A four-part story

Part 1: The Bicycle He Never Bought

My thirteen-year-old son took a weekend dishwashing job to save up for a new bike. Six months later, the bike still hadn't appeared. Then his boss called me and asked, "Do you know what Evan does with every paycheck?"

I told him my son was saving for a bicycle.

The man went silent.

Then he said, "Ma'am, you might want to sit down. Everything your boy has told you about that money is a lie."

To understand how I got that phone call, you have to go back to the day it all started — the day Evan first stopped in front of the window of the sporting-goods store downtown and simply stared.

Matte black frame. Orange lettering along the crossbar. He knew everything about that bike — the gears, the weight, the exact price down to the dollar — long before he ever said a word about wanting it. But that was the kind of kid Evan had become since his father died three years earlier. He'd watched me worry over bills at the kitchen table. He'd watched me clip coupons and put things back at the grocery store. And somewhere in the middle of all that, my son had quietly decided he wasn't going to ask me for anything expensive ever again.

So when he came home one afternoon and announced he'd gotten a Saturday job washing dishes at a diner a few blocks over, I wasn't surprised. I was, if anything, proud.

"I'm going to buy the bike myself," he told me, chin up.

"You know you don't have to do that."

"I want to."

"All right," I said. "But school comes first."

"Deal."

Every Saturday morning after that, Evan left the house in old jeans and worn-out sneakers. Every Saturday evening, he came home smelling like dish soap and fryer grease, his hands red and cracked from the hot water. Whenever I asked how the bike fund was coming along, he gave me the same two words, every time, like a script he'd memorized.

"Almost there."

I believed him for the first three months. By the fourth, I started doing the math in my head. By the sixth, the math simply didn't work. A thirteen-year-old washing dishes every Saturday for that long should have had more than enough for a four-hundred-dollar bicycle. So where, exactly, was the money going?

Part 2: The Money, the Mud, and the Lies

I told myself there were a dozen harmless explanations. Maybe he'd changed his mind about the bike. Maybe there was a girl he was saving up to impress. Maybe he was planning some kind of surprise for me. I wanted, badly, to believe one of those things.