At the bottom of Cemetery Hill, we all got off and pushed.
Brian tried to take my handlebar for me.
“Push your own,” I said.
At the gate, the other three stopped. The way we always do.
“You two go on,” Wilma said. “We’ll wait.”
He walked beside me across the grass with his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up. He hadn’t been up there since Memorial Day of the year before. And then only long enough to set down a little flag and leave.
We stood in front of his father’s stone.
Walter James Hale. The dates. Beloved husband and father.
The wind was coming up the hill through the oat fields.
Brian stood there a long time.
Then he crouched down. And he put his palm flat on top of the granite. The way you’d put your hand on a man’s shoulder.
“It was ice, Dad,” he said. “Mom says it was ice.”
I let him have that one by himself. I looked out at the fields.
After a while, he stood up. He wiped his eyes with the end of his tie. I pretended not to see.
“She passed every test there is,” he told the stone. “She parallel parked. You’d never believe it.”
“He would not,” I agreed. “He used to get out of the car and do it for me.”
We walked back to the gate together.
Wilma had the grace to be studying a cloud.
At the Dairy Queen, my son bought five vanilla cones. And he sat down on the curb in his good trousers next to four old women.
A man he’d sold a farm policy to drove by. He slowed way down. He looked. He drove on.
Brian lifted his ice cream cone at him.
“I’m never going to hear the end of this,” he said.
“No,” said Wilma comfortably. “You will not.”
He slept that night.
Kim called me the next morning to tell me. Ten o’clock to six, straight through. The first full night’s sleep he’d had since the second of May.
I have the Corolla now.
I drive it to church on Sunday mornings. I drive it to my granddaughter’s house in Madison once a month. In daylight. Because I choose to.
And I check my mirrors more often than any sixteen-year-old in the county.
Brian rides along with me sometimes.
He doesn’t grab the wheel.
But the red trike stays in the carport. Right beside the Corolla.
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, any errand inside the town limits, that’s what I take. The library. The bank. The Piggly Wiggly. Up the hill to see Walter.
There are seven of us on Wednesdays now.
Wilma got her sign. It hangs on a nail at the front of my carport.
It’s a small sign.
Shirley goes up the hill every Wednesday. She doesn’t cry anymore when she comes back to the gate. She just smiles and asks who’s buying the ice cream.
Eli keeps my bell oiled for me. He won’t take a dime for it. I bring him banana bread instead, and he doesn’t argue about that.
Last month, a woman from two towns over called me on the telephone. She was seventy-nine. Her son had just taken her car. She’d heard about us from a cousin.
“How do I start?” she asked me.
I told her to go to the bike shop in the old depot and ask for Eli. I told her to sit up straight like she’s in church.
And I told her not to lean.
And once in a while, on a warm morning, I ride down Main Street past those gold letters on my son’s front window.
And I ring my bell.
Just once.
And my son looks up from his desk. Every single time.
And he waves.
