The Bedroom With Two Windows for Danny

I called the Social Security number on Monday morning between two diaper changes. The woman on the phone was kind. She set me an appointment at the Jonesboro field office for a Thursday two weeks out.

“Bring the beneficiary with you if you can,” she said. “It helps when he can tell us himself.”

That Tuesday he came home late from practice. I was already in bed. He sat on the edge of the mattress in the dark and took off his cleats.

“I asked the guys,” he said.

“Asked them what?”

“If they’d help frame a room for Danny. Two weekends, maybe. I’d buy the lumber.”

I sat up. “What did they say?”

“Bobby said he’d pour the footings. Ken said he’d wire it, he’s licensed. Jim’s got a nail gun and a compressor. Pastor Mike’s son said he’d roof it.” Wes pulled his sock off. “I counted twelve before I quit asking.”

“Twelve,” I said.

“Danny’s kept score for that team for six years,” Wes said. “Every Tuesday, on the bleachers, with his little clipboard. Did you think they’d say no?”

I lay back down and cried into my pillow so quietly he pretended not to notice. He has always been good at that.

The appointment was on a Thursday in the middle of April. I got a neighbor lady to cover my daycare kids for the morning, and I picked Danny up at Harps at the end of his shift, still in his green apron.

He had told Trina he was going to a doctor appointment with me. I did not ask him to tell her that. He decided that on his own, and I did not correct him, and I have thought about that since.

The Social Security office in Jonesboro is a plain brick building with plastic chairs and a ticket machine like the meat counter. We took a number. Danny read the numbers on the screen out loud as they came up, and an older man two chairs down started reading them with him.

When our number came, a woman with gray hair and reading glasses on a beaded chain called us to the window. Her name plate said she had been there a long time. She talked straight to Danny, not to me, and I loved her for it.

“Mr. Fuller,” she said. “Your sister Trina is your payee right now. Do you know what that means?”

Danny nodded. “She gets my money and pays for my stuff.”

“That’s right. And your other sister here would like to be your payee instead. Is that something you want?”

Danny put both hands flat on the counter, the way Daddy used to when he was making a deal on a truck.

“I want to live with Kristy and Wes,” he said. “I want a room with a window. And I want Kristy to do my money because she lets me see the paper.”

The woman looked at me over her glasses. “The paper?”

“I told him I’d show him every month where it goes,” I said. “Rent, food, his phone, the rest in savings. He can see it written down.”

She nodded slowly, and wrote something.

She gave me the form, and she walked me through it line by line. She asked where Danny would live and who else lived there, and she asked about my work and whether I had ever been convicted of anything, and I said no ma’am, just a speeding ticket in 2009.

Then she said the part I had been dreading.