THE FESTIVAL CHAIR DROPPED A GIRL’S MAP IN THE GUTTER AND BLAMED A BIKER—THEN THE GIRL RAISED HER PENCIL AND SAID, “LOOK AT THE BOTTOM.”

THE FESTIVAL CHAIR DROPPED JUNE’S PUDDLE MAP INTO THE GUTTER, THEN POINTED AT THE BIKER AS IF HE’D DONE IT.

The storm had moved out of Bell Creek, Ohio, before breakfast on Saturday. By ten, sun shone on the chrome of the old cruiser parked outside the hardware store. Dana Miller stood beneath the striped awning and watched her nine-year-old daughter, June, turn over the map on her lap. June had drawn the route in blue crayon. A short yellow pencil stuck out of the pocket of her yellow raincoat.

Carol Whitaker came down the sidewalk in a cream raincoat, holding a clipboard under her arm. As chair of the spring festival, she’d been the person June was told to ask about adding a puddle walk. June held out her map. Carol took it by one corner, looked at the biker beside the cruiser, and opened her fingers over the gutter. The paper landed face down. Carol pointed at Hank.

“This is what happens when you let a biker plan a children’s event.”

A woman put down her coffee and lifted her phone.

Hank Ellis stayed beside his bike. Dana knew that people at the garage called him Switch, and that he’d once fixed the loose latch on her van while she bought milk. Now there was a tightness at the hinge of his jaw. The leather of his short-sleeved jacket creaked when he flexed a hand. The motor ticked as it cooled.

“I asked him to wait,” June said.

Carol turned toward the phones. She said Hank had promised to push June into standing water, and she was the one who’d had to step in. Someone behind Dana asked how deep it was. Another person said there were open drains after a storm. Dana glanced at the water sliding along the curb and heard herself ask Hank what exactly he’d told June.

June looked down at her pencil.

Hank pulled at the fingertips of his right glove one by one. He tucked the glove into his jacket pocket, turned, and lifted the lid of his saddlebag. A silver bridge was stitched across the back of his black leather. Dana could see the bare hand now, broad and freckled between the knuckle tattoos, reaching past a rag to take out a square of paper in a clear sleeve.

He unfolded it across the cruiser seat. It had the same blue puddles, the same clumsy turn behind the bakery, even the spot where June had drawn a dog bigger than the post office. The woman with the phone took a step closer. Carol’s clipboard slipped against her coat.

“I asked him to bring the good copy,” June said. “In case mine got wet.”

Hank angled the seat-side edge of the paper toward her. Dana had assumed he’d come to speak for June. He took half a step back and waited for her to finish.

June pulled the yellow pencil out of her pocket. Its eraser hovered above a fold near the bottom of the page. The row beneath the puddles was upside down. She bent closer, expecting to see another stop June wanted to add to the route.

“Mom. Look at the bottom.”

Part 2

Under the fold, June had printed STOP MEANS STOP in letters big enough for Dana to read upside down.

Below that, in smaller print, were three names. June Miller. Hank Ellis. And, beside a box marked Walk it first, Carol Whitaker’s initials.

Dana put a finger beside the box. “You saw this?”

“I see a lot of things people bring me,” Carol said.

“You put your initials there.”

“Because she asked me to look at it.”

June shifted in her seat. “You said to bring it Saturday if it rained.”

Dana waited for Hank to tell them which one of them had it right. He rested his gloved hand on the seat, beside the plastic sleeve.

“What did you promise her?” Dana asked.

“To walk the route with you.”

“And after that?”

“June decides.”

The woman who’d raised her phone lowered it just enough to look over the top. Somewhere behind her, somebody set a cardboard tray of coffees down on the hardware store windowsill. Dana could smell the motor cooling and the faint burnt edge of the coffee she’d forgotten to drink.

Three weeks earlier, she’d picked June up from the library just as a shower let up. Three children in bright boots had gone stomping down the walk. June had laughed every time a splash caught one of them in the back. Then she’d asked if Dana could push her through the next one.

Dana had a grocery bag hooked over one handle and a prescription to collect before the pharmacy closed. She’d also seen a broken bottle near the downspout that morning. She said, “Next time,” and steered around it.

That evening June asked how many next times there had to be.

Dana had been turning that question over since. She’d bought June the burgundy chair a year before, after June picked the color from a square of painted metal at the fitting. She knew how carefully June chose the things she could choose. Dana hadn’t realized how often a grown-up could answer for her with two ordinary words.

“Where did the copy come from?” Dana asked.

