The Porch Money at Wednesday Supper

The hole he was in

It came out in pieces, right there at the table.

The year before, Brent had taken a big job framing a strip of townhomes for a builder out of St. Cloud. It was the biggest job he had ever had. He had bought all the lumber himself on his account at the yard, because the builder promised to pay him at each stage.

The builder paid the first stage. Then the builder went under. The whole outfit folded in the spring and left a dozen subcontractors holding the bag.

Brent was out $71,000. Most of it was a lumber bill in his own name.

“The yard was going to shut off my account,” he said. “If they shut off my account, I’m done. I can’t buy a two-by-four. So I paid the yard.”

“With our deposit,” I said.

He nodded. He could not look at me.

“With yours,” he said. “And three others.”

Sheila made a sound like she had been hit.

“Four families,” she said.

“I thought I could catch up,” Brent said. “I thought if I could get one more big job, I could do yours, and then the next one, and get them all done before anybody knew. I poured your slab so you’d know I was coming.”

He shook his head. “And then I couldn’t buy the framing lumber, because the yard was paid but I was broke. And every day I didn’t call you made it harder to call you.”

He wiped his face with the paper napkin. It came apart in his hand.

“I saw you at the Cenex,” he said to me. “I wanted to die. I drove home and sat in the shop with the door shut and the radio on.”

Mom made a small sound beside me.

I felt her hand find mine under the table. Her fingers were cold.

Pastor Jon

By then Pastor Jon had come down the length of the room. I do not know who went and got him. Maybe nobody. Pastor Jon has been at Trinity eleven years, and he has a sense for when a room has gone wrong.

He pulled out the folding chair at the end of the table and sat down in it. He did not ask what was happening. He looked at Brent, then at Sheila, then at me, and then at Mom in her blue cardigan with the pearl buttons.

“Arlene,” he said. “You want to tell me?”

Mom told him. She told it plain, in about five sentences, the way her generation tells everything. The roof, the porch, the check, the slab, the summer.

Pastor Jon listened with his hands folded. When she finished, he turned to Brent.

“Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Are there others?”

“Three.”

“Do you have names?”

Brent nodded. “I have a list. In the truck.”

Pastor Jon was quiet for a moment. Around the basement, people had started to eat again, slowly, the way people do when they are pretending not to listen.

“Here is what I think,” Pastor Jon said. “And then you can tell me I’m wrong. I think Brent goes and gets that list. I think tomorrow night he and Sheila sit in my office and we go through it, one family at a time. I think Brent calls every one of those families himself, by Saturday, and tells them the truth.”

Brent nodded.

“And I think,” Pastor Jon said, looking at me now, “that the Moes need a roof before it snows.”