The Red Tricycle Outside His Office Window

“The trike. Yes, ma’am. I’ve still got her.”

He rolled it out from behind a rack of helmets. It was fire-engine red, with a wide black seat and a wire basket set between the two back wheels, big enough for four bags of groceries. It had fenders. It had a chain guard so a person’s slacks would not catch.

“Three speeds,” Eli said. “Hand brake up front, and she’ll stop if you pedal backward, same as when you were a kid. Is it for you?”

“It is for me.”

“Have you ridden one before?”

“I have ridden a two-wheeler. Not since Kennedy was president.”

He nodded as if that were a perfectly good answer. “Then I’m going to tell you the one thing, and it’s the opposite of everything you remember. Don’t lean. On a two-wheeler you lean into a turn. You lean on this and you’ll tip her. Sit up straight like you’re in church and steer her like a grocery cart.”

“I can sit up straight,” I said.

He lowered the seat for me. Then he had me sit on it, and he looked at my knee, and he lowered it again. He took me out to the gravel lot behind the depot and walked beside me with one hand hovering near the handlebar, not touching it, the way I once walked beside Brian on Cedar Street.

I went around that lot four times. On the first turn I leaned, and the inside wheel came up an inch, and Eli said, “Grocery cart,” very calmly, and I sat up.

By the fourth time around I was not thinking about my hands at all.

Wilma stood by the depot door with her pocketbook held in front of her like a shield. “Well?” she called.

“Well,” I said, “I believe I’m a natural.”

Inside, Eli rang it up. Three hundred eighty-nine dollars. With the tax it came to $410.40. I wrote him a check, and I thought, this is Buick money, every dime, and I felt better than I had in fourteen hours.

“Hold on,” he said. He went to a peg on the wall and came back with a round chrome bell, the kind with a thumb lever, and screwed it to the handlebar beside the grip.

“How much is that?”

“That’s a birthday present.”

“I never told you it was my birthday.”

“Your friend did, while you were out back.” He tightened the screw and tried the lever. It rang like a spoon on a water glass. “Somebody ought to give you something.”

I am not a crier. I looked at a rack of water bottles until it passed.

I let him win, because a person should be allowed to do a kindness all the way through.

It was two miles from the depot to Main Street. I put my purse in the basket. I buttoned my cardigan. It was a bright morning, cool in the shade, with the fields just greening up on either side of the trail and the red-winged blackbirds going at it on every fence post.

“Follow me,” I told Wilma. “In case I end up in a ditch.”

“I’m going to follow you with my flashers on,” she said. “Like a funeral.”

“Like a parade,” I said, and I pushed off.

I will tell you what I had forgotten. I had forgotten that on a bicycle the air moves. In a car the world goes by like a picture show. On that trike it came right up against my face. I could smell cut grass and manure and somebody’s bacon. I could hear my own tires.