She put her hand on the pencil marks again.
“I am eighty-eight years old,” she said. “I had made my peace that I would never stand in my mother’s kitchen again.”
She looked at Nate. Then at me.
“And you two children went and bought it with your own money. And told no one.”
She looked down at the tape on my thumbs.
“Whose money was it? Not Ronald’s.”
“No ma’am,” I said. “Ours. Two years of it.”
“I heard about the envelopes,” Opal said. “At Easter. I told Ronald at the time exactly what I thought about it. He said you two didn’t need it.”
“We didn’t need it,” Nate said quietly. “That’s not the same as not wanting to be thought of.”
Opal nodded. Once. The way you’d nod at a child who just got a hard math problem right.
Then she let me bring her the bucket. And she sat down on it, in her good navy dress, in the middle of her mother’s kitchen.
And Nate knelt down on that filthy floor and put his arms around her.
I went out onto the porch planks and looked at that red clump by the cistern for a while.
It was rhubarb.
Opal told me later. Her mother planted it there in 1931.
Opal told Ron herself.
I wasn’t there for it. All I know is what Judy told me afterward.
Opal telephoned their house Monday morning and said, “Ronald. You will drive me out to my father’s house on Saturday.”
And Ron sat down in the kitchen chair without pulling it out first. And nearly missed it.
They came at ten o’clock that Saturday.
I watched Ron’s truck slow down at the end of the lane. And stop there on the blacktop.
It sat there for what must have been a full minute before it turned in.
Ron Schafer was sixty-nine years old that year. A big, square man. A union carpenter for thirty-eight years.
He got out of the truck and helped his mother down. And then he just stood there in the yard.
He looked at the cistern. At the corner of the porch. At a place in the grass by the old machine shed where there was nothing at all to look at.
Judy had come too. She stood beside the truck with her hand pressed against her collarbone.
Nate came down off the ladder.
“Dad.”
“You bought it,” Ron said. “You bought this place. And you never said one word to me.”
“We didn’t know what it was. I swear to you. Nobody ever told me.”
“No,” Ron said. “I don’t guess anybody did.”
Opal went inside by herself. Judy followed her. A minute later I heard Judy start crying in the front room.
The three of us stayed out in the yard.
Ron looked over the porch the way a carpenter does. I could see it pain him.
Then he looked at the new meter base on the side of the house. At the conduit, running plumb as a ruler. At the permit card in the front window.
“You do all that?” he asked Nate.
“Nights.”
“And she’s been out at the truck stop.” Ron nodded at me. “Judy saw her out there once. Carrying plates. I told her she had to be mistaken.”
He shook his head.
“Two years of that. You should’ve told us you wanted a house. We would’ve—”
He stopped.
“You’d have what, Dad?” Nate said.
He wasn’t angry. He was only asking.
And then Ron said it badly.
I don’t hold it against him now. He was standing in that yard at five years old again. It was all over his face. And a man in that condition grabs for whatever’s closest.
“I don’t see what there is to be sore about,” Ron said. “We told you the truth. We said you were capable. Well. Look.”
He threw his hand out at the house.
“Look at this. Was I wrong? Kim was about to lose those boys’ roof. Jeff was going under. You two never needed one thing from anybody. And I was proud of it. And I said so. That card was the nicest thing I knew how to say.”
Nate looked down at the ground. His ears were going red.
I hadn’t planned to say anything.
I’d thanked that man for the card two years before. And I’d meant to leave it right there. Forever.
But I’d fallen asleep against a plaster wall the month before. My husband had sold his boat. And there was tape on both of my thumbs.
“Ron,” I said. “It was a nice thing to say. I know you meant it.”
I kept my voice down. I didn’t want Opal hearing a quarrel inside that house. Of all the houses in the world.
“But capable people get tired too,” I said. “You just never hear about it. Because we’re the ones who don’t call.”
He looked at me.
“I’m not asking you for anything,” I said. “I didn’t then. I’m not now. I just want you to know it cost something. It didn’t come easy because we’re us. It came hard. And we did it anyway.”
I looked at him.
“Those are two different things.”
Ron didn’t answer me.
He stood there with his jaw working.
Then he went and got his mother out of the house. He helped her back up into the truck. And they drove away.
He looked straight down the lane the whole way out.
Nate put his arm around me.
“Well,” he said. “That’s said.”
“I shouldn’t have said it.”
“You should’ve said it at Easter two years ago,” Nate said. “I should have.”
He kissed the top of my head. There was sawdust in my hair.
“Come hold the ladder.”
The next Saturday, I drove out at seven a.m. Nate was already there working.
At twenty minutes to seven, he told me, a truck had turned in at the lane.
His father’s.
The truck bed was full. Sawhorses. A table saw under a tarp. Two twenty-ton bottle jacks. A stack of cribbing blocks. The old worm-drive saw Nate had been forbidden to touch as a boy. And a four-foot level in a canvas sleeve.
When I walked up, Ron was lying on his back under the porch. All I could see were his boots.
He slid out.
He had cobwebs in his eyebrows. He stood up slowly, the way a man his size has to.
And he took his cap off.
“Emily,” he said. “I’d like to try that again. If you’ll let me. I’ve had a week to work on it. And I had my mother helping me. And she wasn’t gentle.”
“All right,” I said.
He pointed with his cap. At that place in the grass where there was nothing.
“My dad stood right over there in 1961 and watched them sell his plow,” Ron said. “Not one soul put a hand out to him. Not his brothers. Not the church. Nobody.”
He turned the cap in his hands.
“I was five years old. And I made up my mind standing there. If a child of mine was ever going under, I’d be there with money in my hand before they ever had to ask.”
He looked at me.
“Kim was going under. Jeff was. Stacy had those loans. You two weren’t. So I figured I was done with you.”
He shook his head slowly.
“I had it all worked out that help is for people who are drowning. It never once came into my head that help is for the ones who are swimming hard, too.”
He looked at the porch.
“I gave you two a pat on the head. And I gave them the farm ground. And I called it a compliment. And you thanked me for it.”
His voice got rough.
“I’ve thought about that thank you every night this week.”
“Ron—”
“Let me finish. I’ve only got it memorized the one way.”
It was the closest thing to a joke I ever heard that man make.
“I’m not going to write you a check,” he said. “I could. Judy wanted to bring one this morning. But you’d be right to tear it up. And I’d be buying my way out cheap.”
He looked up at the house.
“You two bought my grandfather’s house with tip money and a bass boat. A check from me now would just be me trying to put my name on it.”
He put his cap back on.
“What I can do is build. That front beam is rotted clean through, and the porch posts are standing on nothing. That porch is going to hurt somebody. And my mother means to sit on it.”
He looked at me straight.
“I’d take it as a kindness if you’d let me work on this house. Saturdays. As long as it takes.”
I couldn’t talk. I just nodded.
“Nate,” Ron called. “Bring me that jack. And don’t you touch my saw.”
“I’m thirty-six years old, Dad.”
“Then you’re old enough to know better.”
