The Porch Steps We Built for Mom

Calder put his plate down. He did not say anything. But the next Wednesday he showed up at her house after class with a tape measure and a little spiral notepad and a flashlight.

He went out the back and around the side of the house and stood in front of the porch for a long time.

Then he got down on his back in the cold grass and slid halfway under the porch with the flashlight.

When he came out he had dirt on his shirt and a look on his face I had seen on his father’s when something under a truck was worse than he had hoped.

“Mama, the stringers are gone,” he said. “All three of them. They’re rotted clean through where they sit on the ground. Somebody put them right down in the dirt with no pad. The treads were the only thing holding them together. It wasn’t the step that broke. The whole thing was going.”

He measured the height of the porch three times, from the top of the porch floor to the ground.

Thirty-one and a half inches. He wrote it down in his notepad and drew a little picture beside it.

Then he went inside and knelt down by his grandmother’s chair, the way he used to when he was little and wanted something.

“Grandma,” he said. “Give me one Saturday.”

My mother laughed at him. She said he did not need to waste his Saturday on an old woman’s porch. She said Mr. Danby would fix it sooner or later.

Calder said, “Grandma, Mr. Danby has had two winters.”

And then my mother cried a little, which she never does. She put her good hand on top of his head and held it there for a while, and none of us said anything.

Six Hundred and Twelve Dollars

Before we bought one board, I went across the street one more time. I wanted to do it right.

It was a bright afternoon in the middle of October. Danby was raking leaves in his own front yard, slowly, with a rake that was missing half its teeth.

I told him Calder and I wanted to rebuild Mom’s steps ourselves, with our own money and our own hands. I told him we would build them right and leave them for the house.

He leaned on the rake and looked at me for a long time. “I’m not paying for it,” he said. “I want that clear. I’m not paying you back.”

“I didn’t ask you to,” I said.

“And if it falls down, it’s on you.”

“It won’t fall down,” I said. “My son is building it.”

He looked across the street at the hole in the porch, and something went across his face that I could not read. Then he said, “Do what you want,” and went back to his leaves.

I wrote down the date and what he said in the back of my checkbook, so nobody could say later that we did it behind his back.

Calder made a list in his notepad. He knew what he wanted down to the last screw. Pressure-treated pine, rated for ground contact, because that was what had been missing the first time.