The Porch I Built For My Parents

Your parents aren’t doing great. Mom’s blood pressure medicine went up in price again and dad needs new orthopedic inserts for his boots. Could you send a little extra this month? I hate asking.

I sent four hundred dollars that same night. I did not think twice. I never think twice when it comes to my parents, and that is exactly the kind of trust a person can spend for years before anyone notices the account is empty.

Now I sat in the driveway and watched my father carry a glass of water toward the porch steps, moving like the heat had taken something out of him that he was not going to get back, and I watched Tildy’s mother look at that glass the way you look at an insect on your dinner plate.

He made it to the first step.

The glass tipped. Water splashed over his knuckles, over the step, a small ordinary accident, the kind that happens to every person who has ever carried anything in the heat.

Tildy’s mother came up out of her chair fast and slapped the glass out of his hand. It shattered on the wood my father had sanded and stained himself the summer he moved in, on his knees for three days getting it smooth enough for my mother’s bare feet.

“Useless,” she said. “You can’t even carry a glass of water without making a mess of my porch.”

My porch, she said. The porch on the deed with my name on it, the porch I had signed papers for at a bank two hours from here, alone, on my lunch break, because I did not want my parents to spend one more year of their lives paying rent to a landlord who let the roof leak into their bedroom every spring.