The Lease My Son Typed Himself

Sometime in there I said, “Your mother must be proud of you.”

She was quiet a bit. “My mom’s in Neligh,” she said. “She waits tables. She’s proud. She just can’t ever get off to come see anything.”

I put my hand on the top of her head, the way I used to with Troy when he had a fever. She let me. That was all. But I have thought since that if my son had not done a wrong thing, I would have been alone in that house that night, sitting up in the dark, too stubborn to call anyone.

And Miguel. I must tell you about the garage.

Dale had a workbench out there, and above it a pegboard where he had drawn the outline of every tool in black marker, so he could see at a glance what was missing. After he died I could not go in there. Things had gotten borrowed and not returned, and set down wherever, and the outlines stood empty like the chalk marks they draw on television.

One Saturday in September I went out to find a trowel and stopped in the doorway.

Every tool was back on its outline. The hand plane had been cleaned and oiled. The saw blades had the rust taken off. The bench had been swept, and Dale’s old coffee can of pencils was sitting square in the corner where he kept it.

Miguel was up on the ladder doing my gutters. I walked around the side of the house and stood there until he noticed me.

“I hope that’s all right,” he said. “I wasn’t going through his things. I just kept finding them. And the board had the shapes drawn, so I knew where he wanted them.”

I could not answer him right away.

“My grandma raised me, out in Lexington,” he said, coming down a rung. “My grandpa had a bench like that. When he passed, my uncles sold all of it in one afternoon. I’d have liked to have just the one hammer.”

I went back in the garage and took Dale’s ball-peen hammer down off its outline, the one with the hickory handle gone dark from his hand. I carried it out and held it up to that boy on the ladder.

“Then you had better have this one,” I said. “He would want it used.”

He held it a long time before he put it through his belt.

Troy came the first Sunday of September. I had half expected a telephone call and an excuse. He knocked at the back door at a quarter to six, which he had never in his life done at that house, and he put ten twenty-dollar bills on the table before he sat down.

That supper was stiff too. So was October’s. He and Miguel talked about the weather and the Huskers, the way men will when there is a thing between them they cannot pick up.

In November it rained on a Sunday, hard, and my back gutter came loose at the corner where Miguel had not been able to reach the last bracket alone. I saw Troy look at it through the kitchen window. He got up without a word and went out to his truck for his own ladder. Miguel put down his fork and followed him.