The Apron I Took to My Brother

The table

By three the last car had pulled out onto the county road. Dixie took Rollo to get burgers at the Sonic in town. I told them I would finish up.

I walked over to the tool table. It was one of the long folding tables we had borrowed from the fire hall, and there was nothing left on it but a few curls of old masking tape where my price tags had been.

The sun was still warm on the back of my neck, and my maroon T-shirt was stuck to me from a day of hauling.

The free lumber was gone too. Every board, every leg. I had not even noticed Webb loading those.

I stood there with my hands flat on that empty table, my white pickup parked behind me where I had backed it up to load the trash, and tried to work up the anger I thought I ought to feel.

It would not come. What came instead was the picture of his ears going red when that little boy asked if he was stealing.

Behind me, I heard the screen door. Mom came down the porch steps one at a time, holding the rail with her good hand, with something folded over her other arm.

It was Dad’s shop apron. Worn brown canvas, a bib front, a long tie that wrapped around twice and knotted in front because Dad said the back knot always came loose under a mower deck.

“I took it off the nail the week after the funeral,” she said. “I kept it in my closet. I couldn’t put a price on it.”

She held it out, and I took it. It still smelled like oil and sawdust and the cherry pipe tobacco he quit in 1995. The front pocket was soft as a dish rag from forty years of his hands.

“Mom,” I said. “Why did he do that?”

She lowered herself onto one of the folding chairs we had not sold, the way she does now, carefully, favoring the hip.

“You were at ballgames,” she said. “You were at band practice and Scouts and your friend’s house in town. You were a busy little boy and we were proud of you.”

“Webb was out in that shop every Saturday from the time he could stand on a bucket. Every Saturday, Brandon. Your daddy set a five gallon bucket upside down next to that bench so Webb could see what he was doing.”

I had not known that. I had known Webb liked the shop. I had not known it was every Saturday, or about the bucket. Nobody had ever said it out loud to me.

“Twelve years he was out there,” she said. “Until he was about seventeen and got the job at the grocery. Your daddy used to call him his helper. He’d say, ‘Go get my helper, Corinna, I need small hands on this carburetor.'”

She looked at the apron in my hands for a long time.

“Take that to him tomorrow,” she said. “And don’t take a word of anger with it. Not one.”

She got up out of the chair and went back up the steps.

I stood alone in that sunny front yard by the empty table, unshaved for three days, holding my dad’s apron for a long time before the sun finally went down behind the shop.