The Red Tricycle Outside His Office Window

The first half mile my legs complained. The second half mile they stopped complaining and started working. I am a woman who has walked to the mailbox and back twice a day for forty years and hoed her own beans, and it turned out there was more left in me than my son had figured on.

Where the trail meets Depot Street I had to go out onto the pavement. Wilma was right behind me at about six miles an hour with both flashers blinking. A man at the feed mill, loading sacks into a pickup, stopped with a sack on his shoulder and stared. Then he took his cap off.

I rang my bell at him.

By the bank my thighs were burning and I was smiling like a fool. I did not lean.

Hale Insurance is a storefront between the dime store that is now an antique mall and the bakery. It has Brian’s name on the glass in gold letters. His father and I paid for those letters the year he opened.

I brought the trike up over the low curb at the corner and rolled it down the sidewalk and stopped it square in front of his window. I put one foot down.

Through the glass, Mandy at the front desk stood straight up out of her chair.

Mandy has been Brian’s receptionist for nine years. She is a kind girl, forty or so, with a grandmother in the nursing home in the county seat whom she visits every Sunday. She put her hand over her mouth. I could not tell if she was laughing or not, and I do not think she could either.

Then the door to the back office opened, and my son came out to see what she was looking at.

He saw the red wheels. He saw the basket and the purse in it. He saw his mother.

The color went out of his face.

I had expected him to be angry. I had got myself ready for angry, the whole two miles. I had a few sentences prepared.

He was not angry. He looked the way he had looked at the cemetery eleven years before, standing at the edge of his father’s grave in a coat that was too thin for November.

He came out onto the sidewalk in his shirt sleeves and his tie.

“Mom.” It came out hoarse. “What is that?”

“It’s a tricycle, Brian. I bought it this morning.”

“You rode that here? On Main Street?”

“On the trail, mostly. Then Depot Street, then Main. Wilma followed me.”

He looked up the street. Wilma, parked in front of the bakery with her flashers still going, lifted two fingers off the steering wheel.

“You could have been killed.”

“By what? I was going slower than the mail.”

“There are trucks. There’s the grain trucks, there’s…” He stopped. He put his hand on the back of his neck. “Mom, this is exactly what I’m talking about. This is exactly it.”

People were beginning to slow down on the sidewalk. I did not want that for him. Whatever else, he has to make his living on this street.

“I didn’t come here to argue with you,” I said. I kept my voice where I used to keep it for a caller who was upset. “I’m not asking for the car back. You’ll never hear me ask for it. I came to ask you one question, and then I’ll be on my way to the Piggly Wiggly.”

He waited.