The office of the city ADA coordinator. A woman named Patrice Holloway. I had filed two reports with her office since spring, with photos, and I told Nico this one would be the third, and that I was sending it before I rolled off his block.
He stopped waving his hand.
The woman with the stroller spoke up. Her name was Dani. She asked me how to file one. I gave her the link right there on the sidewalk, and she filed her own report standing next to me, with a picture of her baby in the road.
Nico said it was just a few crates. He said nobody ever complained before.
I told him people had complained. He just never listened.
For a whole year I was the guy who wanted special treatment, when all I ever wanted was the same sidewalk as everybody else.
Patrice called me the next afternoon. She said three reports on the same address, from two different people, meant an inspection. She said the law requires a clear path on a public sidewalk, wide enough for a wheelchair, and that it was not a favor. It was the rule.
The inspector came out on Thursday. He measured. The crates left eleven inches of sidewalk. Nico got a written citation and a week to fix it.
But the inspector did one more thing, and Dani told me about it later, because she was buying bread across the street and saw the whole thing. He had a spare wheelchair in his truck, the kind the city uses for training. He asked Nico to sit in it and try to get from one end of his own storefront to the other.
Nico could not do it. He had to roll off the curb into the gutter.
Dani said he sat in that chair in the street for a long time after that.
The next Monday, the crates were gone. Nico had put up a metal rack against the front wall of his shop, tall and narrow, and stacked everything on it. The sidewalk was wide open for the first time in a year.
When I rolled by that morning, he came out of the shop. He did not wave me off this time. He stood in front of me and said he was sorry. He said he never once thought about what it was like to be on the other side of those crates. He said the inspector made him think about it for about five minutes, and that was enough to make him sick.
Then he asked me something I did not expect. He asked if his front step was a problem too.
It was. I had never been inside his shop.
Two weeks later, there was a small ramp at his door. Wood, painted green, with a rail. He built it himself on a Sunday.
I go in every Saturday now. He runs a little produce market, and it turns out he has the best tomatoes on the whole street. He saves me the good ones in a paper bag behind the counter.
Dani comes in too, with the stroller, right up the ramp.
Nico painted a sign and hung it by the door. It says everyone welcome. He means it now.