Cyclists
My father says today is my day, not Father’s Day, even though the sun is shining like it wants to pin a medal on him. We walk to the park together: him rolling the new bike beside us, me pretending my palms aren’t sweating because I’m afraid everyone will see I’m too old not to know how to ride.
He taps the handlebars. “Light hands. Flow with the frame. Countersteer into the lean,” he says, all serious, like we’re about to fly a rocket and not just lurch on two wheels. I nod even though I don’t understand. I’ve spent my entire life up until now trying to. Those fight-nights between Mom and Dad, I mean, were they really about bikes? Mom said Dad biking a hundred miles a week was him disappearing. Dad said the bike he bought her—electric blue, with a light shaped like a strawberry—was a gift of love. She never believed him. Neglect, she said. They were both speaking English but somehow not the same one.
Now it’s my turn not to understand.
Dad positions the bike at the edge of the path. “I’ll jog beside you,” he says. “But I can’t hold the bars. It ruins the technique.”
“I don’t care about technique,” I say. “Can you just hold on?”
He shakes his head. “If I hold on, you’ll never learn balance.”
Balance. Another word that sounds simple until you try it yourself.
My father has always biked. Always, like how the sun rises or how old men smell like orchids and aftershave. He says he joined this all-Filipino biking club back in Chino Hills, a crew of brown titos in neon jerseys who laughed louder than the gears on their wheels. They named their group something funny—something with a pun, the way all uncles do—but I can’t remember it, only the way Dad described their rides: early morning, fog lower than their doctors tell them to keep their cholesterol, all of them pedaling as if the world depended on it.
I climb on anyway. The seat feels too high, the ground too far, my heartbeat too loud. “Just—just hold the bars,” I say again, my voice cracking.
He folds his arms, stubborn as stone. “You don’t need me there. You just think you do.”
I grip the handlebars tight, wishing they were his hands and hating myself for wishing that, because maybe he’s right. Or maybe he isn’t. Maybe this is just the same as Mom saying she didn’t need Dad’s bike, and Dad saying she did, and both of them standing there, not hearing each other.
“Please,” I whisper. “I need you.”
He steps back instead of forward.
And I feel that ache—the one that comes when someone loves you so much in their own way that they don’t see how it’s the wrong way for you. My foot jerks the pedal too quickly, my grip is too tight on the bars. I move forward as the wheel slicks left and right, left and right, as though the world doesn’t know which way to tilt.
But I cycle. We cycle.
When I was born, and they all got jobs in Santa Clarita—engineers, nurses, warehouse supervisors—they moved north together. New hills, same club. Same jokes. Same heavy calves and heavier accents. Dad says that’s how Filipinos migrate: not alone, but as a flock, except they “shht” like sprinklers instead of quack like ducks.
He tells me this sometimes when we drive past the Walmart where they meet at dawn to avoid the other Filipino group that meets at the Burger King, everyone tapping their cleats on the cement, stretching their arms like dancers about to begin. He always gets soft when he talks about them; those rides keep parts of him alive that the world tries to take.
And when I walk the bike back to Dad after falling at least the fifth time, I can’t help but think of them starting this way too. How many times did they fall on their asses? How many times did they get back up? Dad tells me to get out of my head and watch what’s in front of me.
But the truth is biking isn’t something he started with them. No. He learned from Lolo—his own father—who biked in the Tour de France. Dad says it like force, not France, and I never correct him. I like his version better. It sounds like a superhero competition.
Lolo never won. Dad swears he always finished last, like he meant to arrive on Filipino time. But Lolo didn’t care. Hindi sa galing—sa mahal mo, Dad told me once. Not about being good, but about loving the thing you do. That’s the translation he gives, though he admits he’s forgotten exactly how Lolo said it in Tagalog. “Was it mahal, or mahalaga? Does it matter?” he says, smiling that crooked smile, the one that makes him look half boy, half hurt.
What matters is that Lolo biked even when he was slow, even when the world said he wasn’t enough. And Dad loved him for that. Loves him still, even though Lolo died in a plane crash in the Philippines before Dad turned twenty, before Dad knew he’d have a daughter who’d wobble her way into the same ache.
And here’s the thing: That’s what I like most about Dad—the way he carries Lolo’s stubborn love like a spare tube in his pocket. The way he keeps pedaling even when he’s not sure the words he remembers are the right ones.
It’s why I still love my father, even with the biking and the long rides that made Mom glare at the clock. Even with the stepping back when I wish he’d step forward.
The path curves. I lean, not because of technique but because sometimes loving someone means moving with the shape of them.
And I cycle. We cycle.
Mom’s car pulls into the lot the way she always drives—slow, careful, like every parking space is a math problem she’s solving in her head. I can tell Dad hears the engine because he straightens his shirt and wipes sweat from his forehead, suddenly pretending he didn’t just spend an hour jogging beside me.
Mom steps out, sunglasses big as two moons. She’s got her hair twisted up with a spoon, like she was on the couch eating Jiffy and only just remembered that she needed to come get me.
Dad leans in, automatic as breathing, to kiss her cheek hello.
