The House That Rolled Past His Gate

Three summers

The trailer was in bad shape. The roof leaked over the hall, the subfloor in the bathroom was soft as cake, and the front steps were cinder blocks with a board across them. Daddy had been making do.

I couldn’t get a man with a walker and an oxygen line up cinder block steps.

I couldn’t bathe him on a floor I was afraid to stand on. So I started fixing it, one paycheck at a time.

The first summer was the roof. I paid a crew from Lewisburg sixty-four hundred dollars to put a metal roof over the old one, and I paid for new gutters out of my tax refund. The leak in the hall stopped the first rain after.

The second summer was the floors. I pulled up the old carpet and the rotten bathroom subfloor myself, with a church friend’s husband helping on Saturdays.

New subfloor, new vinyl plank through the whole house, a walk-in shower with a seat and a grab bar.

The third summer was the deck. Eight by twenty, treated lumber, with a ramp on the end so Daddy’s wheelchair could roll right out the front door and sit in the sun.

I painted the shutters dark green to match because Daddy said the white looked like a hospital.

I kept every receipt in a shoebox under the bed. When I added them up after the funeral, it came to $21,140.

That was every dollar I had saved since my divorce, and a little I had put on a credit card and paid off slow.

I never once asked Lonnie for a dime. I never asked him to swing a hammer, either.

He was working mandatory overtime at the plant, and his boys were in high school ball, and I figured that was his to carry and the trailer was mine.

Daddy loved that deck. He sat out there every evening the last summer and into the fall, wrapped in the blanket Mama crocheted, and he called it his front porch.

He’d say, “Sis, this is the best porch in the county,” and I’d say, “Daddy, it’s a deck,” and he’d say, “Not to me it ain’t.”

Lonnie hung a porch swing for him off the end of it that last spring. That was Lonnie’s one piece of that house.

It was a good swing, oak, and Daddy slept in it in the afternoons with his feet up on a milk crate.