The Porch Steps We Built for Mom

The Stringers

Calder dug out a square at the bottom of the porch, filled it with gravel and tamped it down with the end of a four-by-four until it rang.

He set the precast pad on the gravel and leveled it with the long level twice. Then he cut the stringers.

I had never watched him work like that before, not really. At home he builds birdhouses and shelves. This was different.

He laid the first two-by-twelve across the sawhorses and studied it. He sighted down the edge for the crown, the way Thane had said.

Then he set his grandfather’s framing square on the board with two little clamps on it, one at six and five-sixteenths and one at eleven, and he marked the first step.

“Six and five-sixteenths is the rise,” he said, not really to me, just out loud, the way his father used to talk under a truck.

“Thirty-one and a half divided by five, near enough. Low and easy, for Grandma. Every step the same height. That’s the whole thing. If one step is different, your foot finds it in the dark and you go down. That’s what the inspector looks for first.”

He marked every step down the board, then checked every mark again with a tape. Then he cut.

The saw screamed in the cold air, and pale sawdust blew out across the leaves, and the first stringer came away clean.

He did not screw it to anything. He carried it to the porch and held it in place against the rim, and looked at it, and set the level on each step, and brought it back to the sawhorses and took another sixteenth off the bottom.

He fit every stringer twice. Some three times. The pale offcuts piled up on the grass by the sawhorses, short triangles and slivers, and the leaves blew in on top of them.

The Neighbors

Around nine, the lady two doors down came out her front door with a plate covered in a dish towel.

She was a retired school cook, and she had known my mother since before I was born.

She walked across the grass and set the plate on the end of the sawhorse. Sausage biscuits, still hot, wrapped in foil.

She patted Calder on the arm and went back home without saying anything. That is how things are done on our street.

About ten, the neighbor man who had sat with my mother on the steps the morning she fell came over with a five-gallon bucket.

In the bucket were two old stepladders’ worth of clamps, and he set it down by the blanket.

“Thought he might need these,” he said to me, and went home.

A little after that, a couple of the men from Mom’s church drove by slow and honked. One of them stopped and rolled down his window and asked if we needed another set of hands, and Calder thanked him and said he had it, and the man nodded like that was the right answer and drove on.

All that time, Danby sat on his porch. I saw him go in once and come back out with fresh coffee. I saw him stand up once, about the time the second stringer went in, and I thought he was coming over, but he only went down to get his newspaper out of the yard and went back up.