I knew how many Saturdays he had worked, which was all of them, without a single miss.

And when I put those two numbers together, the arithmetic came out wrong.

By my calculation, my son should have had more than enough money to buy that matte-black bicycle months earlier.

He should have been riding it up and down our street by now.

But the bike had not appeared, and Caleb had gone right on working every Saturday and telling me, every week, that he was almost there.

So where, I began to wonder, was all of that money going?