The Summer Truman Saved For My Roof

The Roof Going Up

Mr. Pruitt’s crew put the new roof over that end of the porch on a bright Thursday in September, and I stood in the yard most of the morning watching it go on, feeling, for the first time in four years, like the house was being cared for by more than just me.

I did not spend the children’s money on it. I want that clear too. What I did instead, once Mr. Pruitt made good on his word, was open a small account at the bank in town, in both their names, and put the three hundred and nineteen dollars and forty cents into it exactly as they had saved it, coin for coin, so that one day it will go toward something they choose for themselves, a truck, a class ring, whatever an eleven year old and an eight year old grow up wanting. I added a little more to it myself before I closed the folder, because a grandmother is allowed that much.

The coffee tin sits on my mantel now, empty of coins but full of everything else, the notebook and the letter folded back inside it, exactly where I can see it from my chair every evening.

What That Whole Summer Turned Out To Be

I had told myself, back in June, that I was doing my son and his wife a kindness, taking two children off their hands for a season of dust and construction so they would not have to worry about anything but their kitchen. I thought I was the one giving something away that summer, my time, my quiet, my spare bedroom.

I was not wrong about the giving. I was only wrong about which direction it ran.

The whole time I thought I was providing a place for two children to be looked after for free, they were quietly working, in their own small and careful economy of mowed ditches and sold nightcrawlers and saved birthday money, to look after me. Every strange thing about that summer, the bag Truman would not put down, the extra quiet on certain afternoons, the way Winnie kept finding reasons to walk with me to the mailbox at exactly the wrong moment for her brother to be somewhere else, all of it was never secrecy for its own sake. It was love, moving the only way children that age know how to move it, sideways and hidden and utterly determined.