If you’re lucky, your girlfriend will become your hero one day in your life. I was hoofing home from choir practice in November when I was 18, toting a shoulder bag of science fiction books and a fair amount of humiliation. We were all sopranos, and any vocal change would have taken years, so we sounded like girls, which horrified us because we knew real girls had superior voices. It was a flat walk from school to Main Street, then the banned shortcut behind the depot that I used regardless because some youngster a century ago was hit by a train, then the lengthy climb up Hill Street as the early darkness descended.At that tranquil hour, a young boy came whizzing down the hill on his bicycle, producing S shapes as he careened from the road’s far left to far right. It had also been a dry November, with no ice or snowbanks. It wasn’t until he flew past that I realized his bike was the same model as my brother Ekang’s, and it was the same green. There were no streamers flying from the handlebar grips, thus it couldn’t have been ekang’s bike. The playing card that was clothespinned to the front fork and strummed by the spokes while the wheel turned made no sound.Otherwise, it was exactly ekang’s bike. It was driven by a tall and confident young man who scarcely pedaled as he swooped side to side.Two smaller lads went past at full speed downhill, almost quicker than their legs could move, and I heard the smack of shoes. “Hey, wait up,” the younger ones called out as the cyclist turned left down Marshall Street toward the Farm. Then they were all gone, and I resumed my climb.When I went home, the house was warm, which was unusual for that time of day, and the wood box was full. That meant ekang had to get back to performing her chores rather than grumbling about them. The urge for forgiveness had triumphed. He was in our room with his arm over his eyes and his boots on the bedspread when I arrived. What a show. We didn’t say hello to each other. To me, he was a tyrant. To him, I was a nuisance. We managed to maintain a tenuous truce. Even a simple hello might be explosive.
“What do you mean?”
“Same kind, same color. But no streamers.”
Ekang sniffed. “I took them off last week, stupid. Little kid stuff.”
“Well, it didn’t have any motor, either.”
She sat up. “Was my bike by the front steps when you came in?”
“I didn’t notice.”When we told my mother when she got home from work, she felt the same way. She didn’t say so outright. We just had a feeling. My mum was a difficult person to communicate with. She has the ability to burn a hole in your skin with her gaze. You’d expect lightning bolts if she used her mouth to bear down. She wasn’t all toughness, though. Our family owned three laundromats, and it was generally known throughout town that if someone handed her a dollar for change for the dryers, she always provided 11 dimes. She was well aware of the types of folks that did not have their own dryer. Still, her sternness came out organically at home, in gestures we were always able to decipher.So when I told her about the boy soaring down the hill in circles, she pursed her lips and shook her head, and I was terrified for him and his family. Then she told Ekang and me to go do our homework while she roasted a chicken.In general, we did our best not to bother Dad when he first came home. He wasn’t stern like our mother, just tired. He ran a tiny insurance company, him and a secretary. But he also snowplowed schools and parking lots to make ends meet.
Melton James Caballero 