“The garage,” June said. “Hank has a printer that makes everything blue.”

“Just when the black cartridge’s out,” Hank said.

It was the first thing he’d said all morning that made June grin.

Dana looked down again. The route curled past the bakery, went behind the post office, then turned into the town green. Under the initials, somebody had drawn two straight gray lines at the last corner. June’s pencil marks usually bowed in the middle. These had been made with a ruler.

“What are those?”

“Places we can turn around,” Hank said.

Carol shifted the clipboard under her arm. “I’ve heard enough. I’ll have someone from the town come sort this out.”

A man in a green work shirt was already standing beside the hardware store door. Dana recognized Luis from the street department. He was holding a rolled-up plan in one hand and a breakfast sandwich in the other.

“I was looking for you, Hank,” he said. “We’ve got the green checked. The storm drain behind the post office is still backed up.”

Carol turned to him. “You know him?”

Luis swallowed the bite he’d just taken. “I ought to. He’s the one who got the town to walk that route in the first place.”

Then he looked at the map on the cruiser seat.

“Where’s the second page?”

Part 3

June looked at Hank. Hank looked at Carol.

“I left it in the festival office,” June said. “She said she needed the page with the names.”

“Which names?” Dana asked.

“The people who said they’d come.”

Carol pulled the rolled plan out of Luis’s hand and tried to flatten it against her clipboard. The top kept curling toward her face.

“If this is about my initials, I was receiving a proposal. People bring me proposals for everything. Last year a man wanted a petting zoo next to the pie table.”

Luis took his plan back. “I’m here because there was a storm. We have a barricade up behind the post office. Nobody’s using that stretch today.”

“Okay,” June said. “We can cross it out.”

Dana watched Carol turn toward her daughter as if the problem had just spoken out of turn.

A woman carrying a ring of keys came from the library side of the block. Ruth Bell handled the festival office on Saturdays. Dana knew her as the person who kept spare mittens in the library lost-and-found and washed them before putting them back out. Ruth stopped just outside the knot of people, in a cardigan too thin for the wind.

“Can I get past?” she asked. “I need to see what’s still on the board.”

Carol said, “There’s nothing you need to take down, Ruth.”

Ruth looked at her. “I was going to check whether the sign-up sheet was still there.”

The festival board was inside the library vestibule. Dana and June followed while Hank walked beside them, his glove tucked in his pocket. There was space for two people abreast until somebody left an umbrella stand half in the aisle. Hank moved the stand. June rolled through.

A bright green flyer was pinned over the Saturday schedule. Across the top ran the name of a downtown shop that had offered a cash sponsorship for the festival. Underneath was a drawing of a girl rolling past blue puddles. Dana knew the drawing before she took a second step. She’d seen June erase the back wheel until she’d nearly worn a hole through the paper.

At the bottom were the words Led by Carol Whitaker and the Festival Committee.

June pulled up beside it. “Where’d my dog go?”

The flyer had been cropped to fit. The oversized dog, the bakery turn, and the bottom of June’s map were gone.

Dana asked Ruth, “Did you print this?”

“I did.” Ruth slipped the keys onto her wrist. “I asked where June’s name should go. Carol said the family wanted privacy.”

Dana looked at Carol. “When did I say that?”

“You’d told me before you don’t like June’s picture online.”

“That’s her drawing.”

A little boy came through the library doors holding a book about dump trucks. He stopped to read the green flyer and asked his grandfather if they could do the puddle walk. His grandfather told him to grab a schedule. Dana watched him take the last one from the plastic holder.

June tugged once at Dana’s sleeve.

“Is there still a walk if my name’s off it?”

Before Dana could answer, Carol’s phone vibrated. She checked the screen, then stepped closer and lowered her voice.

“The sponsor’s coming at noon. Dana, could you give me five minutes without June?”

June took her hand off Dana’s sleeve.

Dana said, “Anything about her map, she can hear.”

Carol’s phone went off again. This time Dana could read the preview over the top of the case.

Where are the fifty volunteers you promised?

Part 4

“Fifty?” Dana said.

Carol turned the screen against her coat.

June looked up at Hank. “Did everybody say yes?”

“Everybody I asked.”

Dana thought of the second sheet. She’d pictured five or six people from the garage and a couple of parents who could leave work early. Hank had asked fifty people to show up for something a nine-year-old drew at the kitchen table.

“The boots are at the garage,” he told June.

“Even the ugly ones?”

“Especially those.”

Carol opened her mouth, then shut it. A drop fell from the hem of her cream raincoat onto the library mat. Dana found herself watching it spread.

