The Boy Who Emptied His Piggy Bank

I will not walk you through that part. I have told it once, to Pastor Cole, in his office with the door shut, and once is enough for one lifetime. What matters for this story is what came after. My son, who used to chatter through supper about grasshoppers and tractor parts and whatever cartoon he had seen, stopped talking. Not all at once. It came off him like water off a roof after rain, slower and slower, until most days the only person who got a full sentence out of him was me, and even I had to work for it.

The one thing Ray left him, besides a tackle box of tools too heavy for an eight year old to lift, was a promise. Ray had told him, more than once, that the summer Hollis turned nine he was going to teach him to ride a real bike, no training wheels, out on the gravel road past the Yoder place where a boy could fall without much to land on but grass. Ray never got the chance. So Hollis decided, on his own, sometime that first terrible summer, that he would buy the bike himself. Not any bike. The green one in the window of Cutter’s Hardware on Main Street, the one with the silver fenders that Wendell Cutter had been rotating in and out of that window display for going on three years because nobody in a town our size buys a sixty dollar bicycle without thinking hard about it first.