Her mother had cheered so loudly that a neighbor came outside to see what was happening.
It remained one of the happiest days the girl could remember.
Now, standing beside her bedroom window, she looked at the bicycle for a long time.
Then she went to the kitchen.
Found an empty cardboard box.
Cut out one side.
And made her sign.
She thought perhaps selling the bicycle would buy enough food for several days.
Maybe even a whole week.
She imagined bringing home bread, milk, eggs, and the little oranges her mother liked.
She pictured placing everything on the kitchen table.
Her mother would be surprised.
Then happy.
And perhaps she would stop looking so frightened whenever someone knocked on the door.
The girl carried the bicycle outside.
She positioned it beside the sidewalk beneath the oak tree.
Then waited.
A car passed.
The driver did not stop.
A woman walked by with a dog.
She smiled at the little girl but kept walking.
A delivery van slowed near the next house.
The girl straightened hopefully.
It continued down the street.
She looked toward the porch.
Her mother remained sitting in the chair, her eyes closed.
The girl did not want to wake her.
She knew her mother had been working late whenever she could find a shift.
And she knew the woman sometimes cried after thinking her daughter was asleep.
So she stood beside the bicycle.
Held the handlebars.
And waited for someone to come along who had twenty-five dollars.
What she did not know was that the man about to turn onto her street had spent the previous eighteen years trying to forget a friend whose photograph still sat inside an unopened box at the back of his garage.
She did not know that the black motorcycle approaching the intersection had once ridden thousands of miles beside another motorcycle with the same silver eagle painted on its fuel tank.
And she could not possibly have known that the man she was about to meet had been carrying an apology for almost seven years.
An apology he had never found the courage to deliver.
The old biker had not intended to stop.