The Spotless House We Left Behind

The steps

When they were leaving, Gordon stood at the bottom of the porch steps for a while, looking at them. He stepped on the bottom tread and felt it give. He crouched down and looked at where the stringer had pulled away from the rim joist.

“These are rotten clean through,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to get to them.”

He grunted. He looked at the steps a while longer.

“Saturday,” he said. “Seven. I’ll bring the lumber.”

He was there at six forty-five, with a load of treated two-by-twelves and two-by-sixes from the lumberyard in Brandon, a box of structural screws, and his old circular saw that he’d had since before Natalie was born.

He wouldn’t let me pay him for any of it.

We tore out the old steps together. It was hot already, and the gnats were bad. Gordon worked steady and quiet, the way a man works who’s spent his life outdoors for the county. He laid out the stringers with a framing square and cut them on two sawhorses in the yard.

Around ten, we sat in the shade of the cottonwoods with a jug of water. Gordon took his cap off and wiped his forehead.

“I should have said something,” he said. “That night in April. Before that. I heard what Faye said to Natalie that Christmas about the dishes. I was right there.”

“I know,” I said. “I saw you.”

He nodded slowly. “I let Faye run the house because she’s good at it, and because it was easier. I’ve done that for thirty-five years.” He turned his cap over in his hands. “That one’s on me, Eli. Not just her.”

“I appreciate you saying it.”

“Well,” he said. “It needed saying.” He put his cap back on and stood up. “Let’s get those treads on before it gets any hotter.”

We finished by two. Five steps, solid, square to the house, with a handrail on the left side. Gordon stood on the top one and bounced on it, hard, the way a big man will to prove a thing.

It didn’t give at all.

“There,” he said. And that was all he said, and it was enough.

Brittany

Brittany called Natalie about a week after that. Natalie took it out on the new steps, and I stayed inside, but the windows were open and I heard most of it.

Brittany didn’t do it well. I want to be fair to her about that. It isn’t easy to say you’re sorry for something you didn’t see you were doing.

“I didn’t know it was that bad,” Brittany said. “I just didn’t look. Mom always made it seem like you wanted to help.”

“I did want to help,” Natalie said. “I just didn’t want to be the help.”

There was a long quiet on the line.

“Mom says the kitchen’s closed now,” Brittany said. “She told me. Sunday supper only, and everybody does their own dishes. Even me.”

“How’s that going?”

Brittany laughed a little, not quite happy. “Owen dries. Wade washes. I’m learning to make your hotdish. It’s not as good.”

“You need more onion,” Natalie said.

They talked for almost an hour. I don’t know everything they said. I know Brittany told her things were better with Wade, a little, since the trip. I know at the end Natalie said, “I love you, Britt,” and Brittany said it back, and that they’d both been crying, and that neither one of them hung up first for a while.