The Question My Grandson Asked the Deacon

“So every child would get a sack.”

He chewed on that. “That is a bad rule, then. It did the opposite.”

“It surely did.”

“Did Mama forget the card?”

I pulled the yellow paper out of my pocket at the stop sign and handed it across to him. He cannot read cursive yet, so I read it to him, all of it, including the part where she said she was sorry.

“Your mama did not forget one thing,” I told him. “She did it exactly right. Grown people lost it in a drawer.”

He held that card in one hand and the orange in the other the rest of the way home.

I made grilled cheese and tomato soup, because it was what I had, and he ate two sandwiches in his bathrobe at the kitchen table. I put the oranges in my mother’s big green glass bowl in the middle of the table. Eleven of them filled it to the rim. With the light from the window over the sink coming through, that bowl looked like something off a magazine cover.

About three o’clock I was drying the skillet when I heard tires on the gravel.

I looked out the window over the sink. It was Harold’s truck, the old green Ford he has had since before his retirement, and he sat behind the wheel with the engine off for a long minute.

Then he got out. He had changed out of his suit coat into a canvas work jacket, but he still had on his Sunday shirt and tie, and his good hat. He reached back into the cab and came out with a brown paper sack.

“Tucker,” I said. “We have company.”

Now, I need to tell you about my porch. Dale built it in 1990, the summer after we bought the house, and he built it right, but it has been thirty-five years and four of those without him. The second step from the bottom had been soft since spring. I had learned to step over it without thinking. Tucker jumped it. Amber had said twice she would get somebody out to look at it, and then the truck battery happened, and it went back to the bottom of the list where things like porch steps live.

Harold put his foot on that second step and it gave under him a good inch, with a sound like a wet sponge.

He looked down at it. He did not say a word about it. He came on up, and he took his hat off, and he stood on my porch with his hat in one hand and the sack in the other, seventy years old, with the wind pulling at what hair he has left.

I opened the door before he could knock.

“Patsy,” he said. “I will not come in unless you say. But I could not sit down to my dinner. Jean is home sick with that flu, and I told her what I did, and she said, Harold Simms, what are you doing in this kitchen.”

“Come in out of the wind,” I said.

“I would rather say it out here, if it is the same to you. I do not feel right bringing it in your house.”

So I stepped out, and Tucker came out behind me and stood against my leg in his sock feet.

Harold got down on one knee on the porch boards. It took him some doing. He held out the sack, and I saw that it had a name on it in black marker, like the others. The letters were a little crooked, like the hand that wrote them had not been steady.