They repaved Kimball Street in August while the Nguyens were on vacation. When the family came back, the road was smooth and the old pothole by their mailbox was gone.
Their daughter, who was nine, had never known there was a pothole. She had swerved around that spot on her bicycle for years — the muscle memory of the detour was in her legs — but she had never looked down and thought: there is a hole here, and I am avoiding it.
The new road confused her body before her mind caught up. She rode straight through the spot for the first time and felt something missing. Not the pothole. The swerve.
Her mother noticed the new asphalt right away and said it was about time. She knew what had been there, so she could appreciate what was gone. The repair made sense. It had a before.
The girl had no before. She only had the strange lightness of a habit that had lost its reason, the ghost-loss of something she'd never named, the discomfort of ease.
By October she had forgotten the swerve entirely. She rode straight and it was just riding. The new road was just the road.
Her mother still sometimes thought: they finally fixed that pothole.
The girl thought nothing. Which meant the repair, for her, was complete.