The Bike My Neighbor Backed Over
“He’s out back, Mike.”
Don was on his patio with the newspaper. The one my son had delivered to him at six fifteen that morning.
I had made up my mind to be reasonable. I told him I was not looking for a new bike. I told him a front wheel and a fork and a set of bars would run about a hundred and twenty dollars, and I would do the labor myself, and we could call it even and be neighbors.
He folded the paper in half and set it on his knee.
“I’m not paying a hundred and twenty dollars for a thirty dollar bike.”
“How do you know what it cost?”
“Because I saw you unload it. I see most things.” He picked up his coffee. “I’ll tell you what I told you this morning. The boy leaves his things lying wherever he drops them. Mower in the driveway. Ball in my beds. Somebody was going to hit that bike sooner or later. Better me at two miles an hour than somebody who’d have hurt him.”
“It was leaning on a tree. In my yard.”
“In the right of way.”
“Don. You drove over my curb.”
He took a sip. He was not in any hurry at all.
“Call it tuition,” he said. “Cheapest lesson he’ll ever get. When I was his age and I left a bike out, my father sold it.”
I stood there on his patio and I felt my hands want to do something. I am a millwright at a tube plant and I have a long fuse. But there is a tone some men use about your child that goes straight past all of it.
I did not raise my voice. I want that on the record, because it was the only thing I did right that week.
“All right,” I said. “Then we’re clear.”
“We’ve always been clear, Mike.”
I walked back across the street. Carol was standing in her front window. She lifted her hand a little, not quite a wave, and let it drop.
That night I lay awake and made plans.
I am going to be honest about them, because the story does not mean anything if I pretend I was a better man than I was.
I thought about taking that bike, just as it was, folded in half, and wiring it to the stop sign at the corner of Walnut and Main with a piece of cardboard on it. I thought about what the cardboard would say. I rewrote it four or five times in my head.
I had a picture on my phone. I had taken it without thinking, in the three seconds before he pulled off: the red truck, the tire, the bike under it, and Don bent over checking his fender. It was a very clear picture. I thought about how many places in a town of nine thousand people a man could put a picture like that. The bulletin board at the IGA. The window of the barber shop. The town’s community page, where people argued about fireworks and lost dogs.
By Sunday night I had printed it. Full page, in color, on the printer in the back bedroom. I told myself I had not decided anything. I just wanted to see it.
I left it on the kitchen table and went to get a drink of water, and when I turned around Ryan was standing there in his pajama pants looking at it.