The Porch Wood The Contractor Took

Then June came and Cal did not.

I called. He was on a big job, he said, out at the lake, but he would get to mine. He was sorry. His voice was warm and I believed it.

July, the same. August, he did not pick up the first two times.

Somewhere in there I walked out to check the oak like always, and the stack was a little lower than I remembered. I told myself I was misremembering. Grief does that to the eyes.

I was not misremembering.

When I finally got Cal on the phone in September, I asked him flat out about the wood. He told me he had moved it to his own dry barn to keep it safe from the weather.

That it was better stored inside. That he was protecting my investment. He said it three different ways across three different calls, and each way sounded a little more rehearsed.

I wanted to believe him so badly that I did. A woman who has lost her husband will believe a great deal rather than lose one more thing.

Then came the Tuesday in April I started with. The lean-to empty. The pale rectangles in the dirt.

I called Cal and it went to a full mailbox. I drove by his place and the oak was not in any barn I could see, and he did not come to the door, though his truck was there.

I came home and I sat on the one finished thing on my porch, which was the top step Walt had set, and I tried to think like Walt would have.

Walt did not rage at problems. He studied them. He would say you look straight at a thing instead of around it, and most things will tell you what they are if you hold still long enough.

So I held still. And two days later the thing told me what it was.

I was at the feed store on the county road, buying scratch grain for my hens, and Dewey Shaw was behind the counter like he has been for thirty years.

Dewey had carried a casserole to Walt’s funeral. Dewey knew the oak. Half the county knew about Walt’s tree, because Walt could not help telling it.

Dewey said, out of nothing, that he had driven past the new houses out on Clearwater Lake the Sunday before, and had I ever seen such pretty decking going on the Haaland place.

He said it the way you say a nice thing, no meanness in it. Pale wood, he said. Real pale and clean, with that funny little fleck in the grain.

I set the scratch grain down on the counter. That funny little fleck in the grain.