The Porch Story Hour

What Josh said

Josh got home that night at six, still in his work boots, with the red dirt of somebody’s easement up to his ankles. He climbs poles for the electric co-op. He had spent the day restoring a line the wind took down near Atkins.

I told him at the kitchen table while the macaroni water came up to a boil.

He did not say anything for a while. He is not a man who hurries a feeling. I watched his jaw work, the way it does when he is chewing on something he does not want to spit out.

“I’ll talk to her,” he said at last.

“Please don’t. She’s your sister.”

“She’s out of line, Amy.”

“She is. And you are still not going to be the one who tells her so, not tonight, not mad. I do not want this to be the thing that cracks your family.”

He sat down and unlaced one boot, slow, and set it by the door. Then he did the other one.

“You know the county cut her hours twice this year,” he said. “Down to thirty-two a week. I hear the branch is on a list if the millage does not pass in March. She is scared for that job.”

“Scared people can still be kind,” I said.

“They can,” Josh said. “Mostly they are not.”

He did not argue the point. He just looked at me with those tired eyes and said, “What do you want to do, then?”

I did not know. That was the truth. I stirred the macaroni and watched Truman at the end of the table, lining up his crayons by color, humming over them, and I thought: he loves Thursday at ten. He has never loved anything on a schedule except that.

“Maybe I just read to him myself,” I said. “Same time. Same books.”

“Where?”

“On the porch, I guess.”

Josh looked at me a long moment. Then he got up in his sock feet, kissed the top of my head, and went out to the garage.

On Saturday he came home from the lumberyard in Morrilton with two long cedar boards and a stack of cinder blocks in the bed of his truck.

“For Thursday,” he said, setting them down on the grass. “In case anybody comes.”

“Nobody is coming, Josh.”

“Then it’s a nice bench.”