She dodges—playfully, a leaf fluttering away from the wind. “Hoy, wag,” she says, grinning. She likes teasing him because this is their dance now—near, far, near again—but never touching too long.
They’re divorced. Papers signed. Boxes divided. Two apartments, two separate Netflix subscriptions. But I don’t think I know what divorce actually means. Not when my parents smile like this. Not when they talk without the sharp edges my friends’ parents throw like knives.
My friends say divorce is parents who scream and call each other names. My parents don’t scream. They don’t call each other anything bad. They don’t look like they’re trying to hate each other. They look soft. Soft like day-old rice. A little hard, but nothing a splash of water and oil and a minute in the microwave can’t fix. Soft like there’s still hope for them.
“Did she do good?” Mom asks, nodding at the bike.
“Great,” Dad lies, puffing his chest a little, as if he’d been the one teetering down the path.
Mom squints. “Show me,” she says.
“Okay,” I say, swallowing the nervous bubble in my throat.
I push off, barely, just enough for the wheels to tremble forward. The bike remembers it doesn’t trust me yet and we creep off.
A little away, I hear mom step forward. “Light hands!” she calls out, hands cupped around her mouth. “Go with the bike, not against it!”
I blink. That’s the same thing Dad said. Almost the exact same. And something warm floats up in my chest.
I pedal one more shaky loop.
I hear them both clap.
I cycle. We cycle.
I pedal, slow and careful, like I’m carrying a glass of water filled too high. The path shimmers in front of me, sun sliding down the concrete in long gold ribbons. Mom and Dad keep clapping, and I feel tall, taller than the bike, taller than the space between them.
Then there’s a flash of pink streamers, a wheel turning the wrong way, a little girl fresh out of training wheels coming straight at me, eyes wide as if she’s just remembered she doesn’t know how to stop.
“Hey—!” I squeak, and she squeaks too, and then we’re two birds flying into each other in the middle of the sky.
The bikes kiss first—handlebars knocking, pedals scraping shins—then our bodies tilt and lean, two magnets with opposite charges trying in vain to get away from each other.
Her elbow bumps my elbow. My knee bumps her tire. And somehow, we catch each other—two amateurs holding up the whole world.
We gasp.
We laugh.
We’re still standing.
“Sorry!” we say at the same time, breathless.
Her smile is crooked, brave, despite her age. Mine probably looks the same. Girls whose palms sweat and whose hearts gallop and whose knees have tasted gravel.
Behind her, a man in a bright-orange jersey shouts, “Anak! Light hands lang! Don’t fight the bike!” Almost the same words my dad used, except with something Mom calls the Kalisa Grill Tito swagger, like instructions are something you can barbecue.
Dad sucks in his breath. That short, sharp inhale he thinks nobody notices.
I look back. Dad squints like he’s looking at his bills. The man squints back like he’s got the same bills. Two dads with matching cycling tans and matching calves and matching don’t-mess-with-my-kid stares. I cringe for myself, the little girl, for all of us.
And then I see it—the logo that looks like a rooster riding a fixie.
“Ay, Diyos ko,” Dad mutters. “The Pogi Pedal Club.”
“You,” says the other dad, pointing at my dad’s shirt—navy blue, rooster replaced by a carabao doing a wheelie. “Rolling Carabaos.”
Mom walks up just in time. She sees the orange jersey. I swear her face folds like laundry.
“He cut me off at Lyons last week,” she says. “Didn’t even signal. Almost hit a cone.”
Dad puffs his chest. “He probably rides like a turista,” he says with a hiss.
The other dad crosses his arms and puffs his chest too. “At least I actually ride,” he says. “You look all spandex and no legs.”
Dad bristles.
The man bristles back.
Mom doesn’t have any whiskers to bristle but somehow she does too.
The adults stand before us, about to start a war, and my head is hot, sun-bleached and buzzing with embarrassment. Our dads nearly get chest to chest, and I’m afraid the girl and I will have to square off too. Like Montagues and Capulets, In-N-Out Burger and Shake Shack. I don’t want to fight, I want to swing my arm protectively in front of the little girl beside me, but I’m frozen. Even though I’m older, what can a girl like me, who hasn’t even learned to bike yet, do?
But the girl beside me rolls her eyes. She lifts her bike.
“You want to try again?” she asks. We grin, allies now. Victims of cycling dads.
“Yes,” I say, and we mount our bikes like two knights who’ve agreed not to aim at each other’s hearts this time.
“Careful!” the three adults shout.
“Light hands!”
“Go with the bike!”
“Watch your lean!”
Their voices overlap like mismatched karaoke.
But me and the girl? We push off anyway.
And this time when we wobble, we wobble together, not crashing, not falling—just beginners learning the same balance, the same fear, the same almost-flight.
We cycle.
E. P. Tuazon (@advintage_press) is a Filipino American writer from Los Angeles. His latest book, A Professional Lola, came out in 2024 with Red Hen Press and was selected as the winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Fiction. His forthcoming collection, Kain Tayo! (Let’s Eat!) Or Forever Hold Our Piece, comes out in 2027 (Red Hen Press). In his spare time, he likes to go to Seafood City and gossip with the crabs.