The Bedroom With Two Windows for Danny

Danny came out to watch every afternoon Wes could pick him up from work. He stood at the string line with his hands in his pockets and asked Bobby a hundred questions. Bobby answered every one of them.

“How long does the cement take?” Danny asked.

“Concrete,” Bobby said. “Cement’s what’s in it. Takes about a week to get strong enough to build on. A month to get all the way there.”

Danny nodded seriously and wrote it down in the little notebook he carries in his shirt pocket. Later I found the page. It said, Concrete is not cement. One week.

Danny picked the paint the Wednesday before the first build weekend. Wes took him to the hardware store, and he stood at the paint chips for forty-five minutes. He came home with a gallon of a soft color the card called Morning Sky.

“Because I’ll be able to tell when it’s morning,” he said.

The first Saturday in May came up sunny and clear. By seven in the morning there were pickups lined down both sides of our road, and sawhorses and stacks of lumber spread all over the grass on the east end of the house.

The men had all shown up in the same plain navy T-shirts. Jim’s wife had bought a dozen at the farm store in Jonesboro and handed them out of a sack, no lettering on them, no team name. She said she just wanted them to look like a crew.

There were twelve of them. A pipefitter, two farmers, a high school ag teacher, a man who sold insurance, Bobby and his son, Ken the electrician, Jim, Pastor Mike’s son, and an old man named Howard who had played second base before Wes did and was seventy-four.

Howard did not swing a hammer. He sat in a lawn chair in the shade of the pecan tree with a cooler of water at his feet and called out measurements when anybody asked, and he was never once wrong.

They laid the sill plate and the floor joists by nine. They had the subfloor down by ten. By the middle of the morning they were framing walls flat on the deck and standing them up, three and four men to a wall, with Wes calling the lift.

Danny wore his red T-shirt. He told everybody it was his work shirt. Mama bought it for him for his first day at Harps, and he still saves it for days he thinks are important.

He carried two by fours from the stack to the saw, one at a time, all morning. Nobody told him to. He just watched where they were needed, and took them there, and set them down square.

By early afternoon the east wall was framed and standing, with a rough opening cut where the first window would go. Half a dozen of the men were still framing the south wall and the short wall that would tie into the house.

Wes came over with the first window still in its cardboard. He cut the box open and lifted it out, a plain white vinyl window, thirty-six by forty-eight.

“Danny,” he said. “This one’s yours. You want to set it?”

Danny looked at me. Then he looked at the window. Then he wiped both hands on the front of his red shirt.

“Kristy has to help,” he said. “It’s heavy.”