Almost There

He had been sacrificing it, over and over, every single Saturday, in silence, and telling me he was almost there.

I keep coming back, in my memory, to those hours he must have spent at that shop window.

Because now I understood what they actually were.

I had pictured, all those months, a boy indulging in a harmless daydream, imagining himself on a bike he was slowly earning.

The reality was almost unbearably different.

My son had stood at that window and looked at the one thing in the world he wanted for himself, the single childish desire he had allowed himself to have, and then he had turned away from it, deliberately, and walked to a diner to earn money he would hand directly to a collections office, and he had done that every single week for six months.

The window was not where he dreamed.