Grandma Threw Her 92nd on Her Own Porch

Fixing the Step

The week before the party, Josh went out to look at the porch step.

It had been cracked all summer, with a sheet of plywood screwed over it and a strip of orange tape on the edge so nobody would forget.

Everything went in through the kitchen door. But you cannot have a party on a porch nobody can climb onto.

Josh pulled the plywood off and squatted down and looked at it for a long time. Then he went and got a flashlight and looked under it.

“It’s not just the tread,” he said. “The stringer’s rotted out on that side. That’s why it cracked. The whole run’s going to need new stringers, and probably the bottom of that post.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I can fix it,” he said. “It’s a two-man job, though. Somebody’s got to hold the post while I jack it.”

“Bob Kessler?”

Josh shook his head. “Bob’s seventy-eight and he’s got a bad shoulder. I’ll get it done. I’ll figure something out.”

He did half of it that Wednesday night under the yard light, after work.

He got the old stringers out and the new ones cut, and he got the post jacked up an inch with a bottle jack. He could not set it alone.

I came out at ten with a glass of iced tea and found him sitting on the bottom step with his head in his hands, filthy, his knuckles bleeding, the porch tilted a little at one corner.

“It’ll be done,” he said before I could say anything. “Saturday. It’ll be done.”

The Day of the Party

Saturday the nineteenth came up sunny and warm, the kind of September day in Iowa where the corn is drying down gold and brown in the field and the sky is that hard, clear blue that only happens a few weeks a year.

The step was still not done. Josh had the new stringers in, but the post was still up on the jack, and the bottom step was a loose board laid over cinder blocks. He had been out there since six in the morning.

I was in the kitchen by seven, frosting a sheet cake. Grandma had wanted a sheet cake, plain white with white frosting, the kind from the bakery in town, but she would not pay bakery prices, so I made it.

Rosie had been up since five-thirty. She had made a rhubarb pie by herself the night before, with Grandma sitting in a kitchen chair beside the counter saying, “Wrists,” and “Gentle,” and “Not in a hurry.”

It sat on the counter under a dish towel like a treasure.

Grandma came down at eight in the lavender cardigan. It is the only nice cardigan she owns.

She wore it to Grandpa’s funeral and to my wedding, and her hair was done in soft white curls because Bob Kessler’s wife had come over the night before with her rollers.

“How do I look?” she asked.

“Like ninety-two is a good idea,” I said, and she laughed so hard she had to sit down.

By noon, Wyatt and two of the neighbor boys had tied a bunch of balloons to the porch post by the rail.

Josh had set out every chair in the house and borrowed thirty folding lawn chairs from the church basement. I thought we had too many.

By one-thirty, cars were lined up on both sides of the gravel lane all the way to the blacktop.

People brought their own lawn chairs anyway. They brought casseroles, and bars, and potato salad, and three more pies, though none as good as Rosie’s.

There were sixty people on that porch and in that yard by two o’clock. I counted them, because I could not believe it.

The whole church, the whole road, the man from the elevator, and two old women who had gone to country school with Grandma in 1941.