“How long has this been on your schedule?” Dana asked her.

“Since Thursday.”

“The route needed checking this morning. I didn’t know you’d put a time on it.”

“The shop offered us money for an activity families could do together. They needed to see something in the program. We’ve got bills from last year.”

“You put her picture in the program.”

“Her drawing,” Carol said. “You just said so yourself.”

Dana felt the distinction hit exactly where Carol had meant it to. She looked at June, who was turning the pencil between her palms. The eraser had worn down to a slope.

A voice came from behind the circulation desk. “I can cover the desk if you need the office,” the young clerk told Ruth.

Ruth drew a breath and got her keys off her wrist. “Come see what I printed.”

In the back office, a portable heater clicked under a desk. There was a stack of raffle tickets beside the keyboard and an empty sandwich bag folded into a tiny square. Ruth sat, opened the festival inbox, and brought up a message from Hank with two attachments.

She opened the first. There was June’s map, uncropped, including the rule and Carol’s initials.

Then she opened the second. It was a sign-up sheet with fifty first names and last initials. At the top, Hank had written Available to help if June and her mom decide to go ahead. Beneath the list, in a different hand, were the words Bring boots you can get wet.

“That’s mine,” June said.

Ruth scrolled to the reply. Carol had asked whether the volunteers could line up behind the sponsor’s table at noon. She’d specified dry boots and asked whether Hank had plain jackets the riders could borrow for the photo.

Hank’s reply was two sentences. I’ll let June know the shop wants a picture. Ask her yourself before you put her in one.

Carol stood in the doorway with her arms crossed. “We needed one decent picture for the shop’s newsletter. I thought he’d help me make that happen.”

Dana looked at Hank. The leather across his shoulders had dried unevenly. Around the silver bridge, the thread was lighter at one end, as though somebody had taken the stitches out and put them back in.

“Why did you say you’d let June know?”

“She wanted to decide what to tell Carol herself.”

June stopped rolling the pencil. “I was going to say they could take a picture of our boots.”

There was a pause long enough for Dana to hear a child feed coins into the library copier one at a time.

Carol looked down at June. “You never told me that.”

“You dropped my map before I got to that part.”

Carol left the office. By the time Dana reached the vestibule, she was outside with her phone to her ear.

“I need an officer down here,” Carol said. “There’s a group coming, and I’m concerned about a child.”

Part 5

Dana nearly told Hank to go home.

The thought came so quickly it scared her. She could picture the post somebody would make if an officer walked up while a big man in a biker jacket stood next to a child’s wheelchair. She could picture people seeing June’s face for three seconds and deciding what she felt.

Then Dana looked down. June was holding the yellow pencil against her lap with both hands.

“Do you want to go home?” Dana asked.

“I want to go somewhere people ask me things.”

“All right. Let’s go inside.”

June shook her head. “I meant right here.”

Hank had heard. He set the map on the library windowsill, where June could reach it. Then he stepped back far enough for a woman coming out with a stroller to pass.

The officer arrived alone a few minutes later. Her name was Ortiz, and Dana recognized her from the library’s Saturday coat drive. She spoke to Carol first, then asked Dana if June was all right and if anyone had moved her chair against her wishes.

“No,” Dana said. She looked at June. “Do you want to answer too?”

“He hasn’t pushed me yet,” June said. “I haven’t asked.”

Ortiz wrote something down. She asked whether anyone was planning to use a closed street. Luis showed her the part of the route he’d marked out, and June drew a line through it with the pencil she’d been holding all morning.

“Can I keep the bakery?” she asked him.

“If you stay on the walk. We checked the green and the whole path from the bakery this morning.”

“Could we go there and back?”

“Sure.”

Carol said she had a video that showed how aggressive Hank had been. Dana knew which one she meant. The woman near the hardware store had posted a short clip in the festival group. It began with Carol saying she’d had to step in, then cut to Hank bending over his saddlebag. Someone had already asked whether he’d grabbed the girl.

Dana started typing and erased her answer twice. She couldn’t correct every stranger in town one at a time. She put the phone away.

“Is that Linda’s video?” a voice asked behind her.

It belonged to Owen, the bakery’s Saturday dishwasher. He was sixteen, with flour down one leg of his jeans. Dana had seen him on the bakery steps with earbuds in when they arrived. She’d assumed he was killing time before his shift.

“I was filming the water running out from under the awning,” he said. “My boss wanted to see where it went. You can hear everything.”

