The Porch Money at Wednesday Supper

The table

So that is how I came to be sitting across from Brent Lockwood in the basement of Trinity Lutheran on the third Wednesday in September, with a plate of hotdish going cold in front of me.

Sheila smiled at us. She had no idea. She thought we were just two women who had found the open seats.

“Hi, Heather,” she said. “Hi, Arlene. Isn’t this hotdish good? Marlys made it.”

“It’s very good,” Mom said.

Brent set his fork down. He did not look at me. He looked at the folded paper by my plate.

I had thought for two days about what I would say. I had written versions of it in my head on the drive. Angry ones, clever ones, ones with the dollar amount in them and the number thirty-one.

In the end, I did not use any of them.

I did not raise my voice. I did not say a word about the money. I just looked at him and said what was true.

“Brent,” I said, “my mother would like to know when the porch is coming.”

Sheila set her fork down on the paper tablecloth.

She looked at the folded contract, then at Mom’s cane against the table, then at her husband.

“What porch?” she said.

What Sheila did not know

That was the moment I understood that Sheila Lockwood had no idea.

I had spent the whole summer assuming she knew. Assuming they had talked about it over dinner, maybe laughed about it, maybe decided the Moes could afford to wait. I had built a whole Sheila in my head.

The real one was sitting across from me with her hand at her collarbone.

“Brent,” she said again, softer. “What porch?”

He did not answer her. He put his big hands flat on the table on either side of his plate, the way a man braces himself when the floor of a boat tips.

“Arlene’s porch,” he said finally. “And the roof. Out at the Moes’.”

“You never said you had a job at the Moes’.”

“I know.”

“You said things were slow. You said all summer things were slow.”

“I know, Sheila.”

Their oldest boy had gone quiet at the end of the table. The little one was still blowing bubbles in his milk, because he was four and none of this meant anything to him.

Sheila looked at me. “How much?”

I did not want to say it in front of the children. But she had asked, and she deserved the truth more than anybody at that table.

“Thirty-eight thousand,” I said. “Ten of it was Mom’s.”

Sheila closed her eyes.

Brent made a sound I have heard men make in the nursing home, late at night, when they think nobody is in the hall. It was not crying, not yet. It was the sound before.

Then it was crying.

A grown man, fifty years old, with his elbows on a paper tablecloth in the church basement, and his shoulders shaking. Around us the whole room had gone quiet. Somebody at the coffee urn set down a cup very carefully.

I want to tell you I felt good. I did not. I felt sick. I had been angry at this man for three months, and now he was crying into his hands, and his four-year-old had stopped blowing bubbles and was staring at him.

“Emma,” Sheila said, without looking away from her husband. “Take your brothers upstairs to the youth room. Now, honey.”

Emma, who was not six anymore but fourteen, gathered the boys and went. She glanced at me as she passed. I gave her the smallest nod I could.