The Porch Wood The Contractor Took

There was a lot of that. Eight men who had all lost the same friend, finding him again in the wood, one board at a time, on my east side in the fall light.

They laid every board mark side down, the way a deck is laid, the WK hidden against the joists where only the house would ever know it was there. That is how Walt would have done it. The mark is for the builder, not for show.

And on a bright Saturday in the fall, a year and a half after Walt sat down against that sawhorse and did not get up, I had my porch.

The one he promised me for thirty years. On the east side. Facing the Hagen place, where the sun comes up.

I will not pretend I did not cry when the last board went down. I cried the good kind, the kind that has gratitude mixed all the way through it.

But the part that undid me, the part I was not ready for, came when Lon went to set the top step.

There was one board I had told the men not to cut, and it was the top step board, because Walt had set the old top step himself before he died and I wanted the new one to sit right where his hands had been.

Lon turned that board over to drive the screws, and he went still, and he called me over without a word.

And I will tell you what was carved into the underside of that board, and what my mornings on that porch are like now, because that is the whole heart of this and it deserves to be told all the way to the end.

Walt had carved it himself, sometime in that last fall, when he was setting the posts and nobody was watching. On the underside of the top step, where it would face down into the dark under the porch and never be seen once it was laid.

He had carved it for me to never find. That is the thing I keep turning over. He did not carve it to be thanked. He carved it the way you bury a time capsule, for no reason but that the thing was true and he wanted the wood to hold it.

It said, in Walt’s blocky capital letters, careful and deep: GOOD MORNING NELL. BEST SEAT IN THE COUNTY. SIT A WHILE, I AM RIGHT HERE.

Nell was what Walt called me. Nobody else ever did. Forty-one years, I was Nadine to the world and Nell to that one man.