When asked: “How old are you?” Hannah claimed to be five while Anthony opted for one. Neither was correct. They were at that goofy age when kids just throw up some fingers and laugh, changing the number of fingers they held skyward a couple of times before the spinning carnival wheel stopped on five or one.
They were happy with anything right then, nothing else mattered when they were sitting in the basket of Ruth’s bike.
It was an adult three wheeler, bought from an old lady, winding down her last days in a trailer park two miles up the highway toward town, just past the U-Haul place.
That tricycle was better than a Disney ride, and piloted by the most entertaining driver in the business, Ruth.
Hannah idolized her sister, Anthony was in love.
Ruth was five years older at a time when five years is huge. She could have been in her twenties; it would be all the same to them. Ruth knew best…where to go, how crazy fast, how maddeningly slow.
Like a proper carny, Ruth knew how to work the ride. Shake up the passengers, spinning in the Cul-de-sac, off-balance, in and out of control, screaming.
Because Ruth and Hannah home-schooled, they were always around. Several of the kids in the hood would drop by when they could, knowing the girls would be there. But for two or three years, Anthony was always at our house.
A non-stop jabber machine that frequently made no sense at all, but was delighted as hell to have someone, anyone, to do it with.
In those pre-Ritalin years, if you could have ever gotten Anthony to hold still and think it through, which would never have happened, he would have told you that his very favorite thing in the whole wide world was to go for a fast, unbalanced, bone-jarring ride with Ruth, bouncing along in a basket next to Hannah.
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