Forty Brushes for Mom’s White Fence

She would say I was the one who did not care whether Mom fell. And some people would believe her, because part of it was true.

So I did not call anybody. I helped Mom up off that bucket and walked her to the house.

I made her a glass of tea and a pimento cheese sandwich and sat with her until she ate half of it.

Then I took out my phone at her kitchen table and opened the Facebook group.

Mom’s old students started that group the year she retired. It has a little over two hundred people in it.

They post pictures of their own kids at Vacation Bible School and the occasional prayer request. Mom does not look at it much. I check it for her.

I typed it out three times before I posted it. The first two times I wrote about Sheree. I deleted both. The third time I kept it short.

“Hi everybody. This is Robyn, Miss Bernice’s daughter. Mom’s fence out on the road needs paint and a few posts set. She can’t do it anymore and it’s breaking her heart. If you’re free this Saturday, bring a brush. We’ll start at seven. I’ll have coffee.”

I did not say why. I did not say who. I just put it up there and put my phone in my purse and went home and lay down, because I had to be at work at five.

I figured maybe six would come. Maybe eight. People are busy. It was June and hay was down all over the county and every man I knew who owned a baler was working past dark.

By Tuesday afternoon there were forty-one comments.

The first one was from Corliss, who was in Mom’s class in 1989 and now teaches third grade at the elementary school. She wrote, “I’ll be there with three kids and every brush in my garage.”

Then Sherman, who manages the hardware store in town, wrote that he would bring paint. “Exterior white. Don’t buy any. I mean it, Robyn.”

Then people I had not seen since high school. A nurse who lives two counties over. A man who drives a log truck.

A woman who said she was eight months pregnant and could not paint but could make sandwiches.

One of them wrote, “She taught me the books of the Bible with a song. I can still sing it. I’ll be there.”

Another one wrote, “Miss Bernice drove me home every Sunday for two years when my daddy was drinking. Tell her I’m coming.”

I read that one on my break at the hospital, sitting on an upside-down milk crate by the back dock.

I had to go into the walk-in cooler for a minute and stand there with the door shut.

Wednesday I called Dean. He was on his lunch, sitting in his bucket truck on a county road somewhere. I could hear the diesel idling.