Part 2: A 50-Year-Old Biker Walked Into A Donut Shop And Found A 7-Year-Old Girl Sitting Alone At A Table — She Had Been Waiting Four Hours For A Father Who Was Not Coming
PART 2
I want to tell you who the biker was before I tell you what he did.
His name is Jubal Mathers. He is fifty years old. He is white American. He grew up in a small farm town called Cheney, Kansas, about twenty-five miles west of Wichita, in the 1980s. His father had been a wheat-and-sorghum farmer on a small section of land his great-grandfather had homesteaded in 1894. His mother had been a school cafeteria cook at Cheney Elementary for thirty-one years.
Jubal is a journeyman pipefitter at the Spirit AeroSystems plant on the south side of Wichita, where he has worked for twenty-three years. He has been a patched brother in an independent motorcycle charter that rides out of south Wichita for eighteen of those years.
He has been a father for twenty-seven years.
He has a son named Jubal Jr., who goes by J.J., who is now twenty-seven years old, who is a high-school teacher and football coach at Goddard High School about ten miles west of Wichita, who is married to a woman named Aria, and who has — as of last December — given Jubal a grandson named Eli.
Jubal has been a father.
Jubal was not always the kind of father who walked his son to the front door for the bus or who showed up to a parent-teacher conference or who made dinner at six p.m. on a Tuesday.
I want to tell you what Jubal told me at the counter of Daylight Donuts at seven thirty-eight on the Tuesday night I am writing about, after Bryn’s mother had taken Bryn home and after the dining room had emptied out and after he and I had been the only two people in the shop for forty minutes.
Jubal told me — over a second small black coffee that I had refused to charge him for — that between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-three, he had been the kind of father who, every Friday night after his shift, had stopped at a small bar called the Iron Door off South Hydraulic on his way home from the AeroSystems plant. He had told himself, for the entire ten years between when his son was born in 1998 and when his wife sat him down at the kitchen table in 2008, that one beer at the Iron Door on Friday nights was just one beer.
It had not been one beer.
It had been, by Jubal’s quiet count to me at the counter that night, between four and seven beers, between five-fifteen p.m. and nine p.m., every Friday night, for ten years.
He had missed five hundred and twenty Friday-night dinners with his son.
He had missed his son’s seventh birthday party because he had been at the Iron Door from five p.m. until eleven thirty p.m. on a Friday night in March of 2005.
His wife — a woman named Cathy, then thirty-one, a registered nurse at Wesley Medical Center — Cathy had sat him down at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning in October of 2008 and had told him in eleven words that if he came home from the Iron Door one more Friday night, she was taking their son and she was leaving.
She had said: “Jubal. Decide whether your son is more important than a barstool.”
He had decided that Sunday morning.
He had not been back to the Iron Door, by his own quiet count to me at four forty-three on the Tuesday I am writing about, in seventeen years and three weeks.
He has been a patched brother in our charter for eighteen years. He patched in 2006. He patched while he was still drinking. He had told his charter Reverend in the spring of 2009, six months after the kitchen-table conversation with Cathy, that he had stopped. Reverend had not said anything except brother. Good.
Jubal has had a small embroidered patch on the inside front panel of his cut, over his heart, that nobody outside our charter has seen, that Cathy made for him on a Sunday afternoon in November of 2008 from a piece of pale blue cotton — the color of their son’s first baby blanket — with a single embroidered word on it in white thread.
The word is HOME.
He has worn the patch for seventeen years.
PART 3
I want to tell you what Jubal did when he sat down across from Bryn at four forty-three on a Tuesday afternoon in October.
He did not slide into the booth across from her right away.
He stopped at the edge of the table. He set the white paper bag of donuts down on the Formica. He crouched down on the worn linoleum next to the booth so his shaved bearded face was below the level of Bryn’s small face.
He said, in a voice low enough that I had to lean over the counter to hear it: “Sweetheart. My name is Jubal. May I sit across from you?”
Bryn looked up at him.
Her dark blonde hair was tangled at the front from her having pulled at it with her small hands. Her pale gray eyes were rimmed red from quiet crying. There was an old purple flip phone — the kind grandparents have — sitting face-up on the Formica table in front of her, with the screen showing the last outgoing call log.
She looked at the phone.
She looked at Jubal.
She did not say anything for about four seconds.
Then she pointed, with one small index finger, at the worn brown vinyl bench seat across from her.
