“Almost there”
Every Saturday he left early in his oldest sneakers and came home smelling like dish soap and fryer grease, his hands red and chapped from the hot water. “How much have you saved?” I’d ask.
“Almost there,” he’d grin, every single time.
One month became two. Then three, four, five — and there was still no bike. Quietly, I did the math. Sal was paying him sixty dollars a Saturday, cash. Five months, minus a few missed weeks, was well over a thousand dollars. The bike cost six hundred. He should have bought it twice over by now.
So where was the money?
I told myself the innocent stories — a girl, a bigger surprise, a secret gift for me. Thirteen-year-old boys have secrets; that’s normal. That’s healthy, even. I kept telling myself that.
Then things started happening I couldn’t explain away.
What I saw through his bedroom door
Late one night, passing his room for a glass of water, I glanced through the crack in his door — a mother’s reflex, nothing more — and stopped cold. Evan was sitting on the floor, back against his bed, counting a thick stack of cash fanned out across the carpet. Far more than I’d have expected any thirteen-year-old to be holding at once, and he was hunched over it, protective, secretive, in a way that turned my stomach.
He looked up and the fear on his face wasn’t the look of a kid caught doing something cute. He shoved every bill into his backpack and clutched it to his chest.
“It’s just my bike money,” he said, laughing a laugh that wasn’t his real laugh. “Sal pays in fives and ones, it just looks like a lot.”