He held his phone so Dana and Ortiz could see. The curb filled half the screen. June’s voice came through first.

“I want my mom to walk it with us. That was the deal.”

Then Carol’s. “Give me that, honey.”

A cream sleeve entered the picture. Carol’s fingers opened over the gutter. In the dark reflection of the hardware store window, Hank stood beside his cruiser, both gloves on, his hands down by his sides.

Owen stopped the video before it caught June turning toward the camera.

“I can send you the whole thing,” he told Dana. “I’d rather you tell me what to do with it.”

Dana asked him to send it to her and Ruth. When she turned back, Carol was studying the screen as if she’d only just noticed the reflection herself.

Ruth’s phone buzzed. She read the message, then held it out to Dana.

The shop owner was already at the green. She’d brought a printout of the volunteer agreement Carol had sent her, and she wanted to know whose name was on the original.

Part 6

Dana and June took the long way to the green so they could look at the route without anybody behind them. Hank went along on June’s left, where the walk widened, and carried the plastic sleeve under his arm. At the bakery corner, Dana found herself reaching for the push handles.

“Want me to take this part?” she asked.

“I can do the corner,” June said. “Can you hold the pencil?”

Dana held the pencil.

A blue pickup sat beside the low brick wall at the green, its tailgate down. Boots filled the bed. There were green ones with cracked top edges, orange ones with mud dried into the treads, and a tall purple pair somebody had tied together with a shoelace. Motorcycle engines had gone quiet in the far lot. Fifty riders had come. Some were already standing in socks on the back of the truck, trading sizes.

“Those purple ones are yours,” a woman called to Hank.

“I know.”

“You want to tell her why?”

Hank lifted the boots down by the shoelace. One had a silver bridge drawn near the heel in paint that had flaked away along a crease.

“They were my sister’s,” he told June.

Dana knew Hank had a sister who’d died. She knew because there was a photograph beside the garage register of a woman holding a perch by the line, her mouth open mid-laugh. Dana had always assumed the woman standing behind her with a hand on the cooler was a neighbor.

“Did she ride?” June asked.

“Drove the truck. Kept us out of trouble.”

The woman on the tailgate snorted. “Kept a list of which trouble you’d already tried.”

Hank turned one boot so June could see the bridge. His sister Maggie had drawn it, he said, after a club breakfast got moved into a hall with steps at both doors. She’d used a chair for years and spent that breakfast out by the truck with a paper plate on her knees. The following month she picked a building with a level entrance, drew a bridge on the paper signup sheet, and made Hank carry it around for signatures. Later, the club stitched her bridge on their jackets.

Dana looked at the patch she’d been able to see from half a block away all morning. She’d figured it was a picture of something the men liked to ride over.

“What did she want the boots for?” June asked.

“The greenhouse. She hated dirt in her shoes.”

“Did she go in puddles?”

“When she felt like it.”

June looked down the walk. The water had collected in shallow dips on the wide concrete. A few children were chasing each other across the grass while a man with a trash bag picked twigs out of the path. Somebody had set out towels in a clean laundry basket under the shelter.

Hank held up the tied boots. “Still want me to go first?”

June thought about it. “If you can fit your feet in those.”

Hank sat on the low wall. He’d managed to pull off one brown boot when Dana saw Carol coming across the green with Ruth and the shop owner, Elaine. Elaine held a manila folder flat against her chest.

“Before anybody starts,” Elaine said, “I need to ask June about this.”

She took out a one-page form. At the bottom, beside the words Family approved, were Dana Miller’s initials in a handwriting Dana had never seen before.

Part 7

Dana looked at the initials until she was sure. Whoever had made them had drawn a little loop at the end of the M. Dana had signed her name on so many school forms that her M was practically two fence posts.

“I didn’t sign this.”

“I entered it,” Ruth said.

Dana turned. Ruth had her keys looped around her index finger. She worked them over the knuckle and back again.

“Carol told me you’d approved it by phone,” Ruth said. “She had me enter the initials on the PDF. I should have called you.”

Carol started to speak. Elaine raised a hand just high enough for her to see it.

“Did Dana approve it?” Elaine asked.

Carol looked at the board members standing behind the picnic table. One was holding a tray of cut oranges. He set it down without taking his eyes off her.

“She’d told me June wanted to participate,” Carol said.

“In June’s walk,” Dana said. “Who told the shop I’d agreed to yours?”

Carol took a long breath. “I did.”

Nobody spoke for a few seconds. Behind them, one of the bikers asked another man to check whether the rubber boots he’d borrowed were both left feet. The man sat down on the grass to check.

