“Hey, partner.”
Eli didn’t look at him. Kept lining up chips.
“That’s a good line you got there.” The man nodded at it. “Straight.”
Eli added another chip. Then, without looking up, he moved his row about two inches to the left. Toward the biker.
I started crying right there in the middle of a public playground. Six years of therapists telling me to push for eye contact and here’s my kid offering a stranger the only thing he had, which was four inches of woodchips, and the stranger understood it.
The man stood back up and pulled a card out of his vest pocket. Cheap stock, printed crooked. It said STEEL HORSE VETERANS MC and under that a first name, WALT, and a phone number.
“If he ever gets stuck out somewhere and you need hands,” he said, “that’s a real number.”
He was halfway to the parking lot before I got my voice back.
