The Apron I Took to My Brother

The rest of the day

Webb stayed the rest of the afternoon. He carried things to cars. He loaded the porch swing for a man from Pleasant Plains.

He sold the crate of mason jars to a woman who wanted them for jelly, and charged her a dollar less than I had marked.

At four, when the yard was empty again, he and I loaded what was left into his truck for the church thrift store in town. We did not talk much. We did not need to.

When we were done, he looked at the shop, standing open and empty at the back of the yard.

“I’m sorry about the Mountain Home man,” he said. “I’ll call and apologize to him.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I keep hearing that from you,” he said, and almost smiled.

He did call, too. I know because Mr. Hughes called me the next week to say my brother had phoned him and apologized like a man, and that he would be glad to look at any other lots our family ever had. That is the kind of thing people around here remember.

Moving day

The following Saturday we moved Mom into the apartment in Batesville. Webb brought his truck and a trailer he borrowed from Mr. Pruitt, and I brought mine, and Dixie and Dolly unpacked her kitchen while we carried the bed up the elevator.

Mom’s new place looks out over a little courtyard with a birdbath and a pecan tree. She says the pecans are terrible but the cardinals like the birdbath.

She has a friend down the hall now who used to teach school in Newport, and they play cards on Tuesday.

The deposit was paid with Webb’s six hundred fifty dollars. She told me she held onto those particular bills for two days before she could make herself hand them to the office lady.

The bench

Three weeks after the sale, on a Sunday afternoon, Webb called me in Conway.

“You busy next weekend,” he said.

“Why?”

“I’m putting Dad’s bench back together. In my garage. I could use somebody to hold the other end.”

So that next Saturday, I drove up to Cave City with Rollo in the passenger seat.

Webb had the garage door rolled all the way up and the boards and legs laid out on sawhorses on the driveway in the sun.

It took us three weekends. The oak top had to be sanded down, and two of the boards had split along the bolt holes.

Webb knew exactly what to do with every one of them. He knew things about that bench I could not have guessed.

He knew Dad had glued the top together from boards he salvaged out of an old feed store in Newark when they tore it down.

He knew which leg had been replaced in 1987 after Dad dropped a riding mower transmission on it.

He wore the apron the whole time. He kept a carpenter’s pencil in the front pocket, just like Dad.

Rollo turned out to be good at it. Better than me, anyway.

He was patient with the sander, and he was careful with his fingers, and he listened when Webb talked, which is more than he does for his mother and me.

On the second weekend, Webb set Rollo to sorting the coffee can of drill bits by size, the way Dad always kept them.

Rollo sat on an overturned bucket in the driveway for an hour lining them up on a towel.

I watched that and I did not say anything. I just watched my brother watch my son sitting on that bucket.