The Boy Who Gave His Summer Away

I will tell you what happened in the weeks after, because this is not a story that ends in a church fellowship hall and then stops, not in a family’s real life. Micah Dermot started riding the bus to our stop twice a week that November, and the two of them would come in from the cold stamping their boots on the mat and eat whatever I had just pulled out of the oven, usually too much of it, boys that age eat like the food might be rationed come morning. Then they would go back out to the pole barn so Dale could show them both how to swap a mower blade before winter put the machine away for the season, Micah leaning in close the way a boy leans in when a man is finally showing him something and not just talking at him.

I watched them out the kitchen window one of those afternoons, Dale’s big hand guiding Micah’s smaller one around the socket wrench, Wyatt standing just behind with his arms crossed the exact way his grandfather crosses his, already halfway to being an old man’s imitation at twelve years old, and I had to set my dish towel down on the counter for a minute. Joyce Pemberton would have called it a moment worth crying at, and she would not have been wrong. I am not an easy crier. I cried at that window anyway.

Roy Dermot got steady work by Thanksgiving doing finish carpentry for a contractor two counties over, work that had dried up some after the fire took the better part of three weeks out of his schedule running back and forth to adjusters and contractors of his own. The insurance eventually settled enough that the family moved back into their own repaired house the week before Christmas, and Dana brought over a casserole dish the day they moved back in, not because she owed us a thing, but because that is what you do in this town when somebody has done something for you and you have finally got your own kitchen back to cook in. She stood in my doorway in her coat, the good wool one she had worn to the supper, and said, “I keep trying to think what I would have done for a stranger’s grandson, and I can’t come up with anything that measures up, so I made you a casserole, and I know that doesn’t measure up either, but it’s what I have today.” I told her a casserole measures up just fine, and I meant it, because the measuring in this town has never been about matching a gift dollar for dollar. It is about showing up with whatever you have, the day you have it.