The Bike My Neighbor Backed Over
I had gone up after him with the gas can he forgot. So I was standing at the edge of the parsonage yard when the pastor came out with two glasses of lemonade and looked at the bike lying in his grass.
“Ryan, that’s seen some trouble.”
“Yes sir.”
“What happened to it?”
“Mr. Petrie’s truck,” Ryan said. “He said I should learn.”
Pastor Jim was quiet. Then he said, “Learn what, exactly?”
Ryan wiped his forehead with his arm. He took the question seriously. He took every question seriously.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it. I think he meant to be more careful. But I was careful. So I don’t know what the lesson is yet.”
The pastor handed him the lemonade. He looked over at me, and I saw that he knew exactly who ushered at his ten thirty service.
“No,” he said to Ryan. “I don’t suppose I know either.”
It took about ten days for it to get back to Don.
I was there for one piece of it. I was at Earl’s on a Wednesday buying a drive belt, and Don came in for a bag of grass seed. It was a narrow old store with wood floors, and Earl had run the register for forty years. There were three or four other men in there, the way there always are.
Earl rang him up. He counted out Don’s change and held on to the last dollar a second longer than he needed to.
“Had the Miller boy in again yesterday,” Earl said. “Looking at that Schwinn.”
Don said nothing.
“Rode in on the old one. You ought to hear that wheel.” Earl shook his head. “I asked him how the saving was coming. He’s at a hundred and nine. Says he walks his mower to four yards now because the bike won’t pull it.”
“Is that right,” Don said.
“I offered to knock twenty off for him. You know what he told me? He said, no thank you, Mr. Earl, the tag says one eighty nine.” Earl let go of the dollar. “Ten years old.”
Nobody else in that store said one word. A man by the paint shaker found something to read on a can. Don picked up his seed and put it on his shoulder and walked out past me without turning his head. His ears were the color of his truck.
He came across the street that evening.
I was in the driveway changing the belt. He stopped at the edge of my grass, right about where his tire had been, and he did not come any farther.
“You need to tell your boy to quit running his mouth around town.”
I set down the wrench and wiped my hands. I took my time.
“What’s he said?”
“You know what he’s said. I can’t buy a bag of seed. Jim stopped me on the church steps Sunday and asked me what I thought a child ought to learn from me. On the church steps.”
“What did Ryan say, Don? The words.”
His jaw worked.
“He’s telling people I ran over his bike and said he should learn.”
“Did you run over his bike?”
Nothing.
“Did you say he should learn?”
He stood there. A car went by. Up the block somebody’s sprinkler was going.
“Then I don’t know what you want me to tell him,” I said. “I can’t ask him to lie. And I’m not going to ask him to stop answering when grown people ask him a question. I raised him to answer.”
“He’s doing it on purpose.”