Jubal said: “Thank you, sweetheart.”
He stood up from his crouch. He slid into the booth across from her with his enormous tattooed forearms resting on the table. He pushed the white paper bag of donuts across the Formica toward her.
He said: “Sweetheart. I have two glazed donuts in this bag. They were for me. I don’t want them anymore. Would you like one?”
Bryn looked at the bag.
She shook her head.
She said, in a voice so small I could barely hear it from the counter: “Mister. I want a chocolate frosted with rainbow sprinkles.”
Jubal said: “Sweetheart. Hold on.”
He stood up from the booth. He came back to the counter. He looked at me. He said: “Ma’am. One chocolate frosted with rainbow sprinkles. And whatever a seven-year-old drinks. Not coffee.”
I rang up a chocolate frosted with rainbow sprinkles and a small carton of two-percent milk. I did not charge him. He put a twenty-dollar bill in my tip jar.
He took the donut and the milk back to the booth. He sat down across from Bryn. He put the donut on a small paper plate in front of her. He put the milk on the table next to the plate.
He waited.
She took a small bite of the donut.
She started crying.
Not loud. Quiet. With the donut still in her small right hand and her left hand pressed flat against the Formica.
Jubal did not move.
He did not say anything for about a minute.
Then he said, in the same low voice: “Sweetheart. I’m gonna ask you a question. You don’t have to answer. Are you waiting for somebody?”
Bryn nodded. She wiped her small nose with the back of her left hand.
She said: “My daddy. He was supposed to come at one. He doesn’t pick up.”
She held up the purple flip phone.
She said: “I called him seventeen times. He doesn’t pick up.”
Jubal looked at the phone.
Then he looked at Bryn.
He said: “Sweetheart. Do you have your mommy’s number too?”
Bryn nodded.
She did not pick up the phone.
She said, in the small careful voice of a seven-year-old who has been told something by her father: “Mister. Daddy said don’t call mommy from the donut shop. Daddy said mommy works too hard. Daddy said this is our time.”
Jubal sat back against the worn vinyl of the booth.
He did not say anything for about thirty seconds.
He said: “Sweetheart. Your mommy would want to know you’re here. Your mommy would want to come get you. Is it okay if I call your mommy?”
Bryn looked at the phone.
She looked at Jubal.
She slid the purple flip phone across the Formica table to him with her small index finger.
She said: “Mister. Her name is Cathy. She works at the hospital.”
Jubal — whose own wife of twenty-eight years was also named Cathy and was also a registered nurse — Jubal did not flinch.
He picked up the flip phone.
He found the contact for Mommy.
He pressed dial.
He held the phone to his ear in his enormous tattooed right hand, in a booth at Daylight Donuts on South Broadway in Wichita, Kansas, at four fifty-one p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon in October.
PART 4
I want to tell you what Bryn’s mother — whose name is Cathy Holloran, thirty-six years old, a charge nurse on the cardiac unit at Wesley Medical Center — Cathy was working her third double of the week. She picked up her cell phone in the medication-prep room at four fifty-one p.m. when she saw it was Bryn’s flip phone.
She heard a man’s voice she did not recognize say: “Ma’am. My name is Jubal Mathers. I am a stranger sitting with your daughter Bryn in a corner booth at Daylight Donuts on South Broadway. She has been here since one p.m. She is safe. She is eating a donut. She is okay. She told me her father was supposed to pick her up at one. She has called him seventeen times. He has not answered. I am calling you because I think you need to come get her.”
Cathy did not, by her own account to me at the counter at seven-forty p.m. that night, ask a single question.
She said: “Sir. Twenty-two minutes. Don’t let her leave.”
She left the hospital in her scrubs.
She drove forty-one miles an hour through downtown Wichita on a Tuesday afternoon during rush hour.
She walked through the front door of Daylight Donuts at five-thirteen p.m.
Bryn saw her mother.
Bryn came up out of the booth so fast her purple flip phone slid off the Formica onto the linoleum.
Cathy went down on both knees on the worn linoleum just inside the door. Bryn ran into her arms. Cathy held her seven-year-old daughter against her chest in her hospital scrubs for about three minutes.
She did not cry in front of Bryn.
Cathy is a charge nurse on a cardiac unit. She does not cry in front of patients. She does not cry in front of her seven-year-old.
She held her daughter.
