It’s two miles from the old depot to Main Street.
I put my purse in the basket. I buttoned my cardigan. It was a bright morning, cool in the shade. The fields were just greening up on either side of the trail. The red-winged blackbirds were going at it on every single 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’ll tell you what I’d forgotten.
I’d forgotten that on a bicycle, the air moves.
In a car, the world goes by on the other side of the glass, like a picture show. On that trike, it came right up against my face. I could smell fresh-cut grass and manure and somebody’s bacon. I could hear my own tires on the trail.
The first half mile, my legs complained.
The second half mile, they stopped complaining and started working.
I’m a woman who has walked to the mailbox and back twice a day for forty years, and hoed her own beans every summer. It turned out there was a good deal 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 in her Ford at about six miles an hour with both flashers blinking.
A man at the feed mill was loading sacks into the back of a pickup. He stopped with a sack on his shoulder and stared at me.
Then he took off his cap.
I rang my bell at him.
By the time I passed the bank, my thighs were burning. And I was smiling like a fool.
I did not lean.
Hale Insurance is a storefront on Main Street, between the old dime store that’s an antique mall now and the bakery. It has Brian’s name painted on the front window in gold letters.
His father and I paid for those gold letters the year he opened.
I brought the trike up over the low curb at the corner. I rolled it down the sidewalk. And I stopped it square in front of his window.
I put one foot down.
Through the glass, Mandy, his receptionist, stood straight up out of her chair.
Mandy has worked for Brian for nine years. She’s a kind girl, forty or so. She has a grandmother in the nursing home in the county seat and visits her every single Sunday.
She put her hand over her mouth. I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or not. I don’t 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 my purse in it.
He saw his mother.
And the color went right out of his face.
I’d expected him to be angry. I’d gotten myself ready for angry. For the whole two miles. I had a few sentences all prepared.
He wasn’t angry.
He looked exactly the way he looked at the cemetery eleven years ago. 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 shirtsleeves 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 was parked in front of the bakery with her flashers still going. She lifted two fingers off the steering wheel at him.
“You could’ve been killed,” Brian said.
“By what? I was going slower than the mail.”
“There are trucks out there. 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 right here.”
People were starting to slow down on the sidewalk to watch.
I didn’t want that for him. Whatever else was going on, he has to make his living on this street.
“I didn’t come here to argue with you,” I said.
I kept my voice exactly 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.
“When you decided I wasn’t fit to drive,” I said, “who did you ask?”
“What do you mean, who did I ask?”
“Did you call Dr. Keller? Did you call my eye doctor? Did you ride with me, even once around the block, to see how I did?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Did you ask one single person who would know?”
He was quiet for a long time.
“No,” he said finally.
“Then what did you go on, Brian?”
His mouth opened.
For one second, I thought he was going to tell me. I saw it come right up to the surface, whatever it was. Like a fish rising in a pond.
Then Mandy tapped on the window glass and held up the telephone receiver.
And it went right back down.
“I’ve got a ten-thirty,” he said.
“Then I’ll let you get to it.”
I rang my bell once to clear the sidewalk. And I rode to the Piggly Wiggly and bought a quart of milk, a loaf of bread, a pound of butter, and a small ham.
And I carried them home in my basket. Six blocks. The bag didn’t even shift.
