The motorcycle engine could be heard almost every afternoon at exactly four-thirty.
At least, that was what the nine-year-old girl wanted everyone to believe.
“Vroooom.”
A pause.
Then louder.
“VROOOOM.”
She twisted the plastic grip she had taped around the right handlebar and leaned forward as if she were accelerating down an open highway instead of moving six feet across a suburban driveway at walking speed.
Her motorcycle did not have an engine.
Technically, it barely had a motorcycle.
The frame came from an old child’s bicycle her mother had almost thrown away.
The fuel tank was cut from a large delivery box.
The rear fender had once been the side of a vacuum-cleaner carton.
Two empty soup cans served as exhaust pipes.
The headlight was the silver lid from a peanut container.
The wheels were real bicycle wheels hidden beneath thick circles of cardboard on which the girl had drawn spokes with a black marker.
She had painted the tank bright yellow.
Not ordinary yellow.
She insisted on calling it “Sequoia Yellow Pearl,” even though the paint actually came from a discounted can of outdoor craft paint her mother bought at a hardware store.
A small black stripe ran along the cardboard tank.
A tiny American flag was attached to the back with electrical tape.
And just above the fake engine she had written, in crooked black letters:
HERITAGE
Her mother found the whole thing ridiculous.
She also thought it was beautiful.
Every afternoon after school, the girl put on a bright pink bicycle helmet that was slightly too large, climbed onto the cardboard machine, and pushed herself around the cul-de-sac with her sneakers.
Most children in the neighborhood had bicycles.
Scooters.
Remote-control cars.
One boy had an electric dirt bike that cost more than the mother’s first car.
The girl wanted none of them.
She wanted a Harley.
Not because anyone in her family rode motorcycles.
Nobody did.
Her mother hated motorcycles.
Her grandmother referred to them as “two-wheeled hospital appointments.”
Her father had never owned one.
The girl’s fascination appeared seemingly out of nowhere when she was seven and saw an old cruiser parked outside a diner.
She spent fifteen minutes walking around it.
Looking at chrome.
Pipes.
Seat.
Suspension.
The owner eventually came outside.
Her mother expected him to be annoyed.