Forty Brushes for Mom’s White Fence

I told him about the post. Then I told him what Sheree had said at the coffee urn, word for word. I did not add to it and I did not soften it.

He was quiet so long I thought the call dropped. Then he said, “She said let it fall.”

“She said let it fall so Mom would sell.”

He let out a breath. “I didn’t know that. Robyn, I swear I didn’t know she said that.”

“I know you didn’t,” I said. “I’m not asking you to do anything to her. I’m just telling you. Three of those end posts are leaning bad. I don’t know how to set a post.”

“I do,” Dean said. “I’ll be there at seven.”

He did not say anything else about Sheree, and I did not ask. That was his marriage, not mine. Some things a sister does not get to stand in the middle of.

I did not tell Mom how many were coming. I just told her a few of her old students wanted to help with the fence.

She said, “Oh, they don’t need to do that,” and then she spent all of Friday afternoon making two sheet cakes and a cooler of lemonade.

Saturday came up clear and hot. I got there at six with two big thermoses of coffee from the hospital kitchen and a box of biscuits.

Mom was already up, dressed, standing at the window in her light blue denim shirt.

“Who all’s coming?” she asked me.

“Some folks,” I said.

At ten till seven, Dean’s truck came up the road with eight new treated posts in the bed and a tamping bar and a post hole digger and a sack of gravel.

He parked on the shoulder and got out and nodded to Mom on the porch and went straight down to the leaning end.

At seven, Corliss pulled in with her three boys and a wagon full of brushes.

At five after, Sherman came with his flatbed and twelve gallons of exterior latex, two paint trays, a stack of wire brushes and scrapers, and two of his stock boys he said he was paying for the day.

And then they just kept coming.

I stood at the end of the drive and counted, because I could not believe it. Cars parked along the shoulder of the road both directions.

Trucks in the hay field by the barn. A minivan with a baby seat in it. By eight o’clock I had counted forty grown people, and that was before I started on the children.

Mom came down off the porch slow, holding the rail. She stood at the gate and looked at all of them, and they looked back at her, and for a minute nobody said anything at all.