The Summer Truman Saved For My Roof

The Letter

Under the notebook, folded twice, was a single sheet of notebook paper with my name written across the front, in Truman’s hand, careful in the way a child gets careful when the words matter more than usual.

I am not going to try to give you every word of it, because some things a woman keeps to herself even when she is telling the rest of the story out loud. But I will tell you the heart of it, because it is the heart of everything that happened that summer.

He wrote that he had come in for water back in June and heard me on the phone with Mr. Pruitt, heard the number, heard me say it would have to wait. He wrote that he had gone up to his room that same week and seen the water stain spreading a little wider across the porch ceiling below his window every time it rained, and that it had bothered him in a way he did not have good words for yet, so he had decided, in the plain and total way children decide things, that he would fix it himself.

He wrote that he had not told me because he was afraid I would say no. Grown ups say no to things like this, he wrote, because they think it is too much for a kid, or because they feel bad taking money from a kid, and he did not want me to feel bad, he wanted me to just have the roof fixed and stop worrying about the bucket.

And he wrote that he had hidden the tin instead of handing it to me, and waited until the morning they were already leaving to do it, because he knew that if he gave it to me while they were still standing in the driveway I would try to give it back, and he did not want it to be something I could hand back. He wanted it to already be done by the time I found it.

That was why he looked back at the window. He was checking that it was still there, still hidden, still safe until I found it on my own.

He signed it, Love, Truman, and underneath that, in a hand half the size of his, Winnie had added her own line: Me too.