Page 27 of Frosty the Biker

“What? You did? What did they say?” she excitedly demanded.

I filled her in on my conversation with Mr. Rushing and ended with the box.

“What was in it?”

“I didn’t get a chance to look at it. I went straight to work, then with you,” I replied with a shrug.

“Is it still in your truck?”

I nodded.

“Well, go get it!” she whisper-yelled with wide eyes.

It made me chuckle. She was more anxious to see what was in the box than I was. To make her happy, I did as she asked.

When I got back with it, we sat on the floor in the living room and I lifted the lid. There were loose pictures tossed in the top. We pulled them out and found picture after picture of my mom with a man I could only assume was my dad. There were several of them on a big Harley or with what I assumed were friends that were also on bikes.

“Looks like you got your love of bikes from your dad. Just took you a while to find it,” she teased as she bumped her shoulder to mine.

The contact sent warmth flooding through me.

There were more pictures of my mom with Dallas, a ton more with my father, then pictures of her with me as a baby. I sat still, holding one of the pictures of her holding me when I must’ve been about two. Though she looked like she really loved me, there was something missing. The light that I’d seen in her eyes and smile in the other images, was missing.

It hurt my heart.

“Dalton,” Ryian whispered.

I looked up to see her turning the page on a leather-bound notebook. “What is it?”

She lifted her gaze, and her eyes were shiny. “It’s your mom’s journal.” She lifted an old newspaper clipping from it.

In the news photograph there was a mangled Harley that I soon realized was the one from the other pictures. Pieces were scattered down the road and through the intersection. A draped form was off to one side and there were a bunch of law enforcement and emergency medical people all over the place. Each grainy face wore the same sober expression.

“Oh my God,” Ryian gasped from where she was reading over my shoulder. “Your father was killed on the way to the hospital to see you!”

She was correct. The article read that Mitchel Dixon was traveling southbound when a drunk driver ran the eastbound red light at sixty-seven miles per hour and they collided. My father was believed to have been killed on impact. The drunk driver succumbed to his injuries at the hospital.

Chills raced down my arms and legs. I’d never known what happened to my father. I’d only known he died before my mom.

“Jesus,” I murmured.

Small arms wrapped around me, and Ryian placed her head on my shoulder. I returned her hug with one arm. With the other, I picked up the journal Ryian had set down.

There were a few more newspaper clippings. My father’s obituary—with no mention of my great-grandmother. I noticed his last name was spelled like mine and I had to believe that Mr. Rushing was correct and that my grandfather must’ve changed the spelling of their last name for some reason.

Another mystery we’d probably never resolve.

I began reading the smooth, sloping entries of my mother. She wrote of the guilt she carried for falling in love with my father and leaving her husband for him only to lose them both.

The more I read, the more I realized she was slowly spiraling. Dallas’s father ended up taking him because she was deteriorating. The neighbors called CPS because they were concerned for me when they found me wandering around outside alone and underdressed several times. I was eventually removed from the home as well.

My mom wrote about all of this as if she was annotating facts of someone else’s life.

The last entry was essentially a suicide note.

To read it, utterly ripped my heart out and shredded it. I heard Ryian sniffle.

“I think she had postpartum depression,” Ryian observed as she gently rested a hand on my forearm.

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