Elaine said the shop had already paid for that morning’s tents and tables. She’d settle that invoice. The rest of the sponsorship would stay on hold while the board reviewed what Carol had submitted. Ruth brought up the two original attachments on her phone. The festival treasurer asked her to forward them, along with the form and the email telling her to enter Dana’s initials.

Then Dana showed him Owen’s clip. When the cream sleeve came into the frame, the treasurer stopped chewing the piece of orange he’d just put in his mouth.

Carol watched it too. “I dropped the paper,” she said. “Hank was standing by the bike.”

Dana waited.

“I said he’d put her in danger. I didn’t see him do anything to her chair. He hadn’t touched it.”

The treasurer asked Carol to hand the clipboard to Ruth and step away from the festival table for the rest of the day. Carol put the clipboard down. She started to leave, came back, and looked directly at June.

“I’m sorry I dropped your map.”

June rubbed the eraser with her thumb. “It took me two nights.”

Carol nodded. She stood there for a second, then walked toward the parking lot.

Dana looked at June. “We can be done for today if you want.”

“I waited for it to rain,” June said. “I’d still like to go.”

So they walked the path together. Dana and June agreed on which shallow puddles to try, how June would call a stop, and where she could take the handles back herself. The bikers took turns at her invitation, each walking beside her until she asked for a push. Hank went first, both feet finally wedged into the purple boots.

At the first puddle, June looked over her shoulder. “You can get your feet wet too.”

Hank put one boot down hard on his side of the walk. The splash hit the cuff of his jeans. June laughed. By the third puddle, bikers were stomping and hopping on the open pavement beside her like kids, and June’s laugh had turned into hiccups.

Near the bakery turn, the youngest rider took his turn at the handles. He stopped at the edge of a puddle even before June called out.

“Do you want to skip this one?” he asked.

June shook her head. She was looking at a boy standing beneath the bakery awning in a pair of dry red boots.

“Can we wait for him?”

Part 8

The boy under the awning was June’s classmate Ben. He’d been at the library the day the other kids splashed down the walk. Dana recognized his red boots from the little circles June had drawn next to the puddles. She’d assumed those circles were flowers.

Ben stood with his hands in his pockets. “I thought it was just the people on the list.”

“The list is for pushing,” June said. “You can splash.”

“Do I have to do it big?”

June looked down at her own wet jeans. “Mine got bigger.”

He stepped out from under the awning. At first he only touched the surface with the toe of his boot. Then he stamped hard enough to splash himself in the chin. June laughed so hard she had to ask everyone to wait while she caught her breath. Dana held the pencil and waited with them.

All fifty bikers took a turn. Some pushed June the length of a sidewalk square, some walked her through a shallow puddle, and one man in orange boots used most of his turn trying to make a left on June’s instructions before she told him she’d been pointing at the dog. The dog was real this time, tied outside the bakery, and much smaller than the one on her map.

Elaine took a photograph after asking June what she wanted in it. June pointed down. In the picture Dana got that evening, there were purple boots and orange boots and Ben’s red boots, two wet wheelchair tires, and just enough concrete to show what was left of the last puddle.

Three days later, the festival board sent out a correction naming June as the person who designed the walk and clearing Hank and the club of the safety accusation. At its next meeting, the board voted to remove Carol as chair. Ruth called Dana herself before the corrected flyer went up. She read the whole thing aloud, including the words designed by June Miller, and asked if she’d got it right.

“Ask June,” Dana said, and handed over the phone.

By the following Saturday the green had dried out. Dana stopped at the garage to return the clear sleeve. June carried it on her lap and asked Hank if she could have it back when the next storm came.

“Keep it,” he said.

Behind the register was the photograph of Maggie holding the perch. Beside it, Hank had tacked up the picture of the boots. Dana spotted a scrap of blue paper tucked behind the thumbtack. It was the corner of the map Carol had dropped. The blue crayon dog had survived, one ear sticking up from a stain. Hank told June that Owen had picked it out of the gutter after everybody left.

June looked at it a while. “Put him closer to the puddle picture,” she said. “He likes water.”

Hank moved the thumbtack.

Dana had spent that morning under the awning looking at a roomful of people and guessing who knew best. Next time she wanted to remember what she’d missed while she was looking at a leather jacket and tattooed hands. When June asked everyone to wait, Hank was already standing still.

It rained again the following week. As they came up to the bakery, Dana started to angle the chair toward the dry side of the walk. She stopped and asked June which way she wanted to go.

June pointed straight ahead.

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