The Lawn Chairs Facing the Road

The Porch

The relatives drove home at dusk, and the campers pulled out of the lane in a long line with their lights on. Janelle took the children home and did not speak to her husband in the car.

But Doug came back, alone, an hour after dark. I heard his truck in the lane, and I saw Arlen look up from his recliner. “Let him in,” Arlen said.

He came through the kitchen with his hat in his hand and did not look at me. He sat on the edge of the porch swing, where Arlen had sat on our honeymoon with his boots on, and my husband lowered himself next to him.

I stayed in the dark kitchen with the window open. I will confess that I listened to every word.

“I don’t have a defense,” said Doug.

“I didn’t ask for one.”

“I owe sixty-two thousand dollars on the mini excavator. I bought it new in March. I bought it because…” His voice caught. “Because every Sunday I sit at your table and Merle talks about his nine hundred acres, and I’m the only man there who doesn’t own a square foot of anything.”

The swing creaked.

“I was five months behind, and I didn’t tell Janelle. And then you bought a camper with cash. Forty-one thousand dollars, like it was nothing. I stood in your yard and looked at it and thought, they will never need me for anything.”

“Son,” Arlen said.

“Then you had your heart attack, and I had a paper with your signature on it.” Doug’s voice broke. “I put nine in the college fund because I couldn’t stand to put in nothing. I put fifteen on the bank. I told myself you were too old to use it and the kids had a whole life coming. I told myself that for six weeks.”

“It wasn’t smart,” said Arlen.

“I know.”

“But it wasn’t the worst thing a man’s ever done, either.” I heard my husband take a long breath. “Doug, you could have asked me. I’d have given you the fifteen in a minute. But you’ve never asked me for a thing in eighteen years. You’ve never let me hand you one.”

Nobody said anything for a while.

“I think that was my fault, too,” Arlen said. “Every time something needed doing, I did it myself. I never let you help, and you went and found another way to be useful.” “You can’t make it right with money. You don’t have it. What you’ve got is hands.”

What Doug Built

Janelle did not speak to Doug for nine days. She moved a cot into Ava’s room, and the children knew, the way children always know. Her father had forgiven a man. Her mother had not decided yet. It took me until Christmas.

But on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, a flatbed came up our lane with a mini excavator chained to it, and Doug climbed down from the cab at seven in the morning in a canvas coat. He did not knock. He walked out to the gravel pad and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at the ground.

“What’s he doing?” I said from the window.

“I believe,” said my husband, “he’s going to pour us a pad.”

It took three Saturdays. He tore out the gravel and graded the ground and set the forms himself. Merle came over the second Saturday with a mixer and two sons and said nothing about anything but the mix, and by December there was a slab forty feet long, level as a church floor.

In January, Doug built a pole roof over it with lumber from the Dobbs place, open on the front so a fifth wheel could pull straight in off the lane. He did not charge us a penny. I do not believe he would have taken one.

That winter, he sold his bass boat and the four-wheeler and the second welder, and he took a job three days a week on the county road crew, running a plow in the snow. By the following August, there was fifteen thousand dollars back in the kids’ college fund. Janelle set the statement on my kitchen table on the first of every month, not to prove anything to me, but so I could see her husband’s name on the deposit line in his own handwriting.

He came to Sunday dinner every week after that. And every week, without a word said about it, Arlen handed him the carving knife.