She looked up over Bryn’s small shoulder at the corner booth where Jubal was still sitting with his enormous tattooed forearms folded on the Formica and his salt-and-pepper bearded face turned slightly away to give her and her daughter the privacy of the reunion.
She said, in a voice that was almost steady: “Sir. Thank you.”
Jubal nodded once.
He did not get up.
He had decided, in the four hours and eighteen minutes between when he had walked into the donut shop and when Cathy had walked in, that the next thing was not his to do at the booth.
Cathy stood up.
She kept Bryn on her hip.
She walked the eight feet across the dining room to the booth where Jubal was sitting.
She slid into the bench seat opposite him with Bryn in her lap.
She looked at Jubal.
She said, in a voice so quiet I had to lean over the counter from twenty feet away to hear it: “Sir. Where is my daughter’s father.”
Jubal looked at her.
He did not say anything for about ten seconds.
He said: “Ma’am. I don’t know. I am not in his life. I am asking you. Where is he.”
Cathy looked down at Bryn on her lap.
Bryn was holding the chocolate frosted donut in her small right hand. She had taken three bites of it. She was, at that moment, looking out the front window at the parking lot.
Cathy looked back up at Jubal.
She said, in a whisper so low Bryn could not have heard it from her own mother’s lap: “Sir. He’s at a bar. He goes every Tuesday. He told her he was working overtime. He doesn’t work overtime on Tuesdays. He’s at a bar called the Iron Door off South Hydraulic. He has been doing this for two years. She doesn’t know.”
Jubal did not move.
He did not say anything for about fifteen seconds.
He kept his pale blue eyes on Cathy’s face. His enormous tattooed hands were folded on the Formica.
He said, in a voice that had gone very quiet: “Ma’am. The Iron Door.”
Cathy nodded.
She said: “Sir. Please do not do anything I will have to explain to a police officer.”
Jubal said: “Ma’am. I am not going to lay a hand on him. I am going to say a thing to him at the bar. Then I am going to leave. I have been to that bar before. I have not been back in seventeen years. I think I am the right person to say this thing to him.”
Cathy looked at him for about five seconds.
She nodded.
She said: “Sir. Okay.”
Jubal stood up from the booth.
He nodded at Bryn.
He said: “Sweetheart. You eat that donut. You are gonna be okay.”
Bryn looked up at him.
She said: “Mister. Thank you for the donut.”
He walked out the front door of Daylight Donuts at seven-oh-one p.m. on a Tuesday night in October.
He started the engine of his 2009 Road King.
He rode the one and a half miles north on South Broadway to the corner of South Hydraulic and Pawnee.
He pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Iron Door at seven-oh-nine p.m.
PART 5
I want to back up to the patch.
The small embroidered patch on the inside front panel of Jubal Mathers’s cut, over his heart, that his wife Cathy had made for him on a Sunday afternoon in November of 2008 from a piece of pale blue cotton — the color of their son J.J.’s first baby blanket — with a single embroidered word on it in white thread.
The word is HOME.
Jubal walked into the Iron Door bar at seven-eleven p.m. on a Tuesday night in October of last year for the first time in seventeen years and three weeks.
The bar smelled exactly the way it had smelled in October of 2008. Stale beer. Old fryer grease from the small kitchen at the back. Cigarette smoke from a window that did not seal. A jukebox playing George Strait. Six men at the bar on stools. One bartender, a woman in her fifties he did not recognize.
Bryn’s father was sitting on the third barstool from the door.
I want to tell you what Bryn’s father looked like, because Cathy described him to Jubal in the booth before he left.
Thirty-eight years old. White American. Five foot ten. About a hundred and eighty pounds. Dark brown hair, beginning to thin. He was wearing his blue work shirt from the auto-parts store on Pawnee where he was a parts manager. He had a glass of whiskey in front of him and a draft beer next to it. He had been at the Iron Door, by Cathy’s later confirmation from the bartender, since twelve forty-five p.m.
He had been at the bar for six hours and twenty-six minutes when Jubal walked in.
He had told his seven-year-old daughter at twelve fifty-seven p.m. that he was running into the donut shop for a quick coffee and would be right back.
Jubal walked the length of the bar.
He sat down on the barstool to the right of Bryn’s father.
He did not order anything.
He looked at the bartender. He shook his head once. She left him alone.
Bryn’s father turned his head and looked at Jubal.
He saw the cut. The beard. The shaved head. The forearms.
