he reminded her. You have weekends. You have holidays.
But she turned her back on him and left, and it had been eighteen years since she’d seen them.
She had not driven once in all that time.
Willow picked up the pen and bent over the page.
Later on, when my husband lost faith in and I were separated, our children were forced to choose between their two parents. At the time, I didn’t see the error of that. I was overwhelmed with shame and anger that they did not choose to be with me.
That was my mistake, not to see. And then I made a bigger mistake. I walked away from them. I told myself they’d be better off without me.
Wrecker. Listen to me. Don’t choose. Melody is your mother. Lisa Fay is your mother, too. It’s not fair, what happened to you as a little boy. But what happened to you after that
She stopped there. May have saved your life, she meant to write. But it hadn’t only saved him. It may have saved them all.
What happened after that was a good thing.
I’m leaving now to see if I can find my children. They’ll all be grown, now, which seems impossible. But if I can find them, and if they’ll see me, I won’t let the time we lost stop us from spending the time ahead in whatever kind of together they allow.
I hope I’ll see you again some day.
Love,
Willow
Willow set the pen aside. She ran the tip of her finger lightly along the deckled edge of the photograph, and straightened it beside the letter. Then she stood and slowly walked the perimeter of the yurt, pausing at each window to gaze at length at the view. She had been looking out these windows for eighteen years. It was time for a change.
Wrecker stood in the motorcycle showroom in downtown San Francisco and let his gaze run over the shiny chrome of the new Triumph.
The salesman approached. “Hell, yeah,” the man said, tipping his head toward the bike. “If I were a young buck like you? I’d be riding something like this.”
Wrecker glanced at him. The man was balding, gone to pot, with bland hazel eyes and a manufactured smile. Wrecker pegged him for a Honda 750, with a fairing and a sound system and maybe a little trailer he towed behind for long road trips. “I’ve been looking at that Ducati,” Wrecker said.
The salesman stepped over toward the Italian bike and laid a proprietary hand on its gas tank. “This one? Hell of a lot of motorcycle. You’d want to be sure you could handle it.”
Wrecker had a bank check big enough to buy the Triumph outright. His inheritance, compounded quarterly for ten years. He thumbed the check in the front pocket of his jeans. As if life weren’t absurd enough already. An inheritance, from grandparents he never even knew he had. “How much did you say you want for it?”
The man chuckled deep in his throat. His eyes had an unexpected gleam in them. “This one’s a honey, brother. Open her up on the highway and you’d better be hanging on. One forty, one forty-five, and the motor’s just purring like a cat.” He patted the leather seat and fixed Wrecker in his gaze. “Listen to me. You buy this baby, she’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”
Wrecker looked at the bike. Then he looked out the window.
He had been where he thought he should go. When he arrived in the city he had gone to an arcade and played foosball all afternoon, let the chimes and bells of the machines and the shouts of the men and boys who stood shoulder to shoulder with him in the hall cover his thoughts with white noise. He had careened like a tourist from one district to the next, wearing down his rubber soles, flashing his transfer at bus drivers and Muni men. He snuck a bike past the monitors at the rental stands and rode it fast through mud bogs in the park. He went to the top floor of an old apartment building and threw glass bottles down the trash chute just to listen to them smash. He found a place in Chinatown where he could buy M-80s; he wired them to a makeshift raft and tried to blow it up offshore. And then he turned eighteen, and found himself standing in the rain outside the big stone building that housed the records downtown.
He could go inside. Tell them