The Porch Steps We Built for Mom

Three two-by-twelves for the stringers. Treads and risers. Two four-by-four posts and a handrail with rounded edges, thick enough to get your hand all the way around.

“Not a thin slat,” he said. “Grandma’s hand has to close on it. A skinny rail is for looking at. A thick, rounded one is for holding.”

He wanted a precast concrete landing pad at the bottom too, so the new stringers would never sit in the dirt, and bags of gravel to go under the pad, and hangers and lag bolts and a box of the good coated screws that would not rust out in five years.

We went to the lumberyard out on the bypass that Thursday after my shift. The man at the counter, an older fellow named Thane with a pencil behind his ear, read Calder’s list and nodded slowly as he went down it.

“Who drew this up?” he asked.

“I did,” Calder said.

“Carpentry school?”

“First year.”

Thane nodded again and went to pick out the two-by-twelves himself. He came back with three of the straightest boards I have ever seen and laid them on the cart.

“Crown up when you cut them,” he told Calder, and Calder said, “Yes sir, I know,” and Thane smiled like he had expected that answer.

The bill came to six hundred and twelve dollars and some cents. I paid it out of the money I had been putting back for a new washing machine.

Our old one could walk across the laundry room one more year. Mine was not the washing machine that mattered.

Saturday

That Saturday came up bright and cold, the kind of late October morning in the mountains when the sky is so blue it hurts and the maples have turned as gold and rust as they are going to get.

The leaves were all over Mom’s little lawn, and the frost on them was just starting to burn off when we got there at eight.

Calder set up two sawhorses on the grass by the front walk. He laid out his tools on an old moving blanket in the order he would need them: the circular saw, the speed square, the framing square, the drill, the level, a chalk line, a pry bar, a hand saw for the last cuts.

He wore his gray carpentry shirt and his tool belt, and he had his grandfather’s old framing square, which my mother had kept wrapped in a pillowcase in her closet for thirty years.

I wore my old mustard sweater, the one with the elbows nearly out, because I knew I would be hauling rotten boards and did not care what happened to it.

Mom watched from the front window in her housecoat with her coffee. She waved at us like we were on a parade float.

The first thing we did was tear out the old steps. It took about twenty minutes. Calder pried the treads up with the bar, and they came apart in his hands.

When he pulled the stringers out from under the porch, the bottom of each one was soft and dark and crumbled like old cake. One of them broke in half when he lifted it.

I carried the pieces to the alley one armload at a time. When I came back from the third trip, I saw that Hollis Danby had come out on his own porch across the street.

He was in a flannel coat with a cup of coffee in his hand. He sat down in his porch chair and looked across at us.

He did not wave. He did not call out anything. He just sat there and watched.

Calder saw him too. He looked at me, and I shook my head a little, and he went back to work.

Neither of us said a word to Danby all morning. There was nothing that needed saying. The work was the only thing to say.