The Receipts I Pinned to My Porch Rail

Chapter 2

I came to Locust Street in October, twenty-two years ago, with a husband, three children, and a bus route.

The children were Marcus, who was seventeen, Denise, who was fourteen, and Terrell, who was nine. Leonard worked second shift at the stamping plant on the east side of town. I drove Route 6 for Corliss Local Schools.

I drove that bus for twenty-seven years. I retired at sixty-two, with a plaque I keep in a drawer.

The house at 214 Locust is a plain two-story frame house on a corner lot, white once, with a deep yard and a cellar that smells of wet stone. Alvin Dwyer owned it, and five others in the same block, and he rented them the way his father had, by handshake and by feel.

“Six-fifty,” Alvin said, on the day we moved in. He was seventy then, with a cardigan buttoned wrong. “You keep it nice and I won’t bother you. You don’t, I’ll bother you.”

That was the lease. It was the only one I ever had.

The corner of Locust and Fifth was the stop for every child on our end of town. I knew it, because it was my bus. I pulled up there each morning at 7:12, and there were always eight or nine of them standing on a patch of gravel in front of the house.

The house had a porch then. A porch is a generous word for it. It was four rotted boards and a railing that came off in your hand.

The first winter, I watched the children from my own kitchen window. They stood in the sleet with their backs to the wind, and not one of them would go up on that porch, because one of them had already put a foot through it.

I told Alvin Dwyer, and he said he would get to it. I told him again in March. In April I stopped asking.

Leonard found me at the kitchen table one night in June with a legal pad and the lumber prices out of the Corliss paper, drawing a porch.

“How wide,” he said.

“Twelve feet across the front, and it wraps six feet down the side. With a roof, Leonard. A real roof. So they can stand dry.”

He looked at the drawing for a long time.

“You measured twice?”

“Three times.”

“Then I’ll carry the heavy end,” he said.

That is how it started, and that is how it went. I did the measuring and the planning and most of the cutting, on my days off, with a circular saw I bought at Hendershot Lumber and a borrowed level. Leonard did the lifting, on Saturdays, after he had slept.

It took us the whole summer. Four posts set in concrete, a floor of pressure-treated boards, a shingled roof, and a swing hung from two eyebolts that he sank into the beam himself.

When I told Alvin Dwyer we had finished it, he drove over in his Buick and walked the length of the porch twice.

“I’d have gotten to it,” he said.

“I know.”

“Don’t you pay for that out of the rent.” He took a pen from his shirt pocket and wrote on the back of the lumber receipt I handed him, and signed it. It said: Odessa, apply $400 against rent. A.D.

He knocked four hundred dollars off over the next two months, and he never said another word about it.

That was the first of eleven slips of paper in his handwriting that I would end up saving.

Because there was a second thing about Leonard, and it mattered more than any board he lifted. He kept receipts. He kept every one, in a Folgers can on the shelf above the washer, and when he died, I kept the habit, because I did not know what else to do with my hands.

“A house tells on you if you don’t write it down,” he used to say.

I did not know what he meant until a man in a fleece vest said “zero” at my kitchen table.