I always despised my father for being a motorbike mechanic rather than a doctor or lawyer like the parents of my friends. Every time he rode up to my high school on his antique Harley, leather vest covered with oil stains, gray beard wild in the wind, the humiliation seared in my breast.
In front of my friends, I wouldn’t even refer to him “Dad”; he was “Frank,” a purposeful distance I built between us.
I turned down a hug the last time I saw him alive. My classmates’ parents were in suits and pearls; it was my college graduation. Frank arrived in a button-up shirt that couldn’t disguise the worn tattoos on his forearms and his lone pair of good pants. I stepped back and gave a chilly handshake instead when he came to hug me following the event.
His eye pain now torments me.
Three weeks later, I received the call. On a wet mountain pass, a logging truck had crossed the middle line. When his bike slid under the wheels, they said Frank died immediately. I recall feeling… nothing after hanging up the phone. Just an empty void where sorrow ought to be.
I returned to our little village for the burial. Expected it to be tiny, perhaps a few drinking friends from the roadhouse where he spent his Saturday evenings. I discovered instead a church parking lot packed with motorcycles—hundreds of them, bikers from all six states lined in sombre lines, each sporting a little orange ribbon on their leather vests.
When she spotted me gazing, an elderly lady said, “Your father’s hue.” Frank usually wore his orange bandana. Claimed it was so God could see him more quickly on the roadway.
That was unknown to me. So much I was unaware of.
Inside the church, I heard rider after rider rise to speak. They referred to him as “Brother Frank” and shared tales I had never heard—how he planned charity rides for children’s hospitals, how he drove through snowstorms to bring medicine to elderly shut-ins, and how he never passed a stranded vehicle without stopping to assist.
A man with tear-filled eyes stated, “Frank saved my life.” Eight years sober now since he discovered me in a ditch and stayed until I consented to seek assistance.
This was not the father I knew. Or imagined I knew.
A lawyer came to me following the ceremony. “Frank asked me to give you this if anything happened to him,” she continued, giving me a tattered leather satchel.
I opened it that night by myself in my childhood bedroom. Inside was an envelope with my name scrawled in Frank’s rough handwriting, a little box, and a bundle of documents tied with that orange bandana. First, I opened the letter.
