One Saturday afternoon in fall, my dad pulls into our driveway on a red and black motorcycle. I’m standing in the yard and I don’t realize it’s him at first with his helmet on.
“I did it,” he says, taking the helmet off but making no move to get off the bike. He’s bought it from a retired cop out in the county. It’s a Honda Shadow, in beautiful shape, and it comes with gear—luggage and chaps and gloves and multiple helmets. I can tell right away this must have been a death pact with my mom: “Over my dead body,” she must have said. “Okay,” he must have agreed.
“Want a ride?” he asks.
I hoist myself onto the back and put my arms around his waist and we head straight north out of town, up past the old defunct Revolution Mill and toward the windier roads that snake through the northern reaches of Guilford County. I rest my helmeted head on his back and feel the sun warming my arms and legs. My body feels young and someone is burning leaves in their yard and the rumble of the engine means there is no need to talk. Grief, I think. Sometimes it is not dark or crazy. On the way back into town we pass the hospice building, where several weeks after my mom died my dad and I sat together in stiff upholstered chairs crying to a twentysomething-year-old grief counselor with a handshake like a silk scarf to whom we’d been referred after my mom’s death.
My dad told her he’d been binge watching old Twilight Zone episodes.
“Sometimes it’s a little much,” he said. “Like I can’t tell what’s real and what’s on TV.”
“I can totally see that,” I remember she said. “Maybe just don’t watch so many episodes at a time? But otherwise, it’s normal. That’s what I like to remind people. Everything you’re feeling is completely normal.”