The Boy Who Emptied His Piggy Bank

I think about that plate more than I ever expected to. I think about Ray, who would have laughed and cried in the same breath at what his son did, who would have said, in that dry way of his, that of course the boy gave up the bike, because that is exactly the kind of foolish, decent thing he himself would have done at eight years old, or at forty. I think about how a town that was not rich, that had every reason to look at its own tight budgets and its own hard winter and give a little and call it enough, instead gave until a family had a whole house again, because one small boy went first.

Hollis still does not say much to strangers. He probably never will, not the way other boys do. But most evenings now, weather allowing, you will find him and Cora McAllister riding two bicycles down the gravel road past the Yoder place, her on a bike her father rebuilt from a yard sale frame, him on a green one with silver fenders that the whole town, in its own quiet way, decided he had earned twice over. And every single time I watch him go, I think the same thing. My son found his voice the year he lost his father, and it turns out it was never in his mouth at all. It was in his hands, and what he was willing to put in them, and then let go.