Part 2: A 280-Pound Biker Got Caught With a Pink Lunchbox at the Garage — The Three Words Scrawled on the Lid Made the Whole Club Stop Talking
To understand Tank, you have to understand what Linda has been through with him.
Marcus came home from Desert Storm in October of 1991. He was twenty-three. He had served with the 24th Infantry Division. He was honorably discharged. He came back to Rapid City because his mother had died of cancer three weeks before his rotation ended, and he had not been allowed to fly home for the funeral.
He spent the next year and a half drinking himself into the ground. He told me, on a long ride to Sturgis in 2017, that he had been on the wrong road in 1992 and 1993. “The roads where you don’t realize you’re killing yourself, Reg. Those roads. The slow ones.”
He met Linda in October of 1993 at a fall festival at a Lutheran church in Pierre. She had been there with her sister. He had been there because his AA sponsor had told him he had to start showing up to community things. He was eight months sober.
She was twenty-eight. He was twenty-five.
They got married in 1998.
They tried for a baby for the first eight years.
Two miscarriages. Then a stillbirth in 2003 — a little girl they named Grace.
Linda has Grace’s photograph on the dresser in their bedroom. She still puts a single white daisy in front of it on Grace’s birthday every year.
After Grace, they stopped trying.
They built a different life.
Linda taught second grade at McKinley Elementary for twenty-six years before she retired in 2022. Tank worked at the foundry. They bought the small house on Skyline Drive in 2001. They got Otis in 2014.
They built a quiet, careful, deeply private love.
What Tank started doing in the kitchen of that house on Skyline Drive, around 2014, was making Linda breakfast every single morning before he left for the foundry.
He left for work at 5:15 a.m.
He was up at 4:15 a.m.
He made her — and this is the list Linda told me, exactly as she told me, on Wednesday morning at her kitchen table — “two scrambled eggs, one piece of multigrain toast with butter, half a grapefruit when they’re in season and half an orange when they aren’t, and a small mug of black coffee with one teaspoon of honey.”
He made it the same way every day.
He set the plate on the kitchen table.
He set the mug to the right of the plate.
He covered the plate with an inverted ceramic bowl to keep it warm because Linda did not get up until 6:30.
He left a small handwritten note on the table next to the plate.
The notes said different things on different days.
“Have a good one, sweetheart.”
“It’s gonna rain. Drive careful.”
“Otis was on the bed. I let him stay.”
“Don’t forget your scarf. It’s cold.”
“You looked beautiful sleeping. — M.”
He has been writing one of these notes every morning, on a small paper torn from a yellow legal pad, since the first week of January 2014.
That is eleven years of mornings.
By Linda’s own count, on Wednesday at her kitchen table, when I asked her — “Reggie. About four thousand mornings.”
She has saved every note.
In a tin in the closet of their bedroom.
She showed me.
It is a vintage Folgers coffee tin.
It is full.
The lunchbox tradition started in late 2018.
Tank had been bringing his own lunch in a beat-up Igloo cooler to the foundry for twenty-six years. Same routine. Bologna sandwich. Apple. A Snickers bar on Fridays.
In November of 2018, Linda’s sister gave her a pink insulated lunchbox as a joke gift for Christmas. “Linda, you’re a teacher. You should look like one.” It had a small white daisy on the front and the name LINDA embroidered on the strap.
Linda used it for school for about three weeks. It did not fit her routine.
She put it on the counter.
Tank — who had been listening — picked it up one morning and said, “Mind if I take this to the foundry.”
She said, “Marcus. The boys at the foundry are gonna give you hell.”
He said, “They will. That’s their problem.”
He took it.
He has been carrying it to the foundry every day since.
Pink. White daisy. LINDA embroidered on the strap.
For seven years.
Linda has been packing it for him since 2020 when she retired from teaching. Before that, Tank packed his own.
She always writes a note.
In black Sharpie.
On a small white index card she tapes to the inside of the lid before she closes it.
The note on Tuesday — November 14th, 2024 — read:
“Love you. Eat it all. — L.”
But the message that the whole club saw at the garage on Tuesday afternoon — the message in Tank’s crooked thick black-Sharpie handwriting on the OUTSIDE of the lid — was a different one.
That one said:
“Love you. Eat it all. — M.”
Linda had handed the lunchbox to Tank that morning when he left for work.
Tank had then, at 5:11 a.m. in the kitchen, written his own short note back to her, on the OUTSIDE of the lid, in big sharpie letters, intending to wash it off when he got home.
He had done this every morning for years.
The brothers at the club had never seen it.
Because Tank kept the pink lunchbox in his foundry locker and never brought it to the clubhouse on Tuesdays — Tuesday was a club lunch day at the diner — until last week, when the foundry’s locker room flooded from a burst pipe and Tank had brought the lunchbox to the garage to keep dry while the foundry dried out.
