The Porch Story Hour

Thursday on the lawn

We loaded the truck at seven in the morning. Josh’s co-op crew lent him the flatbed, and two of the linemen showed up in their orange vests to help, because Josh had mentioned it to them and they did not ask why.

The cedar benches went on first, strapped down. Then Josh’s mother’s oak rocker, wrapped in a moving blanket. Then the patchwork blanket, the cookie plates, the stack of picture books off the rail, and the coffee urn Janice had brought from the homeschool group.

Truman rode in the front with the rabbit under his chin. He hummed the whole way into town, a low steady note that rose a little at every stop sign.

The branch is a low brick building on the corner of Church Street and Second, with a flag out front and a bed of marigolds somebody has tended for years. The lawn runs along the whole front, under the wide plate glass windows.

We set the benches in a long curve facing the street, so that anybody going by would see them. We put the rocker in the middle.

At nine forty-five there were a dozen people on the grass. By ten there were more than I could count at a glance, so I counted the way I always do, one at a time.

Janice’s van came. Lori came with both girls, in rain boots again, in sunshine. The grandparents came with their folding lawn chairs, and Mr. Wilkins took the swing Josh had hung that morning from a frame of two sawhorses and a length of chain.

“Best seat in the county,” he said, settling in. “Now with a view.”

Beatrice Boettcher got out of a gray county sedan at five minutes to ten. She wore a navy blazer and carried a thermos of lemonade, and she walked straight up to me and shook my hand like we were closing on a house.

“Amy,” she said. “I am told you read.”

“I read to my son,” I said. “Anybody can listen.”

“I have heard that line,” Beatrice said. “I am going to steal it.”

She took a seat at the end of a cedar bench with her knees together and her purse on her lap, like a woman at a revival.