The little girl with the white bandage wrapped carefully around her small head looked up at me with wide, tired eyes and said the words that broke something deep inside me:
“I don’t want a motorcycle ride. I want you to be my daddy for one whole day.”
I’m fifty-three years old. I’ve been riding with my motorcycle club for twenty-seven of those years. I’ve seen things that harden a man — long roads, lost friends, accidents, bar fights, the kind of pain you learn to swallow and keep buried beneath leather and silence. I never married, never had kids, never stayed in one place long enough to plant roots. I always thought that kind of life — the soft, domestic kind — just wasn’t for me.