The Straw Fort I Built for Free

Donnie Comes Over

Donnie came on Sunday, after dinner at his mother’s.

I saw his truck turn in and my stomach dropped the way it does. There is no fight I hate more than a family fight.

I was sure this was one coming. He parked by the shed and got out and stood looking at the fort.

By then it was a wreck of happy. Straw everywhere. A tower listing where too many kings had sat on it.

The kids were still out there, mine and three others whose folks were coming back at four. And Pax was with them.

Donnie had brought Pax along. Pax did not wait for his dad.

He was out of that truck and into the maze before Donnie had the door shut. He was hollering for Tara.

The two of them and Cole went tearing off through the walls like they had every other day of their lives. To a seven-year-old there is no such thing as whose fort it is.

There is only the fort.

Donnie watched his boy run. Then he walked over to where I was standing by the card table.

He stopped. For a man who always has something to say, he did not have anything for a minute.

“Big turnout,” he said finally.

“It was.”

“You know my gate out there sat empty all weekend.” He said it flat. I could not tell if it was an accusation or just a fact he was setting down to look at.

“I heard,” I said.

He looked at the jar on the table, the one with the coffee money in it. He looked at it a long time.

I watched him do the arithmetic I already knew. The one where a jar nobody is asked to fill ends up with more in it than a box everybody is made to.

“Mom told me what Dad did,” he said. “The oat straw one. Forty years ago.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t remember it.”

“You were little,” I said. “You were littler than Pax.”

He nodded slow. He did not say sorry. Donnie is not built to say sorry.

But he quit looking at the jar, and he looked at his boy instead, and something in his shoulders came down.