Chapter 18 - Stay Here
We never learned who left the blue star.
Maybe one of the families from the reopened cases.
Maybe a detective.
Maybe a parent.
Maybe somebody who had once been scared and had no Harley to break.
I kept it anyway.
Two years passed.
June turned nine.
She grew four inches.
Stopped wearing dinosaur shirts.
Started correcting my spelling on repair invoices.
Emily became charge nurse on the day shift at a rehab center.
Sarah spent a long time earning her way back into the family.
Not because everyone forgot.
Because she stopped asking them to.
Collins got promoted.
She complained constantly.
Which meant she liked it.
My Harley still had the replacement headlight.
A small scratch remained in the chrome where the brick had hit.
I never polished it out.
One spring afternoon, June came into the shop carrying a school project.
“Interview someone important.”
I looked behind me.
“Nobody here.”
“You.”
“Bad assignment.”
She sat on a stool.
Question one:
“What was the bravest thing you ever did?”
I thought about courtrooms.
Fights.
Accidents.
Years on motorcycles.
Then I looked at her.
“Stayed still.”
She frowned.
“That’s not brave.”
“Sometimes it is.”
“When?”
“When somebody scared asks you not to leave.”
She wrote that down.
Question two:
“Who is the bravest person you know?”
“That’s easy.”
“Who?”
“You.”
She groaned.
“Jack.”
“What?”
“I broke your bike.”
“Exactly.”
“That was bad.”
“It was expensive.”
“Mom paid you.”
“She overpaid.”
June smiled.
Then grew serious.
“I was really scared.”
“I know.”
“I thought the man was going to get me.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t know if you were nice.”
“That was smart.”
She stared at me.
“I just knew you looked hard to move.”
I laughed.
“Best compliment I’ve ever gotten.”
She wrote something on her paper.
Later, after they left, I found a copy on my desk.
At the bottom, under MY IMPORTANT PERSON, June had written:
Jack Mercer.
Why?
Because when I was seven, I broke something that belonged to him so he would stay.
He stayed.
I sat alone in the shop for a long time.
Outside, traffic moved along West Main.
People walked past the coffee shop.
Kids came home from school.
Most danger does not announce itself.
Neither does safety.
Sometimes safety is a cashier who steps outside.
A mother who teaches a secret word.
A detective who believes a child.
A dead father who leaves evidence.
A stranger who decides not to turn away.
And sometimes it is a seven-year-old girl who has been counting sidewalk squares for three days, realizes the distance is getting smaller, and refuses to wait for an adult to notice.
She finds a motorcycle.
She finds a brick.
She makes a sound loud enough for the world to stop.
Then she looks at the man who owns it and says:
May you like
“Please stay.”
So I did.
