The Porch Money at Wednesday Supper

Brent

We did not go looking for a stranger. We went to Brent.

Brent Lockwood had been in our church for nine years. He sat four pews ahead of us on Sundays. He had done the new roof on the parsonage and the accessible entrance at the church. His license was current with the state. I looked it up myself on the Department of Labor and Industry site.

He was a big, easygoing man with sawdust in the creases of his hands. His wife, Sheila, ran the nursery during the late service. I had taught their middle girl, Emma, in Sunday school when she was six.

In May, Brent sat at my kitchen table with a clipboard and a calculator. He drew the porch on graph paper while Mom watched from her chair. He drew the ramp with a long, easy slope, and he put a little mark at the corner.

“That’s where your rocker goes, Arlene,” he said. “Facing the road, so you can wave at the mailman.”

Mom laughed. She actually laughed.

The roof came to $21,000. Tear-off, new decking where it was soft, ice and water shield, architectural shingles, new flashing around the chimney. The covered porch with the ramp came to $33,000. All in, $54,000.

He asked for $38,000 up front.

I asked about that. I am not a fool, and I had heard the stories. Brent said shingle prices were going up in July, and lumber was jumping around, and he wanted to buy everything at once and lock it in. He said he could start the porch footings and slab in June and have the whole thing done by Labor Day.

It made sense, the way he said it. And he was Brent. He was the man who did the parsonage roof.

$28,000 was every dollar Darren and I had saved in eleven years. The other $10,000 was Mom’s.

I did not want her to put in a penny. She insisted. She said the porch was for her, so she would pay for her part of it. She wrote the check at my kitchen table in her careful cursive, the same handwriting she used on every birthday card I ever got.

“There,” she said, and she tore it out and handed it to Brent. “Now I’m a stockholder.”

He folded that check into his shirt pocket and patted it.