Stephen Baily has published short fiction in some forty journals. He’s also the author of ten plays and three novels, including “Markus Klyner, MD, FBI,” which is available as a Kindle e-book. He lives in France.
Her Lucky Day
In a brand-new bright-green wheelbarrow with orange hubcaps, my mother was pushing me up the sidewalk on Cosmopolitan Avenue when we crossed paths with Mrs. Quinn, a gray-haired widow who lived in our building.
“Where on earth did you get that?”
My mother explained she’d just won it at the hardware store, as second prize in a drawing for a dishwasher.
“I only wish I knew what to do with it.”
At a loss for suggestions, Mrs. Quinn turned her attention to me. “My, he’s gotten so big. I suppose he’ll be starting school soon.”
“In the fall.”
“How time flies. Speaking of which, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m late for my sodality meeting.”
Before scurrying off to join her friends for a Coke at the drugstore—or so I thought—she made me cringe by stooping to tousle my hair.
“Be a good boy and study hard and you could grow up to be president.”
My mother waited till we were out of earshot to shake her head.
“Senator or governor, maybe, but not president.”
All at once, she lit up. “I know! It’ll make a perfect gift for the Rosenbaums when they move to their new house. We can keep it in the basement till then.”
Inside the back entrance of our building, half a dozen metal cans full of ashes were waiting to be dragged by the porter up to the curb for collection. Beyond them, a dim corridor led past the boiler room and the incinerator to the carriage room, so called because that was where tenants parked their baby buggies, bikes, and other items too ungainly to be tucked away in small apartments. Steam pipes as thick as thighs ran along the baseboards of this chamber, into which a small transom high up in the far wall admitted just enough daylight to see by. My mother was attaching the wheelbarrow to the chain securing my old carriage to a pipe when I tugged at her skirt.
“What?”
At the sight of the finger beckoning to me out of the shadows under the transom, she snatched me off my feet and lugged me back outside so fast the sunlight dazzled me.
“That’s the last time I go in there.”
My father shrugged it off. “Kids.”
“You wouldn’t think so if you’d heard him laugh.”
To set her mind at rest, he asked the Rosenbaums next door for the loan of a baseball bat. Mr. Rosenbaum fetched two of them and insisted on accompanying him down to the basement.
The hubcaps were missing from the wheelbarrow, and its tire had been slashed. The tires and the canvas hood on my old carriage were slashed, too.