He had set it on the workbench at the back of the garage.
He had forgotten about it.
He went to lunch with the brothers at the diner.
He came back at 1:30 p.m.
And by 1:30 p.m., everybody had seen it.
I want to walk you through what happened.
At 1:14 p.m. on Tuesday, Linda pulled into the garage parking lot in her 2009 Honda Civic. She was wearing her blue cardigan and her gardening jeans. She was carrying a small foil-wrapped plate of chocolate chip cookies she had baked for the brothers.
She came through the bay door.
She said, “Hi, Reggie. Marcus said y’all were here today. I brought cookies.”
Three of the brothers were inside — me, our club president Don, and a prospect named Pete who is twenty-four years old and works at an auto parts store.
Linda saw the pink lunchbox on the workbench.
She said, “Oh. He left it here. That dummy.”
She walked across the bay.
She picked up the lunchbox.
She turned it over in her hands.
She read what Tank had written on the lid.
She smiled.
Then she set it down on the bench, said, “Reggie, tell him I came by, and tell him I love him,” handed me the cookies, and walked out.
She got in the Civic.
She drove away.
Pete the prospect said, very carefully, “Mr. Marston. What was on that lunchbox?”
I walked over to the bench.
I picked it up.
The thick black sharpie writing on the lid said:
“Love you. Eat it all. — M.”
I set it down.
I did not say anything for a minute.
Don — sixty-eight, retired ranch foreman, road name Padre, the most respected man in our club — walked over.
He read it.
He set it down.
He said, “Boys. Don’t say a damn thing about this when he gets back.”
We stood there in silence for about thirty seconds.
Then Pete, who had been standing next to the lunchbox, accidentally bumped it with his elbow.
The flap popped open.
A small white index card fell out.
I picked it up.
It was Linda’s note for that day.
It said, in her schoolteacher cursive:
“Love you. Eat it all. — L.”
She had matched him.
She had been matching him for years.
I held the two notes up.
Don looked at them.
Don, who is not a sentimental man, said, very quietly:
“Eleven years.”
I said, “What?”
He said, “Reggie. Marcus does this every morning. He wrote me into the AA fellowship in 2014 and we went to coffee and he told me about the breakfast plate. He’s been doing it since the first week of January 2014. That’s the day of his sober anniversary. He told me he wanted to start a tradition that would mark every day.”
He paused.
He said, “He didn’t tell anyone else in the club. He told me ’cause we were both eight years sober that year. He asked me not to mention it. So I didn’t.”
Don shook his head.
He said, “Eleven years, boys. He’s been writing her a note every morning for eleven years. And she’s been writing him one back. And he didn’t bring the lunchbox to the garage all this time because he didn’t want any of us to see it. He thought we would laugh.”
He looked at us.
He said, “Are we gonna laugh?”
Pete said, “No, sir.”
I said, “No, sir.”
Don nodded.
He said, “Good. Then put the lunchbox back exactly where it was, and pretend you never saw any of this. He’s earned that.”
We did.
Tank came back from the diner at 1:30 p.m.
He saw the lunchbox on the bench.
He said, “Linda was here?”
I said, “Yeah. Brought cookies.”
He said, “That woman.”
He laughed once.
He picked up the lunchbox.
He walked back to his Road King at the front of the garage.
He set the lunchbox in his saddlebag.
He came back into the bay.
He sat down on a metal stool by the workbench.
He looked at the three of us — me, Don, Pete.
He said, “Y’all read it, didn’t you.”
Don said, “Yeah, Marcus. We read it.”
Tank looked down at his hands.
He was quiet for about ten seconds.
Then he said, “Boys. I’m gonna tell y’all something. And I need you to keep it between us.”
We nodded.
He said, “Linda and me lost a baby in 2003. A little girl. We named her Grace. She was stillborn at thirty-six weeks. We weren’t ever able to have another one.”
Pete the prospect went very still.
Tank said, “After Grace, I didn’t know how to be a husband. I didn’t know how to face Linda every morning. I’d come home from the foundry at six p.m. and she’d be sitting at the kitchen table with the lights off. We didn’t talk about it. For about ten years we didn’t talk about it the right way.”
He paused.
He said, “I started going to AA again in 2013. I’d been sober a long time but I needed it again. My sponsor at the time told me — he said, Marcus, you gotta find a way to remember that woman every single day. He said you been losing her in pieces for ten years. He said you gotta start putting the pieces back.”
He paused again.
He said, “I started making her breakfast on January 6th, 2014. With a note. Just a little one. Have a good one, sweetheart. That was the first one. I didn’t know if she’d notice.”
