The Weekend at Grandma’s Brick Bungalow

The question in the truck

We took Dad’s truck, because Dad doesn’t ride in somebody else’s car if his own is sitting there.

He had a circular saw, a drill, a square and a coffee can of screws behind the seat.

On old 66 headed south, with the bean stubble going gold on both sides and grain trucks passing us heaped full, he finally asked.

He kept both hands on the wheel and didn’t look at me.

“Your mother has been sick over this,” he said. “You two girls not speaking right. All this about the money. Is there something I ought to know, Mandy? I’d rather hear it from you.”

I watched a grain truck go by so full that beans were bouncing off the top of the load onto the shoulder. I thought about telling him everything, right there.

Then I thought about Mom’s face in the kitchen, touching that cracked light switch, and I knew she needed to find it herself, not hear it from me.

“Stay the weekend, Dad,” I said. “Then ask me again. You’ve been taking her word for a year and a half. I don’t want to be one more voice on the phone.”

He drove a while without saying anything. Then he said, “That’s fair,” and turned the radio to the farm report. We listened to soybean prices all the way into Lincoln.

At the lumberyard he went through a dozen boards before he found one he liked, sighting down each edge like a pool cue.

The young man at the counter called him sir. Dad paid cash and wouldn’t let me near my purse.

The step

Back at the house, he set up two sawhorses in the back yard.

I held the far end of the board while he measured twice and cut once, the way he taught me when I was ten.

Jessica came out once with two cups of coffee, set them on the back railing, and went back inside without a word. Dad watched her go, and then he went back to work.

He pried the old tread off with a flat bar. The underside was black and soft and came apart in his hands like wet cake.

He held up a piece so I could see it, then tossed it on the grass.

“Water’s been getting under this three or four years,” he said. “Probably since before your grandma passed. She’d never have said a word to anybody. She’d have just stepped over it.”

“She did,” I said. “I used to hold her arm going over it, every Sunday when I brought her pills. She’d say, ‘Watch that one, Mandy,’ like it was my bad step and not hers.”

Dad stopped with the drill in his hand. For a second I thought he was going to say something about Grandma.

Instead he set a screw, drove it home, and said, “Hold that end steady. There. That’s my girl.”

He was sixty-four, and he’d been mixing paint at the Ace every Saturday for over a year to pay rent I never charged.

And there he was on his bad knees in my grandmother’s yard, fixing a step.

I had to go stand by the maple for a minute after that.

I told him I was looking for the lid to the screw can. I don’t think he believed me, but he let me have it.

By four o’clock the step was done, solid and square and a little paler than the others.

Dad stood on it and bounced twice, like a man testing ice on a pond, then went inside to wash up.