The Receipts I Pinned to My Porch Rail

Jerome Pickett stopped by on Saturday with a legal pad and a tape measure and spent two hours on my porch, and he went through the cellar, and the beds, and the kitchen floor. On Monday he handed me a typed page.

“This is what it would cost to put back every single thing you built or replaced in this house,” he said. “Materials and labor, at what I’d charge a customer. Not a nickel padded.”

I looked at the bottom line. It said $58,300.

“The porch alone,” he said, “is twenty-seven thousand three hundred. That’s not me being nice. That’s what I’d bid it for.”

“Mr. Tauber’s number was twenty-two four.”

“Mr. Tauber’s number,” said Jerome, “is a man who has never priced a porch.”

And on Monday afternoon, a young man in a hard hat and a Tauber Home Solutions shirt knocked on my screen door.

He was Dustin Kroll, the project manager, twenty-six years old, with a clipboard and a face that had not slept. He said Mr. Tauber had sent him to measure the porch for demolition. He said he was sorry to do it.

I said that was fine. He did it with a laser and a tape, and then he got down on his stomach and crawled under the third step to look at the footing.

He was under there for a good while. When he came out his face was a different color.

“Ma’am,” he said. “Did you know there’s writing under there?”

I did not.

He took me down the side and I got on my knees in the dirt, which at my age I do not recommend, and I put my head under the step.

On the bottom of the stringer, in carpenter’s pencil, in Leonard’s square hand, were seven words. I knew them in the dark.

Built by Odessa. Held up by Len.

And a date. The first week of August, twenty-one years back.

I stayed down there longer than I needed to. Dustin Kroll stood quietly behind me with his hat in his hand.

“Ma’am,” he said at last, “I’m going to tell Mr. Tauber I can’t tear that out.”

“You don’t have to do that, son.”

“No ma’am,” he said. “I think I do.”

By Wednesday, something else had become apparent, which I had not planned and could not have. Every subcontractor in three counties had somehow come down with a full schedule. Mr. Tauber’s drywall man was booked until March. His roofer had a family matter. His plumber from Columbus wanted forty percent more to drive out, and nobody in Corliss would rent his crew a dumpster.

Nobody organized it. I asked, afterward, and I am certain. A great many of the men in those trades had once been boys at the corner of Locust and Fifth, waiting for a bus at 7:12, and they had each read the paper.