The yellow county title lay on the workbench in the garage under the bare bulb, and I read the serial number aloud to myself three times before I dared to say it to anyone else. It did not belong to the Shovelhead I had sold to the collector in Rapid City. It belonged to something else entirely, a machine whose name I had never heard Duane speak in forty one years of marriage. The name of Duane was on the line for the owner. Under it, in blue ink, in his square hand, he had written my own.
I took the paper to my friend Hal Sorensen that same afternoon. Hal had been a deputy in Lawrence County when I was dispatching, and he could read a county record faster than most people can read a menu. He ran the number through the register and told me, without looking up, that it belonged to a 1979 Harley Davidson Sportster that had been titled in the spring of that year, in Belle Fourche, to a man named Duane Heinrich. “Patsy,” he said, “that is the year you were married.” I had not even known that was a coincidence.
The cut in the pocket of the vest was the part I could not set aside. The lining had been slit along the inner seam with a sharp blade, neatly, from the outside, and the title had been tucked behind it in a flat envelope. Duane did not slit his own clothes. When I asked Wade, my son in law, he looked at the floor for far too long. Then he said his cousin had once told him that old bikers always hide the good paper in the vest, and that after the funeral he had gone looking, only looking, in case it helped Kristi.
A promise tucked away with love is never lost, only waiting for the patient hands that will find it.
Kristi cried when she heard. Wade stood in my kitchen with his cap in his hands and told me the whole thing in one long breath. He had opened the garage while we were at the memorial lunch. He had cut the pocket, taken the title, found nothing he understood, and put it back inside the envelope, not knowing what it meant. He had said nothing because he was afraid. “I thought I might find money for the baby,” he said. “I did not think I was stealing. I was only so scared.” Kristi turned her back to him, and I did not blame her.
Hal and I drove to Belle Fourche the next Saturday, with the title in my purse and my trike rattling a bit on the hills. The address on the old record was a farm on Highway 212 belonging to a man named Walt Brandvold, who had known Duane since their days in the service. He took us out to a barn that smelled of oil and hay, and he pulled a canvas tarp off a long shape in the shadows. Under it sat a Sportster, black and silver, its gas tank painted with a small gold script of my name.
I put my hand on the tank and could not speak. Walt told me the story slowly. In 1979 Duane had bought it for a hundred dollars from a farm sale, a wreck in a ditch, and he had spent four years of Saturdays rebuilding it in this very barn. He meant it for the day of our twenty fifth anniversary, and he painted my name on the tank in secret. Then the Shovelhead took over his time, and the Sportster stayed under the canvas, and in the last year he made Walt promise to keep it until I came for it.
“He told me to wait for you,” Walt said. “He said you would find the title when you were ready.” He took a small ring of keys from a nail by the door. I turned the key in the ignition without much hope, and the engine caught on the third kick, rough and loud, and then settled into a steady, patient beat. Hal took off his hat. Walt blinked fast and looked out the window at the field. The sound of that engine was the sound of Duane humming, and I stood there and let it wash over me.
I paid a mechanic in Spearfish to go over every inch of the Sportster, and he told me the frame was straight and the work was excellent. He asked who had done it. I said, my husband, and he whistled low. I registered the machine in my own name at the county office, and the clerk, a young woman with a quiet smile, looked at the title and the paperwork and said it was one of the cleanest transfers she had seen. I told her that was because a good man had filled it out.
Wade came by one evening in June with a casserole his mother had sent. He stood on the porch and asked whether he could do anything to make it right. I told him he could help me haul the Sportster to the show in Sturgis that August, and that he could carry the tarp. He nodded as if I had given him a crown. At the show, the judges gave it a ribbon for the best restoration in its class, and Wade, who had never wanted to be near it, stood beside the tank the whole afternoon telling strangers who built it.
The women of the riding club came out that evening and gathered around the Sportster, a dozen of us in leather vests and sensible boots. Someone asked what I planned to do with it. I said I would keep it. I would take it up Spearfish Canyon every Sunday I could, and when I was done, it would go to whoever in the family could be trusted to keep it running. I looked across the circle at my daughter, who was holding her baby on her hip. Her husband was beside her with a quiet look on his face.
That night in the motel I laid the vest across the foot of the bed, the one with the slit pocket, and I mended it myself with a needle and black thread, small stitches, the way I used to sew buttons on his shirts. I left the repair a little visible on purpose. Then I put the title back inside, behind the new seam, and pressed it flat with my palm. Some papers are meant to be kept, and some are meant to be found. This one had finally been both.