The Question My Grandson Asked the Deacon

Then he went back out, and I thought he was leaving. Instead he walked down my steps, over the soft one, and went to his truck and came back with a tape measure.

“Harold, you do not need to do that.”

“Thirty-six inches,” he said, to himself, and let the tape snap back. He pressed his thumb into the wood at the end of the tread, and his thumb went in. “Patsy, that is rotted clear through at the stringer. Somebody is going to go through that with a load of groceries. I have a treated two-by-twelve in my barn left over from the wheelchair ramp we built for the Hendersons. I will be back in half an hour.”

“It is the Lord’s day,” I said, mostly to see what he would say.

“He pulled an ox out of a ditch on the Sabbath,” Harold said. “I believe He will allow me one porch step.”

He was back in thirty-five minutes with the board, a handsaw, a cordless drill and a coffee can of deck screws. He pried the old tread up with a flat bar, and it came apart in his hands like wet cake. He checked both stringers with his pocket knife and said they were sound, that Dale had used good lumber and set them up off the ground the way you are supposed to, and that only the tread had gone.

“Your husband knew what he was doing,” he said.

“He did,” I said.

Tucker sat on the top step in his coat with the sack in his lap and watched every single thing. Harold let him hold the end of the tape. He let him hand up the screws, one at a time, out of the coffee can. He marked the cut with a carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear and showed the boy how you start a saw by pulling it backward first.

That is where they were, the two of them, when my daughter’s car turned in off the road at twenty minutes to four.

Amber got out in her scrubs with her hair coming out of its clip and sixteen hours on her face. She saw the truck first. Then she saw Harold Simms on his knees at the bottom of her mother’s porch, and she stopped in the yard with her keys in her hand.

“Mama? What is wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong,” I said. “Not anymore. Come up here.”

I told her standing in the yard, as plainly and as quickly as I could, because she deserved to hear it from me and not piece it together. I watched her face go white when I got to the clipboard. I watched it go red when I got to the question. When I got to the eleven sacks on the back pew she put her hand over her eyes.

Then I gave her the yellow card.

“I turned it in,” she said. Her voice was very small. “Mama, I turned it in. I put five dollars with it because that was what I had that week. I have been meaning to…” She dug in her purse, right there in the yard, and came out with a white envelope, sealed, with For the Children’s Treat written on the front. “I had the fifteen. I have had it since Friday. I was going to put it in the plate this morning, and then they held me over.”

She held it out to Harold.