Twenty-Five Days After Wabash: The Bike Had a Key, and the Key Had a Name

Twenty-five days. I keep counting in weeks because the oven runs in weeks — a bag of flour, a wheel of cheese, the long Saturday — but the thing I have to tell you doesn't run on any schedule I keep. It came in on its own legs and it had a name on it, finally.

You'll remember the bike. I've written about it twice and not by name, because it didn't have one yet. The fold-flat kind the couriers ride, chained to the iron rail outside Daniel Okafor's cleaners two doors down. After the fight it was just there, leaned over on the lock, no rider near it, nobody come for it. I never cut the chain. I told you that straight: I was afraid of it. Not the bike. The chain meant somebody had locked it like they were coming back. And if I cut it, I'd be the one deciding they weren't. That's not my decision to make over a pizza counter.

So it sat. Twenty-five days it sat. The city patched the curb around it and never touched it. The clean jackets walked past it with their clipboards more times than I can count, and not one of them wrote it down, because a bike isn't a body and the number only counts bodies. I know that now for certain, because their number came and went and a person was standing right there chained to a rail the whole time and nobody put him on it.

Her name is Renata. She came in Thursday, near close, and she didn't want pizza, which is how I knew before she said anything. People who don't want pizza in my shop always want the thing I can't give them. She asked, real quiet, was this the corner. I said it was. She said her brother delivered down here. Marcus. He had a green bike, the kind that folds. He hadn't come home since the Tuesday of the fight and the people downtown kept telling her he wasn't on any list.

Marcus. I'll write it down so it's somewhere: Marcus. Twenty-three. Rode for one of the app outfits, the ones who don't know your name either, just your rating.

I took her two doors down. The bike was right where it had been the whole time, leaned on its lock, and she put her hand on the seat the way you'd put your hand on somebody's shoulder. Then she took a little key out of her coat pocket — she'd had the key the whole time, three weeks, carrying the key to a lock she couldn't find — and she opened it. First try. The chain came off in her hand and the bike just stood up straight on its own, like it had been waiting to be let go, and that was the worst part somehow. That it still worked. That all it ever needed was the right person.

I didn't cut it. I want that on the record. It was never mine to cut. Some counts you don't get to close. You just hold them until the person they belong to comes and closes them, and your whole job is to not have thrown the thing away before they got here.

So the count on the back of my guest checks went up by one more, in pen, where the official number won't follow. Daniel Okafor, found a day late, left off. Marcus, twenty-three, never found, never on it. I told you a couple weeks back the count might be two higher than the news. It is exactly two higher. I'd rather have been wrong.

Maria made Renata a slice she didn't ask for and didn't eat, and wrapped it in foil, and put it in her hands for later, which is the only thing any of us know how to do. Renata asked if she could leave the bike here a few days, she wasn't ready to wheel it onto a train. I said it could stay by the oven as long as she needed, no charge, it's just a bike. It's not just a bike. But you say the small version so the person can carry the day.

The kid came by Friday and saw it parked inside and asked whose it was. He still asks me every day when the ones who fly are coming back. I still don't answer that one. But this time he asked a question I could answer, so I told him it belonged to a fella named Marcus who used to ride down here, and the kid said, okay, like that settled it, and took his slice and went. The ones who fly only come back to fight. Marcus came back as a name in a girl's coat pocket. That's the kind of return this block actually gets.

The floor by the front table still gives under my shoe when I carry a tray across it. I keep meaning to tell somebody official about that. I keep not doing it, because I already know which list it won't make.

Two higher. Pen, not card. — J.