Chapter 28: The Second Bike
The pink bicycle had been too small since October, if anyone was honest about it, and everyone was honest about it except Sophie, who had opinions about knees hitting handlebars that she was keeping to herself out of loyalty. She rode it with her knees out like a frog and her chin up like a queen, and the bell still worked, and the chain β Walt checked it at the clinic out of habit, the way a doctor takes a pulse at a party β still ran true and clean as a whistle.
Megan raised the subject at the kitchen table on a Tuesday night, gently, with the catalog open.
"You've outgrown it, baby."
"I know," Sophie said, with the air of a monarch discussing the succession. "I've been thinking. Priya's littler than me."
Priya was six, the daughter of the family that had moved into the Alden place in November β the father working at the plastics plant, the mother expecting a baby in June, the whole family still eating off boxes in a way that the street had noticed and was quietly, systematically correcting through casseroles. Priya's own bicycle was a hand-me-down of a hand-me-down, with a cracked pedal and a chain that jumped its sprocket every third revolution, a fact Sophie had documented with the thoroughness of an insurance inspector.
"She needs a bike that works," Sophie said. "Mine works. I made sure."
"Megan checked," Megan said. "You want to give it to her? Not sell it. Give it."
"Mr. Walt says a good tool goes to the next person who needs it," Sophie said. "It's not a tool. But it's like that."
So it was arranged between the mothers, the way the important treaties on the street were always arranged, over coffee at the Blue Plate counter. Priya's mother, whose name was Dana and who was tired in the way of women carrying both a baby and a household move, tried twice to offer money and was twice refused with a firmness that ended the negotiation. "Then she'll pay you in tomatoes all summer," Dana said, surrendering. "She grows tomatoes like it's a religion." "Deal," said Megan.
By Friday a helmet only slightly too big had arrived from two doors down, and somebody had left training wheels in a grocery bag on Dana's porch β though Priya, six and fearless, would have died before using them.
The handover took place on a Saturday morning in the diner lot, after the clinic, which was the closest thing the neighborhood had to a public square. The pink bike had been prepared like a bride. Sophie had washed it herself, twice. Walt had gone over it with her the evening before β not doing the work, standing in the garage doorway with his arms folded while she did it: tires aired, brakes true, bell polished, and the chain cleaned link by link and oiled to a shine, running around the sprockets without a sound, perfect in the way of things that have been taught and then handed on. Sophie wiped her hands on the rag and hung it back on its nail, and Walt, watching, thought that nobody had ever told her any of this was remarkable, and that was why it was.
Priya arrived holding her mother's hand, in a coat with the sleeves too long, and stood and looked at the bicycle the way you look at weather coming.
"It's pink," she said, awed.
"It goes fast," Sophie informed her. "The bell's loud. You have to oil the chain. I'll show you how. It's easy. The chain wants to go on."
"You hook the top first," said Walt, from where he stood, and Sophie nodded at him with enormous dignity, instructor to instructor.
Dana had brought, against all instructions, a plate of cookies wrapped in foil, which was accepted by acclamation. Megan stood with her arm around nobody, her hands in her jacket pockets, watching her daughter conduct the transfer of a kingdom: the practice laps around the lot, Priya wobbling and then not wobbling, the bell tried twice and then a third time for pure joy, Sophie running alongside for exactly one lap before remembering her new station in life and slowing to a walk, waving instead.
The pink bike rolled away down the street under its new rider, bell ringing at nothing, at the morning, at the world.
Sophie stood in the lot and watched it go all the way to the corner. Megan waited for the wave of something β regret, or the sudden weather of childhood β and it did not come. Her daughter turned around with her face entirely clear, a girl who had finished something, and said, with the practicality of a person twice her size:
"Now I need one with gears. Mine's too slow for me now anyway."
"Megan," said Walt gravely, "you're in trouble."
"I've been in trouble since she could talk," Megan said. "It just keeps getting taller."