Later that evening, Dewey told his father he had learned to ride. He thought his father would be happy, since the bicycle had been his present, but his father had only nodded and had not even looked up from his newspaper. For the longest while, until he went to college, Dewey felt guilty that he had begged Tucker to stay, and wanted to say something to him, but never did. And Tucker never mentioned it.

The Willsons

IT WAS SATURDAY AFTERNOON. The telephone poles, embedded at the edge of the river in the built-up concrete-fieldstone bank, snapped by his window so fast that, after a while, Dewey, eighteen now and returning home from his first year up North at college, stopped trying to think the mounting total, gave up his counting to watch the train race ahead of the river’s current. But soon, as he had done many times in the month since he received it, he began to think of Tucker’s letter. He was still not certain he understood what Tucker meant. Not that the letter communicated many deep or complex thoughts—it was the simplest of letters—rather it brought up a subject and a time he could hardly remember, and he knew in order to understand what Tucker meant he had to remember, examine that time, that day; and not only this, but also the feelings he had experienced that day. He wished those feelings were written down someplace where he could pull them out to read and know them perfectly. And so again he reviewed the particular day Tucker mentioned, and still he could not understand; Tucker’s message, written in a code he could not remember or had never known, evaded him. He started again, took the letter from the now shredded envelope, unfolded the yellow copy paper, and read the typed words, dictated to Bethrah (he was sure), and signed in the hand not of a twenty-two-year-old man, but of a fourteen-year-old boy, the age Tucker had dropped from school:

Dear Dewey:

I hope you’re well. I’m fine myself. So is Bethrah. So is the baby.

The reason I wrote is because I wanted to ask you if you remember when I taught you to ride a bike? That was a very important day for you. I remember you wanted to learn a lot. I am glad I could teach you. But you would have learned anyway, because you wanted to learn so much.

When you were home for Christmas you wanted me to write to you. Well, I wanted to ask you about the bike.

Sincerely yours,

Tucker Caliban

It was as futile this time as it had been all the other times and Dewey was still puzzled and disappointed. But he would be home soon and would ask Tucker himself to explain the letter, though it meant he would have to admit his intellect did not possess the lightning snatch he prided himself it possessed.