The Bike My Neighbor Backed Over
I watched from our porch. Lisa came out and stood next to me and put her hand flat on my back and did not say anything.
He walked the mower across the street. He had to make every pass twice, it was so thick. He stopped again and again to tip the deck and clear the clumps with a stick, never with his hand, the way I had drilled into him. He could not do diagonal stripes. He did straight ones, careful and narrow, up and down, and he trimmed along the walk on his knees with the hand shears.
It took him an hour and forty minutes. It was eighty five degrees.
About halfway through, I saw the front curtain move. Don was in his recliner in that window. He had nowhere else to be. He sat and watched a ten year old boy cut his grass, with the bike he had run over lying on its side at the curb, front wheel up.
Carol came out near the end with a glass of ice water and her purse. I could not hear them, but I saw her hold out a bill and I saw Ryan shake his head. She pushed it at him. He put both his hands behind his back.
She told Lisa later what he said.
“No ma’am. It’s not a job. Tell Mr. Petrie I hope his back gets better.”
Carol said she went inside and repeated that to her husband word for word, and that he did not answer her, and that he did not turn on the television for the rest of the day.
Ryan went back the next Saturday and did it again. This time half the street saw. Mrs. Hadley sat on her porch for the whole of it. And at a quarter to eleven Pastor Jim came walking down from the parsonage in his shirtsleeves, the way he did sometimes, and stopped on the sidewalk in front of Don’s.
He stood and watched Ryan work for a minute. Then he walked up Don’s front steps and knocked.
He was inside for half an hour. I do not know what was said in that house and I have never asked. When he came out he stopped by the curb and looked at the old bike a moment, and then he looked across at me on my porch and lifted two fingers off his hip, a small hello, and went home.
The knock on our door came the next afternoon. Sunday, around three.
Don Petrie was standing on my porch. He had on his church shirt with no tie. He was holding the rail with one hand and he was standing very straight, the way a man does when bending is not available to him. I had never seen him on my side of the street without a complaint.
His truck was at our curb. Parked in the road this time, a good two feet out from the grass.
“Is your boy home?”
“He is.”
“I’d like to speak to him. If you’ll allow it.”
I had the folded picture in a kitchen drawer fifteen feet away. I could have made him say it to me first.
“Ryan,” I called. “Somebody here for you.”
He came up the hall in his socks. When he saw who it was he stopped, but only for a second, and then he came and stood in the doorway beside me.
“Hi, Mr. Petrie. Is your back better?”
Something went across Don’s face that I had not seen there before.