My uncle Tom rode motorcycles his whole life and my whole family spent that whole life waiting for the phone call. When it finally came, it was not the bike at all. It was his heart, in his sleep, at sixty-two. He would have hated going that quietly.
He left me his Harley. An old one, a project he had never quite finished, that he had told me since I was a teenager would be mine one day.
I trailered it home and started going through it, planning to finish what he had started. The fuel tank sounded wrong when I tapped it. Not empty, not full, something shifting inside that was not fuel. I drained it and pulled it off the frame. There was a second compartment welded inside, hidden, accessible only through a small plate on the underside. I unbolted the plate.
Inside, sealed in wax paper and a layer of oilcloth, was a bundle. I set it on the workbench and had to grip the edge. It was letters. And a set of dog tags. And a photograph of two young men in uniform, arms around each other, grinning in front of a helicopter.
My uncle Tom did two tours in Vietnam. I knew that much. He never talked about it, not once, not to anyone, in my whole life. What I did not know was the man in the other half of the photo.
The letters were between Tom and that man, going back to nineteen seventy, and then they stopped, and the last thing in the bundle was a folded telegram. His friend did not come home. Tom carried his tags for fifty years, and he could not carry them where anyone would see, so he welded them into the one place he trusted most. The tank of the bike he rode every day of his life.
There was a single page in Toms handwriting, folded on top, newer than the rest.
Whoever finishes this bike, finish it right, and take Dave for a ride. He never got to see the country the way we planned. Fifty years I have been driving it for both of us. Your turn now.
Dave. His name was Dave. Fifty years my uncle rode with a man on the back of that bike that none of us could see.
I finished the Harley. Took me two years and every dollar I could spare and I did it right, exactly the way he would have wanted. Toms dog tags are on the handlebars now, right next to Daves, where they belong.
Last summer I rode it from Ohio to the Wall in Washington. I found Daves name. I put my hand on it. I told him his best friend had carried him every mile for half a century, and that the ride was not over, that I had him now, and I would take him everywhere Tom always meant to.
Then I got back on the bike and I rode the long way home, the two of them right there with me, the way they always were.