The Porch Steps We Built for Mom

Hollis Danby stood in his own doorway with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and told me my mother could use the back door.

He said it the way you would tell somebody the post office closes at noon on Saturdays.

“She’s 79 years old,” I said. “She went through the second step yesterday morning. Her wrist is broken in two places. The doctor in the emergency room said she was lucky it wasn’t her hip.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said, and I think part of him was. “But there’s a back door. It’s got two good concrete steps. She can come and go that way until I get around to it.”

I asked him when he thought he might get around to it. He looked past me, across the street, at the little white frame house where my mother had lived for twenty-two years and paid him rent every month of them.

“Junie, those steps would be six hundred dollars in lumber if they’re a dime,” he said. “Six hundred dollars for a renter. Not this year. Maybe not next.”

Then he said he had a pot on the stove, and he closed the door, gently, the way a man closes a door when he wants you to know he is not angry, only finished.

I stood on his porch a while longer. It was a March morning in Paintsville, Kentucky, cold and still, and from his porch I could see the hole in my mother’s front steps.

The second tread was gone, split down the middle, and the broken ends hung down into the dark under the porch like two bad teeth.

The Morning She Fell

My mother is Clementine Haskett. She sewed for a living for forty-one years, first at a garment plant over near the river and then out of her own front room, hemming wedding dresses and letting out church slacks and putting zippers in for half the county.

She can still thread a needle without her glasses, and she will tell you so.

She was going out to the mailbox that morning, the way she had every morning for twenty-two years. She liked to get the mail herself.

She said it was the only exercise a seamstress ever got, walking to the mailbox and back, and she would not let anybody do it for her.

The second step had been soft for a long time. I had noticed it the summer before and told her to step wide over it, and she had, mostly.

That morning there had been a hard frost, and she was in a hurry, because she thought she heard the mail carrier. She put her foot square in the middle of it.

She told me later that she did not feel herself fall. She felt the board give, like stepping on a sponge, and then she was sitting on the third step with her left hand bent wrong under her and her purse in the yard.

A neighbor heard her calling. He came running over in his house shoes and sat with her on the steps until I got there.

I work in the laundry at the hospital, I am the supervisor on day shift, and I was already at work folding surgical drapes when my phone rang.

I drove her to the emergency room myself with her arm wrapped up in a dish towel. She kept apologizing to me the whole way, for the trouble, for making me leave work, for the blood on the towel from where the board had scraped her shin.

I told her to hush, and she did not hush once.

The doctor put her in a splint and then a cast. He was a young man with kind hands, and he kept calling her ma’am.

He told me quietly in the hall that a fall like that at her age is often the first of several, and that the first one is the warning.

I took that warning across the street the next morning, and Hollis Danby told me about the back door.