That was a Monday.
By Wednesday, the whole town knew.
In a town of four thousand people, nothing travels faster than an old woman on a red tricycle. And I mean that both ways.
I rode it to the library. I rode it to the bank and deposited the cashier’s check, minus what I’d spent. I rode it to Tuesday prayer circle and parked it by the church kitchen door.
Eleven women came outside to look at it. Three of them sat on it.
On Thursday, I rode it up Cemetery Hill.
I had to get off and push it the last hundred yards. I’m not ashamed of that.
I sat in the grass next to Walter’s stone with my purse in my lap. And I told him the Buick was gone, and who’d sold it.
“Don’t be too hard on him,” I said. Out loud. “He’s got something stuck in him. I just don’t know what it is yet.”
The second week, Wilma bought one.
She’d driven behind me three times by then. The third time, she pulled up beside me at the stop sign on Cedar and rolled her window down.
“I feel like a fool in this car,” she said.
She went to a rummage sale in the next town and came home with a blue trike for seventy-five dollars. It turned out to be built for a much taller woman. Her knees came up to her chin.
So she went to Eli and bought a brand-new one. Green. And kept the blue one in her garage.
“For company,” she said.
Then Shirley bought one.
Shirley is eighty-one. She gave up her own car two winters ago. By her own choice. And ever since then, she’d been waiting on her daughter’s Saturdays to get anywhere at all.
Then Donna bought one. Donna’s only seventy, and her knees are better than all of ours put together.
Eli told me he sold more trikes that May than in the three years before it combined. He started keeping a red one in the front window all the time.
Wilma named us.
She stood in my kitchen with a pencil behind her ear and announced it.
“Wednesdays. Ten o’clock. From your carport. The library, then the Piggly Wiggly, then the Dairy Queen. We are the Wednesday Riders. And I’m having that put on a sign.”
“You are not having it put on a sign.”
“A small sign,” Wilma said.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.