Then he stood up. He walked back to his Fat Boy. He sat on the curb. He pulled out his phone.
He called Hank first.
The Iron Vale Riders raised eighty thousand dollars in seven days.
Diesel pulled fourteen thousand out of his own savings before he asked anybody else. Hank put in eight. Pop — the Vietnam vet — put in fifteen, which was almost everything in his retirement account, and refused to tell anybody. The club passed a bucket at every bar within forty miles. They did a poker run the next Saturday — three hundred and eleven bikes showed up. The Cedar Falls Hy-Vee, where Rachel worked, took up a collection at every register for two weeks. A welding shop in Waterloo donated five thousand. A church Diesel had never set foot in donated three.
Eighty thousand dollars. Cash and checks. In a brown envelope.
Diesel and Hank brought it to Rachel’s house on a Tuesday night.
Rachel sat at her kitchen table and looked at the envelope and could not open it.
Hank opened it for her.
She covered her face with both hands and she sat like that for a long time. Sophie was asleep down the hall. Diesel was looking at the linoleum floor. Hank was staring out the kitchen window like he was somewhere far away — and I know now he was, because his daughter Marisol had died at the U of I Hospitals on a Tuesday night just like that one, in 2009, and he had never told Rachel.
He told her that night.
He told her:
Ma’am, this money won’t fix it. You know that. I know that. But it means she gets to be home. With you. Not in a hospital bed. Not under fluorescent lights. Home. For whatever time she has.
Rachel nodded. She still couldn’t speak.
Sophie came home from her last hospital stay three days later.
She lived four more months.
She did not die in a hospital. She died in her own bed, in her unicorn pajamas, with her mother holding one hand and a worn-out stuffed bear in the other, on a Wednesday afternoon in September while sunlight came through her window and the curtains moved in a slow breeze.
She was five years and seven months old.
Diesel had come over every Wednesday afternoon for those four months.
Sometimes he brought Mila. The two girls — one healthy, one dying — would sit on the living room rug and color pictures of horses. Mila gave Sophie her favorite stuffed bear, a brown one with a missing eye named Bartholomew. Sophie kept it on her pillow until the end. It was in her hands when she died.
Diesel never missed a Wednesday. Not one. Even after.
He came to the funeral in his cut. So did all fifty other Iron Vale riders. So did sixty-four bikers from three other clubs across Iowa. They lined up outside the small Lutheran church on East 5th Street and they stood with their helmets in their hands while the pallbearers brought Sophie’s white casket out.