The Little White House on Elm Street

“I said that to my own daughter. I was wrong. Your mother told me I was wrong that same night, and I was too proud to go back and say it. I’m saying it now.”

I saw Mom’s mouth go tight. Her eyes were wet. She looked down at the leaves on the driveway.

“You should have had help,” he said. “You had a little girl and nobody, and I let you carry it. That’s on me. I’m sorry, Tracy. I am.”

“Dad.”

“But you don’t square that out of your girl’s pocket.” He said it just as gently as the rest.

“You don’t take what I gave her, and then charge her rent for the room she was born into, and tell me every Christmas she’s doing fine. That’s not getting even with me. That’s doing to her what I did to you.”

Mom started to cry. Not loud. She put her hand over her mouth.

“So here’s what’s going to happen,” Grandpa said. “I’m paying Haley’s school myself, from here till she’s done. Every term. I’ll write the check to the college, with her name on it, the way I should have done the first time.”

“Dad, you can’t afford…”

“I can afford it. I’ll sell the truck if I have to and drive your mother’s old Buick.” He almost smiled.

“And that lot up at the lake. I’m not going to tell you what to do about it. It’s yours. You’re fifty years old. But you know what it was bought with, and so do I.”

He put his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t pull away.

“You’re my daughter,” he said. “That’s not going to change. There’s coffee at my house any morning you want it. But I’m going to go carry my granddaughter’s boxes now.”

Then he turned and came back up the steps, and picked his box up off the rail, and carried it inside.

Mom stood in the driveway a long time. She didn’t look at me. I didn’t look at her, either, because I didn’t trust what my face would do.

Finally she got back in her car and backed out slowly, and drove away down Elm with the leaves blowing up behind her.

It took us maybe an hour to unload the truck. Mr. Hughes came by halfway through and helped Grandpa with the dresser, and the two of them stood in my kitchen afterward and talked about soybeans and the price of propane like they’d known each other forever.

When the truck was empty, Grandpa went back out to the curb and got his old red toolbox out of the bed.

He carried it up the steps and set it down on the porch and opened the rusty latch.

“That screen door’s been bothering me since we pulled up,” he said. “It’s going to slam on you every time you come in with an armload, and it’s hanging crooked. Hold this.”

He handed me a flashlight. I held it while he took the door off its hinges and laid it across two sawhorses Mr.

Hughes had in the garage. He worked slowly. His hands aren’t what they used to be.

He tightened the hinge screws, and where the holes were stripped he packed them with toothpicks and wood glue, the way he’d done on the elevator office door a hundred times.

He replaced the spring with a new one he’d brought from the hardware store in a paper sack.

“How’d you know it needed a spring?” I asked.