The Red Tricycle Outside His Office Window

“He drifted over the center line twice, Mom. Twice in four miles. The second time there was a milk truck coming, and I reached over and grabbed the wheel, and he laughed at me. He said the road had moved.” He wiped his face with the flat of his hand. “I was going to say something. I was going to talk to you about it. I had it all worked out, how I’d bring it up. I thought I’d wait until after Thanksgiving so I wouldn’t spoil it.”

Walter died on the nineteenth of November, on County N, at twenty minutes to seven in the morning, on his way to open up the cheese plant, where he ran maintenance for thirty-four years. He went off the curve by the Miller farm.

“The deputy called me,” Brian said. “Not you. You were at the church setting up for the bazaar and nobody could raise you. So he called me, and I drove out there. I saw the car, Mom. I saw the car before they had him out of it.”

I had not known that. In eleven years he had never told me that.

“Oh, Brian.”

“I said nothing, and he died.” His voice broke clean in half. “And then you called me and told me about that mailbox, so cheerful about it, and all I could see was that curve. I haven’t slept right since. I’d lie there and think, I said nothing once. I’m not going to say nothing twice. I couldn’t do the talking part. I knew if I talked to you first you’d talk me out of it, and then you’d be out on some road, and I’d get another call.” He looked up at me. “So I just did it. I did it all at once so it would be over.”

I pulled the other chair around and sat down close, so that our knees almost touched.

“Listen to me,” I said. “I am going to tell you two things, and I want you to hear both of them.”

He nodded.

“The first one is this. It was ice. I read that deputy’s report, which is more than you ever did. There was black ice on that curve from the creek, and a boy of twenty-six went off it forty minutes before your father did and walked away only because he was in a pickup. The deputy told me to my face that a man of thirty would have gone off that road. Your father’s eyes did not kill him. You did not kill him. November did.”

He was shaking his head.

“Maybe he should have had his eyes looked at. I’ll grant you that. Maybe you should have said something, and maybe I should have noticed, and I was the one sleeping next to him. If that silence is anybody’s to carry, we carry it together. You do not get to carry it alone for eleven years and then set it down on me.”

He made a sound I will not try to describe.

“And here is the second thing.” I waited until he looked at me. “Fear is not a reason to take a person’s legs, Brian. I don’t care how much you love her. That car was my legs. You were afraid, and so you made me smaller, so you could sleep. And you didn’t sleep anyway, did you?”

“No.”

“No. Because that is not how fear works. You feed it and it wants more. Next it would have been the stove. Then the stairs.”

He sat with that. Out front, I could hear Mandy answering the telephone in a voice that was a little too bright.