The Bike My Neighbor Backed Over
“I always put it there,” he said. “By the tree.”
“I know you do, bud.”
“Is that the road?”
“No,” I said. “That is not the road.”
I should tell you about the bike, because it was not much of a bike, and that matters.
It was a blue Huffy with twenty four inch wheels. I bought it for thirty dollars at a yard sale out on Route 61 the spring Ryan turned eight. It had two flat tires and a seized chain. The two of us spent most of April in the garage with it turned upside down on a tarp. I showed him how to break a chain and soak it, how to seat a tire bead with your thumbs, how to true a wheel by squeezing spokes in pairs. He painted over the rust spots himself with a little bottle of touch up paint that did not quite match.
So it was a thirty dollar bike. But he had built it, and he knew every bolt on it, and it was how he made his money.
He had thirty four houses on his route. Walnut Street, top to bottom, and two blocks of Second. He was up at six every morning, including the dark ones in January. He also had four lawns that summer, at fifteen dollars each, and he pulled our push mower behind that bike on a rope to get to them.
He kept his money in a red coffee can on his dresser. He had been saving since June for a new bike, a real one, a green Schwinn that sat in the front window of Earl’s hardware store downtown. It had a tag on it that said one hundred eighty nine dollars. Ryan knew that number the way some kids know batting averages. He had sixty one dollars in the can that morning.
Lisa came out while we were still standing there. She had her hair wet and a dish towel over her shoulder. She took one look at the bike and one look at the tire tracks in the grass and she knew the whole thing.
“Did he say he’d pay for it?”
“He said the first six feet belongs to the city.”
She closed her eyes for a second.
“Of course he did,” she said.
We had lived across from Don Petrie for eleven years. He had been a supervisor out at the pump works in Mansfield for most of his life, and he had retired with a pension and a habit of supervising. He measured how far our garbage cans sat from the curb. He had called the village about our maple dropping leaves in his gutter. The summer Ryan was six, a wiffle ball went into his flower bed, and he walked it back across the street and handed it to me, not to Ryan, and said, “I’d rather not have to do this twice.”
He was an usher at Grace Lutheran, three blocks up. He wore a tie every Sunday and shook every hand at the door. People in town thought he was particular. On our street we used another word.
I carried the bike into the garage. Ryan followed me with the grip.
I went over there that afternoon. Lisa asked me not to go angry, so I waited until I was not, or until I thought I was not.
His wife Carol answered the door. She was a small, kind woman with a bad knee, and she had always been good to Ryan. She gave him a can of pop on hot mornings and a five dollar bill in a card at Christmas. Her face fell when she saw me, and I understood she already knew.