LEWISTON — As a story line, it’s nearly perfect.

A mother, six months pregnant, who cares for her elderly father. A grizzled cop fresh off some hard times of his own. A flat tire on a cold, October morning. Two lives thrust together on the side of the road in a hard city.

Don’t wait for the movie to appear on the Lifetime Channel. It happened Sunday on Lisbon Street when a front tire blew on the front of Heather Jeselskis’ Honda. Her car hobbled. She pulled into the parking lot at a Mobil Station.

The 30-year-old Auburn woman is not helpless. There were police cars in the lot — the Mobil is a popular coffee spot — but even two-thirds through her pregnancy, she figured she could manage it alone.

“I got the car jacked up and the lug nuts off,” she said. “But I couldn’t get the tire off the car.”

Lisbon Street traffic buzzed by. A few officers left the store and went on their way. Round with child, Jeselskis tried a few more times to remove the tire. It wouldn’t budge.

“I was covered in grease,” she said. “I said, ‘Can somebody please help me?'”

Enter Jeff Baril, a seen-it-all corporal who has been with the department for 21 years. The officer took a look at the tire. He sized it up, took aim and gave it a kick. The tire tumbled free. He then put on a temporary spare, a tiny tire good for 50 miles, at best. She didn’t have a better one. Baril wanted to know what she would do to get the tire replaced.

“I told him, ‘I’ll be all right,'” Jeselskis said. “But he said, ‘Why don’t you meet me down at VIP?'”

The auto part store is just down Lisbon Street. The two drove there separately. Baril went inside and spoke to a store clerk. The clerk looked over the car, an Accord still hanging in there at 176,000 miles. It needed not one but two tires on the front.

“They told me in another 10 or 20 miles, the other tire would have blown, too,” she said.

Several times a month, she drives out to Mercer to help her elderly father. It’s a long drive with a lot of barren stretches. She was grateful to have new tires. But in her head, she was trying to sort out how she would pay for them.

No sweat, said the clerk. Cpl. Baril took care of it.

“I just started bawling,” Jeselskis said. “I started crying. I hugged him and told him he was my angel.”

Jeselskis has had a rough year. She went through a divorce. She has an 8-year-old daughter and another child on the way. She didn’t want a handout that Sunday morning. She only wanted to be able to get where she needed to go.

“I’m just so thankful,” she said. “People don’t do this kind of thing for others anymore.”

No thanks necessary, as far as Baril is concerned. If it were his choice, the deed would have gone unmentioned.

“He’s uncomfortable getting credit for this,” said Chief Michael Bussiere of the Lewiston Police Department. “He told me he went through a hard time recently and a lot of people helped him out. This was his way of paying it forward. His words, not mine.”

It’s a concept Heather can get her mind around. Someone helps you; you try to help someone else. She’s keeping it in mind. Meanwhile, she has a new appreciation for police officers — the rough work that they do and the credit they don’t always get.

But Chief Bussiere was not surprised at all.

“Jeff Baril has a big heart,” Bussiere said. “A lot of them do. Police officers do things like this more than people hear about. They don’t do it for the accolades. They do it because they feel it’s the right thing to do.”

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