The Summer Truman Saved For My Roof

The Phone Call I Thought No One Heard

Somewhere in the middle of that summer, on an afternoon I remember only because of what came after, I called Voss Roofing about the leak over the west end of the porch. It had been dripping into a bucket every time it rained hard since the spring, staining the ceiling boards a color I did not like looking at.

Mr. Pruitt, who has done roof work for half this township since before I was married, came out and walked the porch roof and gave me a number that made me go quiet on my end of the line for a second too long.

“I hear you,” he said, gentle about it, because he is a decent man and he has known me thirty years. “It’s not an emergency yet. The bucket’ll hold you through fall if it has to.”

“It’ll have to,” I told him, and thanked him, and hung up, and did not think another thing about it, because that is what you do with a number you cannot spend right now. You set it down and you go on.

I did not know, and would not know for another six weeks, that Truman had come in from the yard for a glass of water in the middle of that call and stood in the kitchen doorway long enough to hear all of it. I did not know he had gone back outside afterward and sat on the back steps with Winnie and told her, in the flat, serious way children announce things that matter to them, that they were going to fix it themselves before they had to go home. I did not know any of that. I only knew that my porch would have to wait, and that the kids were, if anything, a little quieter and busier than usual for the rest of July, which I put down to the heat.

The Last Morning

Their parents came for them on a Saturday at the end of August, the same day of the week they’d arrived on, which felt right in the way that farmhouse summers like to close their own loops. We had a quick breakfast, eggs and the last of the garden tomatoes, and there was a great deal of hugging, Winnie wrapped around my middle so tight I nearly lost my balance, Truman quieter about it but no less thorough.

Then everyone carried bags out to the car, and I stood on the porch to see them off the way I always do, and that is when I noticed the thing I would turn over in my mind for the rest of that day and most of the next.

Just before he climbed in, Truman stopped with one hand on the car door and looked back at the house. Not at me. Past me, up at the second story, at the window of the room he’d slept in all summer.

He looked, for just a second, like a boy checking that something was still where he’d left it.

“Forget something?” I called across the yard, half joking.

He shook his head fast. Too fast. “No, Grandma.”

Then he got in, and Lyman backed the car around, and I waved until the dust off the gravel swallowed them at the end of the lane, and the house went quiet in that particular way it does after children have filled it and then taken themselves back out of it.