The Red Tricycle Outside His Office Window

And because I know my son, and I know what an insurance man will say about a doctor who has never seen you behind a wheel, I did one more thing. I called the driving school in the county seat, the one that teaches the high school children, and I paid $85 for an hour with an instructor in a car that had a brake on his side.

He was a retired shop teacher. He took me through town, out on the highway, around the courthouse square, and into a parallel parking space I have been avoiding since 1971.

He never touched his brake. He wrote, on a form with a carbon copy, that I checked my mirrors more than his sixteen-year-olds did and that he would ride with me any day.

I still had my license, you understand. It had been in my purse all along, good for five more years. Nobody had taken that. Brian had only taken the car.

I put the three papers in a manila folder. On the last Tuesday in June, at eight in the morning, I rode to Hale Insurance.

Mandy was just unlocking the front door. She looked at the folder in my basket and then at me.

“He’s been here since before six,” she said quietly. “He’s here before six every day since that mailbox, Mrs. Hale. I find him sitting back there with the lights off.” She bit her lip. “I don’t think it’s about a mailbox.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t either. Thank you, Mandy.”

His office door was open. He was at his desk in his tie with a cup of coffee he had not touched. The lamp was off. Behind him on the shelf was the picture of him and Walter holding up a stringer of bluegills, the summer Brian was twelve.

He stood up when he saw me. I did not say good morning. I did not say anything at all.

I laid the folder on his blotter, opened it, and turned it around to face him. Then I sat down in the chair where his customers sit, with my purse on my knees, and I waited.

He read Dr. Keller’s letter. He read the eye doctor’s. He read the driving instructor’s form, the white copy, and I watched him get to the line about the mirrors.

He read all three a second time.

Then he sat down slowly and put the heels of both hands against his eyes, and his shoulders started to go.

I had not seen my son cry since he was a boy. He did not cry at his father’s funeral. He stood there in that thin coat and shook hands with two hundred people and made sure everyone had a ride to the church basement.

I got up and shut the office door. Then I came around the desk and stood next to him and put my hand on the back of his head, where the hair is getting thin, the same as his father’s did.

“All right,” I said. “All right. Now tell me what you went on.”

It took him a minute to get his breath.

“The Sunday before Dad died,” he said. “I rode with him out to the Millers’ to look at that boat. You remember. He was going to buy that boat.”

“I remember.”