The Summer Truman Saved For My Roof
Now Every Summer
They came back this June, same as always, same overpacked car, same gravel dust down the lane. Truman climbed out with a different bag this time, an ordinary backpack, nothing hidden in it that I could tell, though I have learned not to assume too quickly with that boy.
We sat on the new stretch of porch roof’s shade that first evening, all three of us, and Winnie asked, with the particular bluntness of a child who has decided a good idea should not go to waste twice, what we were going to secretly fix this summer.
“Nothing,” I told her. “The roof’s done.”
She thought about that for exactly as long as it takes an eight year old to think about anything, and then she said, “There’s still that fence by the garden that’s falling down.”
Truman did not say anything. He just looked at me the way his grandfather used to look at me across a room when he already knew what we were going to do and was only waiting to see if I’d catch up.
I have a feeling I am going to be finding things hidden in that house for as long as those two keep growing, and I have decided, sitting here now with a dry porch over my head for the first time in four years, that I would not trade that particular kind of worry for anything.
Lyman still shakes his head about it when he brings them up on Saturdays, says he cannot decide whether to scold his son for keeping secrets from his own grandmother or to frame the notebook and hang it in the hallway where every visitor to this farmhouse will have to see it. I have told him plainly that there will be no scolding done in my house over a boy trying, in the only way he knew how, to take care of somebody he loves. If that is the worst thing either of my grandchildren ever hides from me, I will consider myself the luckiest grandmother in this county, and I mean to tell that fence by the garden it had better hold up, because I do not think Winnie has forgotten about it, and I do not think Truman has stopped listening for the next thing worth fixing.
This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.