Chapter 9 - The Anatomy of a Second-Grade Saturday
The park behind the elementary school in Knightdale had two basketball courts with chain-link nets that rattled like tin cans whenever a ball hit the rim, three wooden picnic tables beneath an open-sided shelter of green corrugated fiberglass, and an eight-foot paved asphalt trail that wound through the loblolly pines toward the creek.
It was nine o'clock on the third Saturday of October.
The air was fifty-four degrees, smelling of fallen pine straw, damp red clay, and the clean, cold water running over the granite boulders in the bottom land.
Two bicycles were circling the court.
One was a sixteen-inch purple cruiser with a white plastic basket and training wheel brackets that had been removed two summers ago, the frame covered in scratch-and-sniff stickers from the grocery store.
The other was a twenty-four-inch Coastal Sage cruiser with double-walled aluminum rims, an internal three-speed hub, and a front wicker basket that carried two water bottles, six packs of cheese crackers, and a small, gray stuffed rabbit with one ear missing.
The pink ribbons were horizontal in the wind.
Brooklyn rode with her elbows high, her knees pumping with that clean, natural cadence of a child who has finally discovered that if you push the pedals down with your heels instead of your toes, the machine does the work for you.
She did not look over her shoulder.
She did not look toward the picnic shelter where David and I sat with two cardboard cups of coffee from the convenience store on the corner.
Eliza was half a length behind her, her little legs spinning the pedals of her smaller bike with furious, joyful energy, her tongue tucked into her cheek, her pink sneakers flashing through the gray morning light like two small lanterns.
"Watch the transition, Brook!" Eliza shouted, her voice ringing off the chain-link fence. "The roots are high by the oak tree!"
Brooklyn didn't slow down.
She stood on the pedals, her weight shifting over the bottom bracket, her knees absorbing the bump as the white tires cleared the two-inch pine root with a clean, rubbery whump-whump.
She circled the three-point line, her left shoulder dipping, the seafoam frame catching the low Carolina sun through the pine needles, and then she reached down with her left thumb.
DING-DING.
The sound went through the woods, clear and high, startling two gray squirrels from the sweetgum branches.
David took a sip of his coffee.
He was wearing his old green wool jacket with the torn lining, his hands in his pockets, his heavy boots resting on the cedar cross-brace of the picnic table.
"The chain's got a little slap in it," he said, without taking his eyes off the rear hub.
"It looks straight to me, David," I said, leaning my head against his shoulder.
"It's an eighth of an inch slack on the return," he murmured, his thumb moving against his knuckles. "I'll take half a link out when we get home. If she takes that corner into the driveway at twenty miles an hour, she doesn't need to be throwing a chain against the stay."
"She's seven, David," I said. "She's not going twenty miles an hour."
"She was going eighteen off the bridge," he said, a tiny, slow smile breaking through his copper beard. "I clocked her with the laser level from the truck."
The two girls came off the asphalt together, their tires skidding in the dry pine straw beside the shelter, their breath pluming white in the cold morning air.
Brooklyn stopped her bike with the coaster brake, leaving a clean, six-inch black line on the concrete apron.
She didn't drop the machine.
She swung her right leg over the top tube, stepped down onto her purple slip-on shoes, and kicked the chrome kickstand down with the heel of her sneaker until it locked with a solid, metallic snick.
She walked over to the table, took one of the cheese crackers from her basket, and handed it to Eliza without speaking.
"Aunt Catherine?" she said.
Her hair had come loose from the yellow yarn, two dark strands blowing across her nose in the river breeze.
"Yes, Brooklyn?"
She looked down at her hands—her small, brown hands, with the clean nails and the tiny scab on her thumb from where she had helped David grease the chain links on Friday night.
"Can we ride down to Grandpa's creek?" she asked.
I looked at the trail.
The asphalt ran down the hill through the pines, crossing the old property line that Arthur Bennett had surveyed with his brass transit in nineteen-seventy-two, past the three-quarter-inch iron pin driven four feet into the red clay beneath the roots of the big willow oak, all the way to the water where the white stones sat in the current.
"Yes, Brooklyn," I said.
I stood up, pulled Eliza's wool cap down over her ears, and pointed toward the timber.
May you like
"You take the lead," I told her.
"The line is clear all the way to the stone."
