Chapter 1 — The Bike in the Window

My son, Caleb, had been staring at the same bicycle for months.

Every single time we passed the sporting-goods store on the corner, his eyes went straight to the window, and stayed there, as if the rest of the street had simply stopped existing.

It was a matte-black frame with bold orange lettering, and Caleb knew everything about it.

It sat in the window of the sporting-goods store we passed on nearly every errand, angled toward the street as though it had been placed there to catch exactly one boy’s eye, and it caught his without fail, every single time.

He knew the gears and the frame and the brakes.

He knew the model name.

He knew, down to the dollar, the exact price.

He had studied that bicycle the way other boys his age studied video games or sports statistics, with a total and encyclopedic devotion, and he could have recited its every specification in his sleep.

He would recite the price to me sometimes, casually, as if it were just a fact he happened to know, and I would say something like, well, maybe someday, and he would nod and change the subject.

I thought, when he did that, that he was managing his own disappointment, being mature about a thing he understood we could not easily afford.

I know now that he was doing something else entirely.

He was keeping the number in front of himself, the price of the one thing he wanted for himself, so that he would remember, every single week, exactly what he was choosing to give up, exactly how much of his own desire he was folding into an envelope and carrying across town to a collections clerk.

The price was not a wish to my son.

It had become a measure of his sacrifice, and he recited it the way a person touches a scar.

But here is the thing that I should have paid closer attention to, the thing that told the truth about my son long before I understood it.

Caleb never once asked me to buy it for him.

Not on his birthday, not at Christmas, not on any of the hundred ordinary days we walked past that window and I watched his face turn toward it like a flower toward the sun.