The Receipts I Pinned to My Porch Rail

Chapter 4

There were three coffee cans, in the end, and a shoebox, and a grocery sack with the oldest ones, from before Leonard started using the can.

I spread them on the kitchen table on Thursday night and I began to sort. I did not sleep much Thursday, or Friday.

There was the lumber receipt from Hendershot Lumber, dated June of 2005. Eleven hundred and eighty-four dollars and sixty-two cents, paid in cash, with Alvin’s pen on the back of it.

There was a furnace blower motor, four hundred and twelve dollars. I had paid it in January of 2011, the winter Alvin was in the hospital with his heart and his niece in Arizona did not answer the phone. Alvin’s note on that one said: Take it out of the next three months. God bless you. A.D.

There was a water heater, six hundred and eighty-nine dollars. A new subfloor for the kitchen, after a pipe broke. Shingles for the porch roof when a limb came down, and again when the hail did. Thirty-one gallons of paint, over twenty-two years.

There was a peony that cost eleven dollars and had come back every May since.

There were two park benches I had bought for the bus stop with money from the school fundraiser, after I got tired of watching children sit on the ground.

There was a receipt for forty-two pairs of mittens, and one for a first-aid kit, and one for a bin of hand warmers from the farm store, that I had stocked each November on the porch for any child who needed them.

At two in the morning on Saturday I added it up on Leonard’s old desk calculator, the kind with the paper tape. I did it twice.

Thirty-one thousand, eight hundred and sixty dollars and forty-seven cents.

It was all of it money I had paid out of my pocket, in a house that belonged to somebody else, because nobody else was going to do it and children were standing in the rain.

Then I counted the slips. Two hundred and twelve.

It was the weekend of Harvest Days, the second Saturday of September. The parade comes down Fifth Street at eleven o’clock, and it turns the corner at Locust, right at my house, and has since before I was married. By noon there are three thousand people within a hundred yards of my porch, eating funnel cake out of paper boats.

I got up at five. I made a pound cake, because it was what my mother would have done.

At seven I got out the clothespins and a ball of kitchen twine, and I started pinning.

I strung twine along the porch rail, front and side, and down the length of the swing chains. I pinned the receipts in order, oldest at the top of the steps and newest at the far corner, and I did not hurry. I set out a pitcher of sweet tea and a stack of paper cups on the little table by the door, with the cake under a glass dome.

Last of all I wrote a card, in my school-bus hand, and I tied it to the post at the top of the steps.

It said: Twenty-two years. Read them if you like.

I sat down on the swing, in my church dress, with my hands in my lap.

It was eight o’clock in the morning, and nobody had come yet.