The Bike My Neighbor Backed Over
“What’s that for?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
He studied it. He had his mother’s way of going quiet when he was working something out.
“Are you going to show people?”
“I’m thinking about it. I think people ought to know what kind of man he is.”
Ryan put one finger on the corner of the paper and turned it a little toward himself.
“It makes it look like we’re mad,” he said.
“We are mad.”
“I’m not.”
I looked at him. “Ryan. He ran over your bike and told you it was your fault.”
“I know. I was there.” He shrugged, the small tired shrug of a boy who gets up at six. “But if you put that up, then it’s a fight. And then it’s about you and him. And I still don’t have a bike.”
I did not have an answer for that.
“I’m just going to fix it,” he said. “And keep saving up. I’ve got sixty one. I only need a hundred and twenty eight more.”
“Bud, that wheel’s done. You can’t true that.”
“Can I try?”
He went back to bed. I stood in the kitchen with a color picture of my neighbor and nothing to do with it. After a while I folded it in half, and then in half again, and put it in the drawer with the takeout menus.
He was in the garage before I got home from work on Monday.
He had the bike upside down on the tarp, same as when he was eight. He had gotten the front wheel off by himself. It was shaped like a potato chip.
“Show me what you’ve done,” I said.
He had laid the wheel flat on the concrete and stood on the high side of it, bouncing a little. It had come back maybe a third of the way. His knuckles were skinned.
I wanted to tell him to stop. I wanted that bike left the way it was, bent and ugly, where I could look at it and stay angry. That is the truth. I had a use for it broken.
But he looked up at me with the spoke wrench in his hand and said, “Can you hold it while I push?” and there is only one answer a father can give to that.
We worked until dark. I put the rim across two blocks of wood and leaned on it while he called out which way. We got the handlebars turned back around. The fork I got close with a pry bar and a prayer.
When we were done, it was a bicycle again, more or less. The front wheel had a wobble in it you could see from across the street. Once every turn, the rim came around and kissed the brake pad on the left side.
Tick.
Ryan rode it down the driveway and back.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
“It pulls a little,” he said.
“It’s going to pull a lot. Ryan, you can’t pull a mower with that.”
“I’ll walk the mower.”
“And the route?”
“It rolls.” He bounced the front end once and listened to it. “It’s fine, Dad. It’s just for a while.”
I heard him leave at six the next morning. I was standing at the kitchen window with my coffee, and I heard that wheel go down the driveway and turn up the street in the dark.
Tick. Tick. Tick.