I’ll Get You There

Joe Broadmeadow

The bike came from a yard sale. Blue, with a dented fender and a horn. The boy squawked it so often his mother threatened to pry it off with a butter knife. His father just laughed.

His father spent a Saturday morning oiling the chain and lowering the seat, then walked the bike to the top of the street, where the pavement ran long and flat.

“Get on,” he said. “I’ve got you.”

The boy wobbled. The father bent low, one hand gripping the back of the seat, and started to run. Up the block they went, the boy pedaling in furious, crooked bursts, the father puffing along behind him.

“Keep pedaling. Look ahead, not down. I’ll get you there.”

Somewhere near the Hendersons’ mailbox, the father let go. He didn’t announce it. He just opened his hand and kept running so the boy would still hear his footsteps. The boy made it all the way to the corner before he turned to share his triumph and saw his father standing half a block back, hands on his knees, grinning like a man who had just won something.

The boy crashed into a hedge. It didn’t matter. He had ridden alone, and he had never once felt alone doing it.

*   *   *

Twelve years later, the same father sat in the passenger seat of the family sedan while his daughter adjusted the mirrors for the fourth time.

They had chosen the church parking lot on a Sunday afternoon, empty except for a few gulls. She gripped the wheel at ten and two, knuckles white. When she eased off the brake, the car lurched forward like a startled horse, and her father’s right foot slammed against a pedal on his side of the floor. There was no pedal. There never is. Every parent who has ever taught a child to drive has worn a groove in the carpet searching for one.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry. Be smooth. You’re doing fine.”

They practiced for weeks. Left turns. Parallel parking between two orange cones he borrowed from a neighbor. The terror of the first highway on-ramp, when she pressed the gas and merged into a river of tractor-trailers while he kept his hand flat on the dashboard and his voice low and even.

“You’ve got room. Signal. Check your blind spot. Good. I’ll get you there.”

The day she passed her test, she drove to a friend’s house by herself. He stood in the driveway and watched her taillights until they turned the corner. Then he stood there a little longer.

*   *   *

The boy with the blue bike grew into a young man, and at 2:40 on a February morning his wife shook him awake and said, very calmly, “It’s time.”

He did not feel calm. He found one shoe. He found the hospital bag, packed three weeks earlier and placed by the door for exactly this moment, and he still managed to walk past it twice. The roads glistened with frost. He drove the speed limit, stopped fully at every red light on an empty street, and kept one hand on her knee while she breathed through the contractions.

“Almost there,” he said, though they were not almost there. “I’ll get you there.”

He got her there.

Two days later he drove home slower than he had ever driven in his life. Fifteen miles an hour on the main road. Cars stacked up behind him and honked, and he did not care. He had installed the car seat three times the night before and checked the straps twice in the hospital lot. Every pothole felt like an accusation. His wife sat in the back beside the baby, and he kept glancing in the rearview mirror at the small, wrinkled face beneath a knit cap.

His father waited on the front porch. When the young man lifted the carrier out of the car, the old man came down the steps with his hands already reaching out, and neither of them said anything at all for a while.

*   *   *

This is the whole secret, I think. Nobody makes the trip alone.

Joe Broadmeadow

*   *   *

Time does its quiet arithmetic. The young man became a middle-aged man, gray at the temples, and his father became an old man with an oncologist.

Tuesdays and Thursdays. Radiation first, then chemotherapy. The son rearranged his work schedule without asking anyone’s permission and picked his father up at eight sharp. The old man was always ready, sitting on the bench by the front door in a pressed shirt, because he refused to go to the hospital looking like a sick man even though he was one.

The drives were quiet at first. Then they weren’t. The father talked about the neighborhood he grew up in, the job he almost took in Baltimore, the girl before his wife, and the reasons it hadn’t worked. He told stories his son had never heard. Some of them were even true.

On the bad days, after the chemo, the old man slumped against the window with a plastic bag in his lap, and the son drove the way he had driven his newborn home: slowly, gently, easing into every turn.

“I hate this,” the father said once. “I hate being a burden to you.”

The son thought about a blue bicycle, a hand on the back of a seat, and a man running breathlessly behind a boy who never knew when he let go.

“You’re not a burden, Dad. Just rest. I’ll get you there.”

The father closed his eyes. After a moment, he smiled, because he recognized the words.

*   *   *

The church was full. The son stood at the lectern with three pages of notes he never looked at.

He told them about the bike. He told them about the Hendersons’ hedge. He told them how his father ran behind him that morning and how he kept running so a scared little boy would hear the footsteps and believe someone still held on.

“I’ve been thinking…” he said, and his voice caught, and he waited until it came back. “I’ve been thinking he never really let go. Not of the bike. Not of any of us. He just loosened his grip enough so we could learn we were strong enough to keep going. And he stayed close enough so we’d never have to find out what it felt like to do it alone.”

After the burial, in the cemetery lot, the son stood beside his car and fumbled with his keys. His hands would not stop shaking.

His own child, grown now, the baby in the knit cap, stepped up and gently took the keys from him.

“Let me drive, Dad,” his son said. “I’ll get you there.”

*   *   *

This is the whole secret, I think. Nobody makes the trip alone. We spend the first part of our lives being carried and the last part being carried again, and in the long middle we take our turn at the wheel, running behind the bicycle, pressing the pedal that isn’t there, driving fifteen miles an hour with the most precious cargo in the world.

The hand on the seat passes from one generation to the next. It never disappears. It just changes owners.

We are all here to help each other along the way. And when it’s our turn, the best any of us can do is hold on, let go at the right moment, keep running anyway, and say the words someone once said to us.

I’ll get you there.