The Bedroom With Two Windows for Danny

“He wouldn’t, Trina. You know he wouldn’t. He doesn’t want anybody sad.”

“I know.” She blew her nose. “I know that. I knew it then.”

Then she asked me something I did not expect.

“Is it true the softball team is building him a room?”

“Twelve of them,” I said. “They framed it Saturday. They’ll dry it in this weekend.”

She was quiet. Then she hung up, but softly this time, not like before.

The second Saturday came up sunny too. I had biscuits in the oven at six. At seven sharp, while the first trucks were pulling in, Trina came walking around the corner of the house.

She had all three kids behind her. Josh was fourteen, Kayla was eleven, and the little one, Sam, was eight. They looked like they had been woken up and told to put shoes on and not ask questions.

Trina had a paintbrush in a plastic grocery sack. She stopped at the edge of the new floor. She did not look at me. She looked at the room instead, the walls and the rafters and the one window Danny and I had set.

“Where’s the trim,” she said.

Wes was cutting on the sawhorses. He did not say anything clever and he did not make a face. He just pointed with his tape measure at the stack of pine boards for the window and corner trim, and the gallon of white exterior paint beside it.

“We’re putting it up this afternoon,” he said. “It’d go a lot faster if it was already painted.”

Trina set down her sack and took out her brush, and she knelt in the grass, and she started painting.

She painted every board of that trim. She did both sides and all the edges. She did not talk to anybody for the first hour, and nobody made her. The men went around her the way you go around a person praying.

Danny came out of the house about eight. He saw her and stopped on the step. Then he went back inside without a word, and I watched through the kitchen window as he poured a glass of sweet tea from the pitcher in the refrigerator, put three ice cubes in it, and carried it out.

He set it down in the grass by her knee. He did not say anything. He patted her once on the shoulder and went back to carrying lumber.

Trina put down the brush. She put both hands over her face. She sat there kneeling in the grass with her shoulders shaking, and Danny kept carrying two by fours, and none of those men looked over once. I have never loved a group of men more than I loved them right then.

Josh, her oldest, went and got a second brush out of Wes’s truck without being asked and knelt down beside his mother. By ten, Kayla and Sam were painting too, and Sam had white paint to his elbows.

That day the crew shingled the roof and set the second window, the south one, and wrapped the walls and put the siding up to match the house as close as they could get. Howard called out the measurements from his chair.

Late in the afternoon, Wes and Ken nailed up Trina’s trim around both windows and down the corners. Trina stood back by the pecan tree and watched them do it with her arms crossed.

When the last piece was up, Danny walked over and stood next to her.