My father pass.ed away alone on the side of Highway 49 last week, sitting against his broken-down Harley in 103-degree heat, waiting for the daughter who was “too busy” to answer his calls. They said it was due to heart attack as he’d been there for hours, his phone showing seventeen missed calls during the time, all ignored because I was tired of hearing about his “biker nonsense” and assumed he just wanted money for motorcycle parts again. For thirty years, I’d been telling everyone my father was a d3adbeat who chose his motorcycle club over his family, a man who missed my college graduation for a stupid rally, who showed up to my wedding reception smelling like motor oil with his trashy biker friends in tow. What I never told anyone was that he’d called me the morning he d!ed, leaving a voicemail I deleted without listening, too angry about an argument we’d had months earlier when he refused to sell his “precious” Harley to help pay for my kitchen renovation. Now I’m standing in his garage, surrounded by photo albums I never knew existed—pictures of him teaching me to ride a bicycle, cheering at my softball games, working overnight shifts at the factory to pay for my Catholic school tuition. Page after page showed a man I’d somehow forgotten, or maybe never let myself see, because I was too consumed with anger that he wasn’t the father I thought I deserved. The other bikers from his club told me he talked about me constantly, carried my baby picture in his wallet until it fell apart, had newspaper clippings of every achievement I’d ever had carefully preserved in plastic sleeves. They said he’d been trying to reach me that last week because the doctor had given him six months—pancreatic can:cer, already spread to his liver—and all he wanted was to take one last ride to the lake where he’d taught me to fish when I was seven, to sit with his daughter one more time before the can:cer took him. Instead, he d!ed alone, slumped against the bike I’d hated for so long, clutching a letter he’d written to me that began with “My darling daughter….. (Check out the comment to read full story)