Thirty Neighbors Built Mom a Home

“I think that’s exactly how.”

“Then I suppose I can.”

Around noon Leona Henke started setting up on the flatbed.

I have to tell you about the food, because that is how this county speaks, in covered dishes. There were pork steaks done on two borrowed grills.

There was fried chicken from the Casey’s on the highway, which Hal had bought three boxes of and denied it. There were green beans with bacon, and corn pudding, and a sweet potato casserole somebody’s daughter had made with those little marshmallows, and three kinds of pie.

There was a pan of biscuits, stone cold by that time, that Marvin ate all by himself standing up.

Mom was handed a plate by a woman she had known since grade school. They did not say a word. They stood shoulder to shoulder in the grass and ate, and the woman patted Mom’s arm twice.

I was carrying water to the crew when I noticed what the men were doing at the back of the lot. They had the little porch roof half up. They were bracing the rafters with scrap lumber, and a boy about twelve was holding a plumb line like it was the most important job in the world.

His grandfather stood behind him and said nothing, just nodded, and the boy held it steady for nearly an hour without being asked to move.

I thought of Dad then. I’d been thinking of him all morning, but that was the first time I let myself.

He died four years before that, in March, of a stroke, at the kitchen table, with a cup of coffee in front of him. He was sixty-eight. Mom had spent the four years since in a rented house that still had his boots by the back door.

At two o’clock, I went into the rented house for the last time that day. Curtis had not come. Nobody had expected him.

The house was bare. Mom had cleaned it down to the baseboards the night before, scrubbing the same linoleum she’d scrubbed for twenty-two years, because she said she wasn’t going to leave anybody a mess.

In the living room, alone against the wall, sat Dad’s brown recliner. It was from the early nineties, the arms rubbed pale where his hands had gone, with a dent in the headrest the shape of the back of his head. Mom had not let anybody sit in it since the funeral.

Four men came in behind me. I hadn’t heard them. Marvin, Roy, Hal, and a farmer named Emery Siebert who I’d gone to school with. They stood in the doorway and took their hats off.

“We’ll take it,” Hal said, gently.

“It’s heavy,” I said. It was a stupid thing to say.

“We know, Tina.”

They lifted it between the four of them, and they carried it out through that house the way you’d carry a person.

Across the pasture, up the new steps, through the new door, they walked Dad’s chair, while a hundred feet of grass went quiet around them. People stopped eating. Nobody told them to. A man took off his cap by the flatbed.

They set it by the front window. They squared it to the glass. Hal stood back and looked at it and turned it a quarter inch.