Thirty Neighbors Built Mom a Home

I had been standing at the gate since half past five with a thermos in one hand. The grass was wet and bright green, and I could smell cut hay from somewhere. It looked absurdly large rolling down my little gravel road, white and long as a train car, and for one terrible second I thought, What have I done?

Mom came up beside me in her soft blue cardigan, holding the coffee mug I’d handed her. She did not say anything. I watched her face. She watched the house come down the lane.

“That,” she said, finally, “is bigger than I thought.”

“It’s got two bedrooms.”

“It’s got a kitchen.”

“It has a kitchen, Mom.”

She put her free hand to her mouth. Then she took it away, and she laughed, and then her eyes were wet and she looked away at the trees so I would not see.

The pickups were already lined up along the fence. I had not counted them.

Later I tried to reconstruct it, and the best I can say is that by seven there were eleven trucks on my pasture and by nine there were closer to twenty. If you added every wife and teenager and a few grandchildren, we had thirty-one people. Hal’s count, not mine.

The hauler, a man named Lance, had never set a house in front of an audience. He backed the home onto the pad with Hal waving him in, and every man within fifty yards had an opinion.

“Little left,” said Marvin.

“Hold on,” said another. “She’s riding high.”

“She’s fine,” said Lance, a little defensively.

“She’s an inch off.”

“An inch is fine.”

“It’s not,” said Marvin, and Lance looked at him, and then at the level in Marvin’s hand, and then he went and got his jack.

That’s how it went all day. Men who had known each other forty years, arguing over a bubble in a vial. I have never loved a group of people so much.

By nine the piers were set and the home was blocked and leveled. By ten the tie-down straps were anchored, which Roy said the county would ask about, and which the county did.

By ten-thirty I was on my knees in the grass beside the front door, in my canvas work jacket, driving deck screws into the new steps.

I had never built steps before. Hal’s nephew, a lanky boy of nineteen, had cut the stringers on a sawhorse at six-thirty and shown me how to set them. I think he did it so I would have something to do with my hands.

I was grateful. Mom stood beside me in the sunshine, holding cold coffee she kept forgetting, and watching four men in ball caps and flannel shirts fit the beige skirting along the bottom of her new house, one panel at a time.

Nobody was talking to her. Nobody was making a fuss. They were simply working in front of her, the way people do when they know the worst thing you could do to a woman in her seventies is ask her how she feels.

“I don’t know how to thank them,” Mom said, very quietly.

“You don’t,” I said, and sank a screw. “You let them.”

She was silent for a while.

“Is that how Dewey did it?” she asked at last. “When the Sorensens lost the barn?”