That was a Monday.
By Wednesday, the whole town knew.
In a town of four thousand people, nothing travels faster than an old woman on a red tricycle. And I mean that both ways.
I rode it to the library. I rode it to the bank and deposited the cashier’s check, minus what I’d spent. I rode it to Tuesday prayer circle and parked it by the church kitchen door.
Eleven women came outside to look at it. Three of them sat on it.
On Thursday, I rode it up Cemetery Hill.
I had to get off and push it the last hundred yards. I’m not ashamed of that.
I sat in the grass next to Walter’s stone with my purse in my lap. And I told him the Buick was gone, and who’d sold it.
“Don’t be too hard on him,” I said. Out loud. “He’s got something stuck in him. I just don’t know what it is yet.”
The second week, Wilma bought one.
She’d driven behind me three times by then. The third time, she pulled up beside me at the stop sign on Cedar and rolled her window down.
“I feel like a fool in this car,” she said.
She went to a rummage sale in the next town and came home with a blue trike for seventy-five dollars. It turned out to be built for a much taller woman. Her knees came up to her chin.
So she went to Eli and bought a brand-new one. Green. And kept the blue one in her garage.
“For company,” she said.
Then Shirley bought one.
Shirley is eighty-one. She gave up her own car two winters ago. By her own choice. And ever since then, she’d been waiting on her daughter’s Saturdays to get anywhere at all.
Then Donna bought one. Donna’s only seventy, and her knees are better than all of ours put together.
Eli told me he sold more trikes that May than in the three years before it combined. He started keeping a red one in the front window all the time.
Wilma named us.
She stood in my kitchen with a pencil behind her ear and announced it.
“Wednesdays. Ten o’clock. From your carport. The library, then the Piggly Wiggly, then the Dairy Queen. We are the Wednesday Riders. And I’m having that put on a sign.”
“You are not having it put on a sign.”
“A small sign,” Wilma said.
The second Wednesday, Shirley asked if we could add the cemetery to the route.
So we walked the trikes up the hill. Four old women in a row, pushing. Stopping twice to catch our breath.
At the cemetery gate, Shirley parked hers. She took a pot of red geraniums out of her basket.
“You go on,” Wilma told her. “We’ll wait right here.”
We stood at the gate and watched her cross the grass. Slow. In her blue windbreaker.
She found the stone. She stood there a moment.
Then we heard her. Because sound carries on that hill.
“Don,” she said. “I came by myself.”
Wilma reached over and took my hand. Donna turned and looked out at the fields. Nobody said a single word. Nobody needed to.
Shirley hadn’t been to her husband’s grave without somebody waiting in a car with the engine running since the winter she gave up her license.
She stayed twenty minutes. She set the geraniums down and straightened them twice.
When she came back to the gate, her face was wet. And she was smiling.
“Well,” she said. “Who’s buying the ice cream?”
That’s what four miles an hour will buy you, if you want to know. Not speed.
Time enough.
All that while, my son did exactly what he’d promised. I’ll give him that.
He called me every evening at six o’clock. He offered rides I didn’t need. On Saturdays he came over and mowed my lawn, the way he has every Saturday since his father died.
And he looked at that red trike sitting in the carport, in the exact spot where the Buick used to be.
And he never said one word about it.
He looked terrible. Gray under the eyes. Thinner.
Kim called me one night when he was out.
“He thinks you’re going to get hit,” she said. “Dorothy, he’s worse now than he was before. He’s up at four in the morning most days. Sitting in the kitchen in the dark.”
She was quiet a second.
“I told him not to do it that way. I told him to talk to you first. I want you to know I said that.”
“I know you did, honey,” I said. “You’re the one who cut the cake.”
I thought about that phone call a good deal.
A man who takes his mother’s car out of plain bossiness sleeps just fine afterward. He sleeps like a judge.
So it wasn’t bossiness.
And I still didn’t have my answer.
I decided to go get one of my own.
The first week of June, I rode my trike to the clinic and asked for Dr. Keller’s longest appointment.
He’s been my doctor for twenty-two years.
“Jeff,” I said, sitting down on his paper-covered table. “I want you to examine me exactly as if you were deciding whether to take my driver’s license away. Do not be nice about it.”
He wasn’t nice about it.
He tapped my knees and my elbows with his little rubber hammer. He had me stand on one foot. Then the other. He had me get up from a chair, walk ten feet, turn around, and sit back down, while he held a stopwatch.
He had me remember three words. Draw the face of a clock with the hands at ten past eleven. Count backward from one hundred by sevens.
I did that last one faster than he could check me. A telephone operator in my day carried half the county’s phone numbers around in her head.
He put down his clipboard.
“Dorothy,” he said, “you’re in better shape than I am.”
“Put it in writing.”
He did. On the clinic’s letterhead. Signed.
No medical condition that would limit the safe operation of a motor vehicle.
The next week, I rode to the eye doctor on the courthouse square. I had my cataracts done four years ago. She put me through all of it. The chart. The side lights. The glare test.
Twenty over twenty-five in both eyes, with my glasses on. Full side vision.
She wrote that down for me too.
And because I know my son, and I know what an insurance man will say about a doctor who’s never once seen you behind the wheel, I did one more thing.
I called the driving school in the county seat. The one that teaches the high school kids. I paid eighty-five dollars for an hour with an instructor in a car with a brake pedal on his side.
He was a retired shop teacher named Gus. He took me through town. Out on the highway. Around the courthouse square twice.
And then into a parallel parking space. Something I’d been avoiding since 1971.
He never touched his brake. Not once.
He wrote on his form, with a carbon copy, that I checked my mirrors more often than any of his sixteen-year-olds. And that he’d ride with me any day of the week.
I still had my driver’s license, you understand. It had been sitting in my purse the whole time. Good for five more years.
Nobody had taken my license.
Brian had only taken the car.
I put all three papers in a manila folder.
On the last Tuesday in June, at eight o’clock in the morning, I rode to Hale Insurance.
Mandy was just unlocking the front door. She looked at the folder sitting in my basket. Then she looked at me.
“He’s been here since before six,” she said quietly. “He’s been here before six every single day since that mailbox, Mrs. Hale. I find him sitting back there in his office 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 sitting at his desk in his tie, with a cup of coffee he hadn’t touched. The desk lamp was off. On the shelf behind him was the photograph of him and Walter holding up a stringer of bluegills. The summer Brian was twelve.
He stood up when he saw me.
I didn’t say good morning. I didn’t say anything at all.
I laid the folder on his desk blotter. I opened it. I turned it around so it faced him.
Then I sat down in the chair where his customers sit. I put 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. I watched his eyes get to the line about the mirrors.
He read all three a second time.
Then he sat down slowly. He put the heels of both hands against his eyes.
And his shoulders started to shake.
I hadn’t seen my son cry since he was a little boy.
He didn’t cry at his father’s funeral. He stood there in that thin coat and shook hands with two hundred people. He made sure everybody had a ride to the church basement. He carried the casseroles.
He didn’t cry once.
I got up and shut the office door.
Then I came around the desk and stood next to him. And I put my hand on the back of his head. Right where his hair is getting thin. The same as his father’s did.
“All right,” I said. “All right. Now tell me what you went on.”
