The Porch Steps We Built for Mom

Two Winters

The first winter after the fall, my mother went to church four times. That was all. I drove her, and I walked her out the back and around the side of the house, and she held my arm so hard I had bruises on the inside of my elbow.

The second winter, she did not go at all.

She would not say she was afraid. She said it was too cold, or that her hip was stiff, or that the preacher was only going to preach the same sermon he preached last year.

But I saw her stand at the front window in the mornings and look at the mailbox the way a dog looks at a door.

Her friend from church, a widow named Agatha who had sung alto beside her for thirty years, started bringing the bulletin by on Sunday afternoons.

She would sit in the front room and read my mother the prayer list and the announcements, and they would laugh about whose casserole was at the last funeral dinner.

Once, when Agatha was leaving, I walked her out the back way, and she stopped in the mud and looked at me. “Your mother used to be the first one in the door and the last one out,” she said.

“Now I’m reading her the bulletin like she’s in the nursing home. That house is making her old, honey.”

I knew it. I did not know what to do about it.

I thought about calling the city. Somebody at work told me there is a housing inspector you can call. But Paintsville is a small town, and I knew how that would go.

Danby would get a letter. He would fix the steps the cheapest way possible, or he would not, and either way he would raise the rent at the next lease, and my mother would be living across the street from a man who was angry at her.

She could not afford to move. Her rent was four hundred and fifty dollars a month, and there was nothing else in town for that.

Arguing with Danby had already cost my mother two winters. She needed her front door by Thanksgiving. I quit asking him for it.

Calder’s Notepad

My son Calder is nineteen. He is tall like his father was, with a brown buzz cut he gives himself in the bathroom mirror, and he has wanted to build things since he was big enough to hold a hammer.

His father died when Calder was twelve, in a mine accident over in Martin County, and after that he followed his grandmother around like a shadow.

She taught him to sew a button on before he could ride a bike. He taught her to use the remote control. They have always been a pair.

This fall he started his first year of carpentry school at the community college. He drives there four days a week in his work clothes, a gray shirt with the school’s name on the pocket, and he comes home with sawdust in his ears.

He loves it the way I have never seen him love anything since his dad.

In early October, the week of the Apple Festival, we were all sitting in my mother’s front room eating apple stack cake somebody from church had dropped off.

My mother looked at the window and said, very quietly, that she had not been to the Apple Festival in two years, and she supposed she had seen her last one.