Kathy Frey worked the graveyard shift at 7-Eleven on North Pines Road.

She was 23, divorced, vulnerable to whoever jumped off the railroad tracks outside or rolled off the nearby freeway. Her children, 4-year-old Angie and 1-year-old Mindy, stayed with their grandmother, while Frey cleaned bathrooms and served the rought clientele an all-night business attracts after the bars close.

Around sunup, Rich Duff would walk in for a cup of coffee. Duff drove locomotives for the Union Pacific Railroad. He liked Kathy. She was slender, blonde. Her eyes were baby blue and her smile was genuine.

Kathy also drove a black Pontiac Trans Am with a gold decal of a phoenix splayed across its hood. It was the car in the "Smokey and the Bandit" movies, the one Burt Reynolds used to woo Sally Field.

Rich regularly asked Kathy when she was going to let him drive her car. When she consented, he took her on a dinner date to Coeur d'Alene, which of course required a 20-minute highway ride. Once they went down that road there was no turning back.

"Friday night he bought me dinner. Saturday he bought me four new tires," Kathy Duff said. "He made things a lot easier. We moved in together and kind of made a family."

Rich Duff died Oct. 1, five days after crashing his motorcycle while riding with Kathy. Duff, 58, apparently hit a patch of paint right before the Sprague Avenue onramp to westbound Interstate 90. His motorcycle slid out from under him as he approached the highway. Kathy, riding beside Rich on her own motorcycle, missed the paint entirely.

Duff was a special man to everybody, said Tom Scalf, who works the parts counter at Latus Motors Harley-Davidson. Rich became a fixture at the shop after buying his first bike a couple years ago, so much so that Latus offered the retired railroad engineer a part-time job in its parts department.

On Oct. 11, Latus closed for the day to participate in a 150-motorcycle funeral procession for Rich Duff. As the thundering parade of metal rolled up the street, Kathy Duff waited at the church to honor her husband of 23 years.

Rich Duff received a Harley-Davidson sendoff, but he wasn't always into motorcycles. Duff's Harley fascination came after he retired. It was a running joke around the Duff home that Rich was going to grow his hair long and buy a motorcycle. He finally bought one. After taking one trip on the backseat of her husband's bike, Kathy knew she had to have one of her own and bought one a few months later.

They didn't own a Harley when Rich Duff was hanging out at the 7-Eleven, playing Ms. Pac-Man and keeping Kathy company. As their relationship developed, Duff began spending entire nights at the store. He even moved into an apartment complex behind 7-Eleven.

"He should have been sleeping," Kathy said of Rich's all-night store sessions.

At the end of her convenience store shift, Kathy went home, but Rich went to work on a locomotive. After they moved in together, their work schedules still didn't jibe. Rich would get Kathy's girls, Angie and Mindy, ready for school. Kathy took over when Rich went to work. The tag-team parenting lasted years as Kathy became a laboratory worker in the Spokane medical industry.

They didn't marry right away. Then one morning, Rich rolled out of bed and suggested they head to the Hitching Post in Coeur d'Alene to make their commitment official. Combined, Rich and Kathy had four children, though Rich didn't have full custody of his daughter Sarah and son Richie.

He was a great dad, said Sarah Duff, who remembers her father being so well liked, so much a part of whatever was going on, she always felt privileged to be in the same room with him.

He wiped noses, made beds, coached his children into crack softball players and taught them how to ride bikes. Mostly, he made growing up fun.

"We'd have spaghetti, and Dad would always have a white T-shirt on," Sarah Duff said. "He would slurp his spaghetti. We would count the spots on his T-shirt when he was done."

Sarah Duff has her own child now. She is teaching her boy how to ride a bike and wishing she could ask her father how it was when she was the student and he was the teacher.

Mindy Frey, Rich Duff's youngest stepdaughter, said her dad was a teacher, but also a trickster. He led Frey to believe they were crossing the Grand Canyon during their trips over the Columbia River. It was all fun and games until she put Vantage, Wash., as the location of the Grand Canyon on a school test.

He playfully cheated at poker and dared his opponents to do the same. Sarah Duff remembers card games between her father and his dad, as nonstop lessons in shenanigans. They were two of a kind, both railroad engineers from Idaho, both competitive, both full of practical jokes.

Their father's last laugh still hasn't played out. The running joke at the Duff house, involves a golf ball, Rich Duff would hide in his stepdaughters' shoes or personal belongings. It was a gag that lasted for years, and Angie Frey said she had yet to find where the ball was last placed.

She has a few months to find the ball and Angie Frey is sure she will, hiding in some suitcase they haven't opened since Oct. 1 or tucked away in a pair of seldom-worn shoes.

In the spring, Kathy Duff will take the ball with her to 10,000-foot plateau of Montana's Beartooth Pass. It will be the couple's last ride together. When she gets to the plateau, she will spread Rich Duff's ashes and place the golf ball beside him.