He looked up.
He said, “She noticed. The next morning when I got home from the foundry, there was a note from her on the kitchen table. It said — and I’ll never forget it — it said, Marcus. Thank you. — L.”
He paused.
He said, “That was eleven years ago. We have not missed a single morning since. We trade notes every day. Mine in the morning. Hers in the evening or in the lunchbox. Sometimes we use the same words. Sometimes we don’t. Some mornings I can’t think of anything to say. Some mornings she can’t either. But we put something on the paper. That’s the deal.”
He smiled, a small one.
He said, “I figured I’d lose her in pieces if I didn’t keep handing her pieces back.”
He stood up.
He said, “Y’all weren’t supposed to know. Don’t make it weird.”
Don said, “Marcus. We won’t make it weird.”
Pete the prospect — twenty-four years old, married six months — said, “Mr. Whittaker. Sir. Thank you.”
Tank looked at him.
He said, “Pete. Buy a yellow legal pad on the way home tonight. Don’t tell your wife why.”
Pete said, “Yes, sir.”
Tank went and washed his hands in the deep sink and went back to work on the carburetor he had been rebuilding all morning.
We did not talk about it again for the rest of the day.
I drove out to Skyline Drive on Wednesday morning.
I told my wife I was going to check on Linda. I did not tell her why.
Linda answered the door in her blue cardigan.
She said, “Reggie. What are you doing here?”
I said, “Linda. Can I come in for coffee?”
She made me coffee.
We sat at the kitchen table where, every morning at 6:30, she eats two scrambled eggs and one piece of multigrain toast and half a grapefruit, with a yellow legal-pad note her husband has left for her.
I told her what had happened at the garage on Tuesday.
She listened without interrupting.
When I finished, she did not say anything for a minute.
Then she got up.
She walked to the bedroom closet.
She came back with the Folgers tin.
She set it on the table.
She opened it.
She showed me.
Inside the tin were thousands of small yellow legal-pad notes.
Thousands.
She said, “Reggie. He thinks I throw them away. I haven’t thrown a single one away in eleven years.”
She closed the tin.
She said, “Don’t tell him about the tin.”
I said, “I won’t.”
She said, “He doesn’t need to know. Some things are mine.”
I said, “Yes ma’am.”
I drank the rest of my coffee.
I left.
I have not told Tank about the tin.
I am not going to.
That is hers.
The brothers have started a new tradition.
It is small. Tank does not know it has anything to do with him.
Every Tuesday now, when we have club lunch at the diner, every man at the table writes a small note for his wife on a paper napkin during lunch and folds it up and puts it in his pocket.
We do not show each other the notes.
We do not talk about it.
We just write them.
It started on the Tuesday after the lunchbox.
Don walked into the diner that day, sat down, picked up a napkin, took a Sharpie out of his cut, and wrote something. He folded it. He put it in his pocket. He picked up the menu.
The rest of us watched.
The rest of us picked up napkins.
Tank — who was sitting at the head of the table — looked around.
He saw it.
He did not say anything.
He picked up his own napkin.
He wrote something.
He folded it.
He put it in his pocket.
He smiled.
Just once. Small.
He said, “Boys. Y’all are gonna make me cry into my eggs.”
Don said, “Eat your eggs, Marcus.”
Tank ate his eggs.
The waitress brought us coffee refills.
Nobody said anything else about the napkins.
Pete the prospect — the twenty-four-year-old — got patched into the club two weeks ago.
When his old lady walked in to pin his patch on him, she was wearing a pink lunchbox lanyard around her neck as a joke.
It said PETE’S OLD LADY on it.
Pete had made it.
She held up the lanyard at the patching ceremony.
She said, “For the record, I have a yellow legal pad in my kitchen now.”
Tank, sitting at the back of the room, laughed for a long time.
He raised his beer.
He said, “To the legal pads, boys.”
Eighteen beers went up.
“To the legal pads.”
Tank still rides the 2008 Road King.
He still works the foundry.
He still gets up at 4:15 a.m. every morning.
He still makes Linda her breakfast.
The pink lunchbox still goes to the foundry every day.
The notes still get written. Both directions.
Linda is sixty-one now. The Folgers tin in the closet has thousands of notes in it. It is, by her count, more than four thousand mornings.
Tank does not know about the tin.
He does not need to.
I have been married to my own wife Tracy for twenty-eight years. I have not, until last Tuesday, ever written her a note before work.
I have written one every morning since.
I am not as good at it as Tank.
She does not seem to mind.
If this story moved you — follow the page. There are more bikers out there like Tank. More small houses on quiet streets. More yellow legal pads. More pink lunchboxes. There are more stories the world doesn’t see — and I will keep telling them as long as someone keeps reading.