He said, in the tone of a man who has been drinking for six hours, “What.”
Jubal did not raise his voice.
He said, in a voice that anyone within ten feet of the bar could hear but that was not, by any measurement, a shout: “Brother. There is a seven-year-old girl who has been waiting for you in a corner booth at Daylight Donuts on South Broadway for four hours and twelve minutes. Her mother had to leave a double shift at Wesley to come get her. I paid for her chocolate frosted donut. I sat across from her in the booth for two hours and eighteen minutes because she did not have anybody else. You are her father. I am a stranger. Think about that.”
He stood up from the barstool.
He walked out of the Iron Door at seven-thirteen p.m.
The whole conversation, by the security footage Cathy was eventually able to get from the Iron Door’s owner three weeks later, had lasted fifty-four seconds.
Bryn’s father sat on the barstool with his hand frozen around his whiskey glass for forty-one seconds after Jubal walked out.
Then he stood up.
He left the whiskey unfinished.
He left the beer untouched.
He walked out of the Iron Door at seven-fourteen p.m. on a Tuesday night in October.
He did not, by Cathy’s careful follow-up of his receipts and his location data and his bank account and his bar tabs for the next fourteen months, go back to the Iron Door.
Not once.
PART 6
I want to tell you what happened in the year between the Tuesday in October of last year and the Tuesday in October two weeks ago.
Bryn’s father — whose name is Caleb Holloran — Caleb went home to their small house on West Mt. Vernon Street that Tuesday night at seven thirty-one p.m.
Cathy was sitting at the kitchen table.
Bryn was asleep on the couch with a partly-eaten chocolate frosted donut still in her small right hand.
Caleb sat down at the kitchen table across from Cathy.
He told Cathy what had happened at the Iron Door.
He cried at the kitchen table for about an hour. He has not, by his own quiet admission to me at the counter at Daylight Donuts on the Tuesday two weeks ago, cried in front of his wife since their wedding day in 2014. He cried that Tuesday night.
He started outpatient treatment at the Substance Use Disorder Clinic at Via Christi the following Monday morning.
He has been clean for fourteen months.
He goes to the AA meeting at the Lutheran church off South Seneca on Tuesday nights at seven p.m.
He picks Bryn up from school at three-fifteen every weekday afternoon now. He takes her to Daylight Donuts every Tuesday at three-thirty. He sits in the corner booth with her until five-thirty when Cathy gets off her shift.
He orders a chocolate frosted with rainbow sprinkles for Bryn.
He orders a glazed for himself.
He pays in cash.
He has been doing it for fourteen months.
PART 7
I want to tell you what happened on the Tuesday afternoon two weeks ago.
Jubal Mathers walked into Daylight Donuts at three thirty-eight p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-October — fourteen months and four days after the Tuesday in October I have been writing about.
The bell above the door rang.
Bryn — who is eight now, with her dark blonde hair still in two braids her mother does every Tuesday morning before second grade — Bryn looked up from the corner booth where she was sitting with her father.
She saw Jubal.
She came up out of the booth so fast her chocolate frosted donut slid off her small paper plate onto the Formica.
She ran across the worn linoleum of the dining room of Daylight Donuts on her small light-up sneakers and threw both her small arms around Jubal’s heavy black engineer motorcycle boots and the dark blue jeans above them.
She looked up at him.
She said, loud enough for the entire dining room of Daylight Donuts to hear: “Mister Jubal! My daddy is better now! My daddy doesn’t go to the bar anymore!”
Jubal went down on one knee on the worn linoleum.
He put both his enormous tattooed arms around her small shoulders.
He did not say anything for about ten seconds.
He kissed the top of her head once.
Across the dining room, in the corner booth, Caleb Holloran was standing up. He had a chocolate frosted donut in his hand. He was crying without making a sound.
Cathy had just come through the front door in her scrubs from her three-thirty shift change.
She did not say anything either.
She looked at Jubal on the linoleum with her daughter in his arms.
She nodded.
Jubal nodded back.
He stood up. He kissed the top of Bryn’s head again. He let her go.
He walked to the counter.
He ordered two glazed donuts and a small black coffee.
He paid in cash.
He put a twenty in my tip jar.
He walked out.
The bell above the door rang behind him.
Follow the page for more stories about the bikers America thinks it knows — and the fifty-four-second conversations they have at the third barstool from the door of bars they have not been to in seventeen years.
