The Porch Money at Wednesday Supper

The slab

In June, Brent and a young man I did not know came out with a skid steer. They dug the footings, set the forms, and a ready-mix truck came out from Mora and poured the porch slab.

It was a beautiful slab. Smooth and broomed, with a slope for the water to run off. Mom had Darren walk her down the old steps so she could stand at the edge of it and look.

“That’s the start of something,” she said.

The next week, Brent did not come.

He had said he would be back on a Tuesday to start framing. Tuesday came and went. I texted him. He wrote back that a job in St. Cloud was running long and he would be out the following week.

The following week, he did not come either.

By the Fourth of July, he had stopped writing back. By the end of July, his phone went straight to voicemail. I called it thirty-one times between July and the middle of September. I know, because I kept a list on the back of a feed store calendar.

Every wrong way to find a man

I tried everything a sensible woman tries.

I drove past his shop on the county road. The overhead door was always shut. His work truck was gone more often than not. Once I knocked on the side door, and I could hear a radio inside, and nobody came.

I drove past his house. Sheila’s car was in the driveway. I did not stop. Sheila had nothing to do with my contract, and I was not about to stand on a woman’s step with her kids in the window and accuse her husband.

He stopped coming to church on Sundays, too. Or maybe he came to the early service. I work most weekend mornings, so I am usually at the late one, and that summer I could not have told you which he went to.

Once, in August, I pulled into the Cenex in town for gas, and there was Brent at the next pump. He looked at me. I looked at him. He hung up the nozzle, got in his truck, and drove away without waiting for his receipt.

I sat in my car for ten minutes after that with my hands on the wheel.

Darren called me every night from wherever he was parked. He was in Dickinson, North Dakota, when I told him about the gas station.

“I’ll come home,” he said. “I’ll go over there Saturday and stand in his shop until he talks to me.”

“And then what?” I said.

He did not have an answer. Darren is a calm man, but he is a big one, and I did not want him in Brent Lockwood’s shop with both of them angry and nowhere to put it. I had seen too many grown men in my line of work who never got over the one bad minute of their lives.

“Let me think,” I said. “Give me a week.”

I called the sheriff’s office, too. I will admit that. A deputy I know from the nursing home called me back. He was kind about it. He said a contractor who takes a deposit and stops working is usually a civil matter, unless you can show he never meant to do the job, and a poured slab made that hard to show.

“You can sue him,” he said. “Or you can file with the state and get in line for the recovery fund. Either way you’re looking at a long time.”

I thanked him. Then I sat at my kitchen table and thought about what I wanted.

I did not want Brent in jail. I did not want a court date in a year and a half. I wanted a roof over my mother before the snow, and I wanted the porch he drew for her on graph paper.

And I could not stop thinking about Emma Lockwood, six years old, holding up a paper lamb she had glued cotton balls to.