The Porch Steps We Built for Mom

A Little After Five

We cleaned up the yard. Calder swept the sawdust off the steps and the walk and loaded his tools into the back of my car.

I raked the offcuts into a pile and saved the longest ones for his kindling. Mom sat on her front porch in a kitchen chair with a quilt on her lap and watched the street.

She said hello to everybody who went by. The school cook two doors down came out and sat with her for a while.

The neighbor man came and stood at the bottom of the steps and looked at them with his hands in his pockets and said, “Well, now,” which from him is a speech.

A little after five, with the sun still bright on the maples and the shadows getting long across the road, Danby’s screen door opened again.

He came down his steps. He looked both ways, the way you teach a child, and he walked across the street.

He had a long white envelope in his hand, and he was holding it in front of him with both hands, like it was something that might spill.

He stopped at the bottom of the new steps. He did not come up. He stood on the concrete pad and looked at the steps, and at the rail, and at the hangers and the bolts, and at the post Calder had plumbed.

He reached out and put his hand on the rail the way my mother had, and his fingers closed around it.

“Who built this?” he asked.

“My son,” I said.

He looked at Calder, who was standing at the corner of the porch with a broom in his hand.

“Son, you did a good job,” Danby said. “That’s a good job of work. That’s better than I’d have had done.”

Calder said, “Thank you, sir,” and that was all.

Then Danby looked up at my mother in her chair. He had taken off his cap. I had not seen his head bare in years. He was balder than I knew, and older.

“Clementine,” he said. “I owe you an apology. I owed you one two years ago.”

My mother did not say anything. She only looked at him, the way she looks at a seam that is not straight.

“My wife would have been ashamed of me,” he said. “She’d have been over here the day you fell with a pot of soup, and she’d have had me out here with a hammer before supper. I don’t know what happened to me. Somewhere in all those trips to Lexington, I started looking at everybody like they were a bill.”

He held out the envelope, not to me, but to my mother. Calder went up the steps and took it from him and carried it to her.

She opened it with her good hand. It was a check for six hundred and twelve dollars. Somebody, I suppose Thane at the lumberyard, had told him the exact amount.

“It’s for the lumber,” Danby said. “I can’t pay for the work. I couldn’t afford what that work is worth. But I can pay for the lumber, and I’m going to knock the rent down fifty dollars a month for the rest of the year, and if anything else on this house is soft, I want you to tell me, and I’ll fix it.”

My mother looked at the check a long time. Then she folded it in half and put it in the pocket of her cardigan.

“Hollis,” she said. “Your wife hemmed her Easter dress in my front room every year for fifteen years. She’d sit right there by the window and tell me about you. She said you were the stubbornest man in Johnson County, and the softest.”

Danby did not say anything. He looked at the ground. After a while he put his cap back on.

“Come to supper Sunday,” my mother said. “After church. Junie’s making chicken and dumplings.”

I was not making chicken and dumplings. I was now.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Thank you. I will.”

He went back across the street. I did not gloat, and I did not need to. Calder put his broom away. I gave my mother back her cane.

The sun went down behind the ridge a long time after that, and we were all inside by then, eating leftover stack cake at her kitchen table.