The Summer Truman Saved For My Roof

The Phone Call To Lyman

I do not know how long I sat up there before I finally called my son. Long enough that the light coming through Truman’s window had gone from afternoon gold to the flatter color of early evening.

“Mom?” Lyman said, and I could hear immediately that something in my voice had already told him this was not an ordinary call. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said, and then I had to stop and get my breath back before I could say anything else. “Nothing is wrong, Lyman. I need to read you something your son wrote me.”

I read him the notebook first, the tally, the Hendersons and the co op and the nightcrawlers off the boat ramp, and I heard him go quiet the way I imagine I had gone quiet an hour before. Then I read him Winnie’s page, the roof with no leak in it, WE FIXED IT SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ANYMORE in crayon capitals, and I heard my son, a grown man with a mortgage and a gutted kitchen of his own, make a sound I had not heard out of him since he was younger than Truman is now.

“He’s been tired some nights,” Lyman said finally, half to himself. “We thought it was just the heat. We thought he was just wearing himself out playing.”

“He was earning a roof,” I said. “The both of them were.”

Telling It At The Feed Store

I did not spend that money the week I found it. I want to be honest about that, because I think it matters. Three hundred and nineteen dollars and forty cents, saved by an eleven year old and an eight year old out of chore money and birthday money and a summer’s worth of small, careful secrecy, is not the kind of money you simply cash and forget. I put the tin on the mantel where I could see it every day, and I thought about what to do with it for the better part of a week.

What I ended up doing was telling the story, plainly and without dressing it up, to Mr. Pruitt himself, on a Tuesday morning at the feed store where half the township does its real business over coffee before the actual roofing gets discussed.

He was quiet for a while after I finished. Longer than I expected from a man who talks roofing numbers for a living.

“Lucinda,” he said finally, “I’ve fixed a lot of roofs in this county, and I have never once had a kid save up to pay for one.” He shook his head. “You keep every dollar of that tin for those two. I’ll do the west end at cost, and I’ll throw the labor in for free, because a boy who’ll do that for his grandmother deserves a roof that doesn’t leak.”

Pastor Combs heard about it two Sundays later, the way anything worth hearing gets around a church potluck by the second helping of pie, and by the end of that month there was a small collection taken up among people who had never met my grandchildren and never would, simply because the story of two children and a coffee tin was the kind of thing this town still likes to reward when it hears it. A woman I only know from the checkout line at the grocery pressed a folded ten dollar bill into my hand outside the sanctuary and told me it was for the roof fund, whether I wanted it or not, and I have learned by fifty nine that there is no arguing with that particular kind of kindness. You simply say thank you and let it in.

Even the man who runs the hardware store in town, who has never in thirty years given so much as a discount on a box of nails without being asked twice, sent a case of shingles out with Mr. Pruitt’s crew at no charge, with a note that said only, tell the boy good work.