His Motorcycle Was Half-Built When He Died, and I Decided to Finish It

The bike he never got to ride

Derek bought the motorcycle the winter before he died. It was a 1979 Honda, the colour of old mustard under all the dust, and he brought it home on a trailer with the kind of smile a grown man is not supposed to have about a machine that did not run. He parked it in the middle of the garage, put his hands on his hips, and said he would have it going by summer. He had the tank off and the carburettors soaking in a jam jar of petrol when his heart stopped on an ordinary Tuesday in May. He was fifty-four. I was fifty-one, and I did not know a torque wrench from a tyre lever.

For almost a year I did not go into the garage. I would walk past the door on my way to hang washing and feel the whole weight of it sitting there in the dark. His overalls were still on the hook. His radio was still tuned to the station he liked, the one that played too much Status Quo. I told myself I would clear it out when I was ready, the way people tell you to, as if readiness is a bus that eventually arrives if you stand at the stop long enough.

Then one Saturday in autumn I went in, meaning only to fetch the ladder, and I stayed four hours. I sat on the cold cement next to the Honda and I read the manual he had bought, the Haynes one with the greasy thumbprints already on page nine, and something in me decided, quietly and without drama, that I was going to finish what he started. Not to honour him, exactly. More that I could not bear the thought of a stranger buying it half-done and never knowing whose hands had been on it first.

The garage became the one place I could breathe

I am not going to pretend I knew what I was doing. I learned the names of things slowly. I learned that the orange gunk in the carburettors was varnished fuel, and that you clean it out with patience and a tin of carb cleaner and a set of little wire brushes. I learned to label every bolt in a margarine tub with masking tape so I would know where it went three weeks later. My son in Durban would laugh on the phone when I told him I had spent a whole evening on one seized nut, but he also started sending me links to forums, and we would talk for an hour about things we had never once discussed while Derek was alive.

The garage, I found, was where Derek still felt close. His smell was in there, two-stroke oil and Sunlight soap and the faint sweetness of the brake cleaner he used too liberally. In the house I was a widow. In the garage I was just a woman working on a bike, and for a few hours at a stretch the grief would loosen its grip on my throat and let me get on with something. I began to look forward to it the way other people look forward to church. It was mine. It was the one room in my life that still had him in it and still had a job in it that was not finished.

The door I came to dread

Which is why the door became such a problem.

The garage is the original one, put up some time in the seventies when the house was built. It is a single tilt-up door, heavy as sin, a timber-framed thing clad in steel sheet, and over the decades it had warped so that one bottom corner dragged along the concrete and the whole panel sat skew on its runners. Derek used to fight it with a practised shove and a knee, the way you learn to handle something broken that you love anyway. For him it was a small thing. For me, at fifty-one and not tall, it became a daily battle I started to dread before I had even finished my coffee.

Some mornings I had to haul up on the handle with both hands and my full weight until my shoulders burned, and it would rise a foot and jam, and I would have to drop it and start again. Winter made the timber swell and it got worse. There was one morning I stood in the cold with my palms stinging and actual tears on my face, not because of the door but because of everything the door had come to stand for. The one place that gave me peace had a dragon at the mouth of it, and I was tired of slaying the thing just to get inside.

I started avoiding the garage on the bad days. That frightened me more than anything, because the garage was the project, and the project was the thing keeping my feet under me. A friend from my book club, Hettie, caught me rubbing my shoulder one evening and I told her the whole silly saga. She did not tell me to sell the house or move to a flat, which is what everyone else seemed to want to say to a widow. She just said her neighbour had got someone out to look at their old door and it had not cost the earth, and that I should at least get someone who knew about garage doors to come and have a proper look before I did my back in for good.

The morning it finally beat me

I put it off, of course. Then one Thursday in June the door won outright. I heaved it up, it rose halfway, and then one of the runners twisted and the whole panel jammed solid at an angle, neither up nor down, with the bottom corner gouging into the cement. I could not move it either way. I stood there in my late husband's garage, locked out of the one place I wanted to be, and I laughed, which turned into something that was not laughing at all.

So I did the sensible thing I should have done months before. I phoned a company that did garage door repairs, the one Hettie's neighbour had used out this side of the East Rand, and a man came out two days later. He was kind about it in the plain way practical people are kind. He did not try to sell me the moon. He looked at the warped timber and the bent track and the tired old springs, pressed on the panel with his thumb, and told me the honest truth, that the door had reached the end of its road and that patching it would be throwing good money after bad. He said the sort of garage door repairs he could do would buy me maybe a year, but the frame itself was rotten in two corners and would only warp again the next winter.

I think a younger me would have insisted on the cheap patch out of stubbornness. But I had learned something from the Honda, from all those labelled margarine tubs, which is that doing a job properly the first time is a kind of respect. Derek would have grumbled about the cost and then agreed. So I asked him to quote me for a new one.

A door that opens like it was never a fight

They came back the following week to do the garage door installation, two of them, and they were done before lunch. They took the old warped door away, the dragon, gouges and all, and fitted a new sectional one that rolls up overhead on proper tracks. The first time I lifted it I actually stumbled, because I had braced for the usual war and it simply glided up under my hand like it weighed nothing. I stood there in the sudden light with my mouth open. Such a small thing. Such an enormous thing.

The man showed me how it all worked, where the springs sat, how to keep the runners clean, and he did not once talk to me as though a woman could not understand it, which after that year I was quietly grateful for. Then they drove off and left me alone with my garage, properly alone, with the door standing open and the winter sun falling across the concrete and onto the mustard-coloured tank of a motorcycle that was slowly, slowly coming back to life.

I made a cup of tea and sat on the old stool and just looked at it all for a while. The overalls still on the hook. The radio still on his station. The bike with its tank back on now, its chrome coming up nicely under the polish, closer every week to the day it will turn over and run. I have not cried in that garage since. I go in whenever I like now, early, late, in the rain, and the door lifts for me every single time without an argument.

People kept telling me the way through grief was to let go of things. Clear the garage, sell the bike, downsize, move on. What nobody told me was that sometimes the way through is to fix the thing that is broken and keep the thing that matters, and that occasionally the obstacle between you and your own peace is not your sorrow at all. Sometimes it is just a tired old door that nobody ever got round to replacing. I got round to it. Derek would be glad. The bike will be running by summer, the way he said, only now it will be me taking it gently down the road for the first time, through a doorway that finally lets me out.