The Biker Who Walked Her Home

“The man moved faster. He came across Fourth Street like he was forty years younger. He didn’t touch that boy, Amy. I want that understood. He stepped in between them and he said, ‘That’s enough, son. Go on home.’ That was all. The boy ran. And then that man got down on one knee in the ditch and helped your daughter up and picked the leaves off her backpack one at a time.”

She stopped a moment.

“Then he sat down on the grass. Very carefully, like a man lowering himself into a hot bath. And he looked up at me and he said, ‘Ma’am, I’m not supposed to be on this side of the street. Would you tell her daddy I’m sorry.'”

I put my hand over my mouth.

“The ambulance comes from Joplin. You know how long that takes. I had his head in my lap for fourteen minutes, and he talked the whole time. I believe he thought he was dying and he wanted somebody to have it.”

So she gave it to me, the way he had given it to her.

He had seen it the first time in September. He was walking past the school at three o’clock, and he saw a boy put a little girl in a purple backpack into the ditch, and take off running. He went and picked her up. He asked her name, and where she lived, and it turned out she lived next door.

He told her he was going to walk her home and tell her folks.

She begged him not to. She cried, and hung on to his vest.

“She said she’d already told,” Mrs. Novak said quietly. “She said she told at supper, the first week of school. And her daddy said don’t make a fuss.”

And there it was. I was sitting in a child’s chair in a second-grade classroom and I was back at my own kitchen table on a night in August, with a bowl of green beans in my hands.

A big boy pushed me, Daddy.

Did you cry?

A little.

Well, that’s why. Kids that make a fuss get picked on, Lily-bug. Don’t make a fuss. Walk around him.

And I had passed the green beans. I had sat right there, her mother, and passed the green beans.

“So she asked him for something else,” Mrs. Novak said. “She said, ‘Could you just walk with me?’ And he told me, lying there on the ground with his lips going gray, he said, ‘Ma’am, what was I supposed to say to that?'”

It had been going on a month by then. A month, every school day. The boy took her lunch out of her backpack in the mornings at the corner of Fourth, and he shoved her off the sidewalk in the afternoons. The hunger. The tights. The gravel in her palm. The purple backpack that was too easy to see.

Once Gus started walking her home, the shoving stopped. Then he took to standing at the corner of Fourth at half past seven in the morning with his thermos, not saying a word, just standing there like a fence post. And the lunches stopped disappearing.

“And then your husband told him to keep away,” Mrs. Novak said. “And he did. To the letter. Other side of the street, half a block back. He said it took that boy two days to work out that the big man wasn’t allowed to come close.”

“She’s been coming home starving,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “All week. I poured the milk.”