The Bedroom With Two Windows for Danny

“You did good,” he said.

“You picked a good window,” Trina said. Her voice was rough. “Both of them.”

“Morning Sky,” he said. “That’s my paint inside. You can come see it when it’s done.”

She nodded. She did not trust herself to say anything else. I knew that look. It was Mama’s.

The men drank one last round of cold water, shook Wes’s hand, and climbed into their trucks. Bobby’s son honked twice going down the road. And the room stood there at the end of our house, closed in and roofed, with trim around its two windows that my sister had painted on her knees.

The rest took three more weeks of evenings. Ken pulled his wire and the county man came out and passed it. Two of the farmers hung drywall on a Tuesday after softball and finished it the next night. I mudded and sanded the seams myself after the daycare kids went home.

Danny painted his own walls. He did it slow and careful with a roller, and he got paint on the ceiling and the carpet and on Wes, and the room came out the color of the sky about twenty minutes after sunrise.

Wes’s mother gave us her old maple dresser. Danny’s pew headboard came out of Trina’s basement in the back of Wes’s truck. Trina helped carry it up the stairs herself, and she unscrewed the hook and eye latch from the basement door while she was at it and threw it in the trash.

Social Security made it official at the end of May. A letter came addressed to me, saying I had been selected as Danny’s representative payee, starting the first of June.

The accounting with Trina took longer. She sat at her kitchen table with a shoebox of receipts for two weekends, and she wrote out everything she could prove and everything she could not. She sent it in herself.

She sold the hot tub too. Nobody asked her to. She put it on Marketplace for forty-two hundred and it was gone in a day, to a couple from Paragould who hauled it off on a flatbed. She drove to my house and put a check for every dollar in Danny’s hand.

“For your savings,” she said. “It was always yours.”

Danny looked at the check a long time. Then he handed it to me. “Write it on the paper,” he said. “So I can see it.”

What Social Security decides about the rest of the money is between Trina and them. I have not asked, and she has not told me. Some things are a sister’s to carry by herself, and that is one.

Danny moved in on the first Friday of June.

He had a duffel bag of clothes, the laundry baskets, his tablet, a stack of Razorbacks programs going back to 2007, and Mama’s Bible. He had a coffee can of the softball team’s old scoresheets that he has kept since the beginning.

We ate supper together at our kitchen table, the three of us. Wes said grace. Danny added a long part at the end thanking God for Bobby and Ken and Jim and Howard and every other man on the team by name, and for Trina, and for windows.

After supper he went to bed early, which he never does. Wes and I sat on the couch with the television on and did not watch it.

About nine thirty, Danny came down the hall in his pajamas.