Back at home, Granma says, “You could probably use some wheels as well.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let me show you.”

And she takes me outside again. It’s just starting to get dark, you can see the sun going down behind the trees.

There’s a shed by the side of the house that’s just full of old bikes. Mom comes out, too, to help me look at them. She gets very nostalgic. “Mostly they’re girl bikes, but I had a BMX phase when I was about your age,” she says. But they’re all in totally unusable condition. The tires are flat, the chains are rusted. They’re really dusty, and even Mom says it’s pointless; she keeps getting bitten by mosquitoes. My hands are sticky with cobwebs. It’s still hot and sweaty outside and when I rub my hand across my forehead, to keep the sweat out, the cobwebs stick in my hair. I feel disgusting. Granma stands in the backyard watching.

“They’re perfectly good bikes,” she says. “They just need a little fixing up.” I guess it makes her sad to realize that this stuff she’s been keeping for all these years is just junk; it’s not worth anything. Nobody wants it.

I look at Mom, and Mom says, “I think we can afford a new bicycle.”

So in the morning, after breakfast, we drive down to this bike shop by a creek or something, next to another busy road, but there’s a park opposite. It’s one of those shops with a big glass window two stories high. There are hundreds and hundreds of bicycles, all shiny, in different colors and sizes.

Mom says, “Just pick one,” but I can’t choose. It’s, like, what kind of kid am I? Am I the kind of kid who rides this bike or that one? But the truth is, I’m not really any kind of kid, at least, not the bike-riding kind. In New York, I stopped getting bikes for my birthdays when I was, like, seven years old—it was just too much hassle to find a place to put it in the apartment, and wheel it down in the elevator, and cross over at the traffic lights on Central Park West, before I could ride it.

Finally Mom gets fed up and picks a Schwinn Frontier mountain bike for $300. It has a blue frame and big black tires. When we walk out of the shop, I can’t tell if I’m happy or annoyed, but Mom says, “It’s a bike. Who cares what it looks like. . . . I mean, if this bike isn’t covered in dirt inside a week, it’s a waste of money. Come on, you should break it in.”

And we take it across the road to the park before we go home.

For five minutes I’m just gone—in New York Mom hardly let me walk to the diner, but here, anything goes. It’s like even after all those years she was still scared of New York.