The Two Miles I Pushed My Son

The shoulder

The county road has a shoulder of packed gravel and then a strip of grass that runs down to the ditch. I kept the chair’s wheels on the packed part where it was smoothest, and I walked behind with both hands on the grips.

It was harder than I thought it would be. There was a grade I had never noticed from inside a car, a long slow rise for the first half mile, and the gravel grabbed at the small front wheels, and my breath came short before we had gone a quarter mile.

Eli held his cardboard tank and did not say much. A semi went by in the far lane and the wind of it pushed us and he grabbed the armrests.

“You okay,” I said.

“The air pushed me,” he said, and he laughed a little, surprised, and I felt something in my chest come loose.

The first car to come our way was a little silver Honda, and it slowed, and the window came down, and it was a woman I did not know, maybe sixty, with her hair in rollers under a scarf.

“Honey, is your car broke down,” she called. “You need me to call somebody?”

“We’re all right,” I said. “Just getting to school. Thank you though.”

She looked at us a long second, at the chair, at the tank, at the two miles of road, and she did not understand it, and she drove on slow, watching in her mirror. I saw her brake lights come on down the road and then go off, like she had thought about it and then thought better of turning around.

I did not blame her. A stranger on the road with a child in a wheelchair is a thing a person does not know what to do with.

We kept walking.