Consider it a bonus from Sal’s Diner.” Caleb looked at me, his eyes asking permission, unable to believe it was real, and I laughed through my tears and gave him a gentle push.

“Go on,” I said.

“It’s yours.

It was always going to be yours.” And I meant it in a way that went past the bicycle, though he could not have known that yet.

What was always going to be his was not the machine but the thing it now stood for: a childhood, returned to him, permission to want and to have and to ride around a parking lot laughing like the boy he was supposed to have been allowed to be all along.

And he ran to it, and traced the frame with his cracked fingers, and climbed on, and rode out across the empty lot, laughing, the wind in his hair, the orange letters flashing in the sun, and I saw on his face the wide, free, boyish smile I had not seen since before his father died.