Thirty Neighbors Built Mom a Home

Mom came up the steps behind them, slowly, one hand on the rail I had made. She stood in the doorway and looked at the chair for a long time.

Then she walked across the floor, the first steps she had taken in that house, and laid her hand on the arm of it, right where the fabric was worn pale. Not on the seat. Just her hand.

She stood like that for what felt like a minute. Nobody breathed.

“It’s a good fit,” she said finally, to the room. “Isn’t it? He’d have liked the window.”

“He’d have brought a level,” Hal said, and everyone laughed, and Mom laughed too, and put her other hand over her eyes.

Leona’s daughter set the quilt rack beneath the window, the old walnut one Mom’s mother had brought from Gasconade County, with a folded coverlet over the top rail. It was the first thing anybody had thought to bring that was not furniture for sitting.

Mom touched the edge of the cloth. She did not say anything for a while.

“Well,” she said. “It’s home enough.”

At four o’clock the water was running. It came out brown for about ten seconds and then ran clear, and a cheer went up that must have carried a mile.

Roy flipped the main breaker, and the lights came on in every room of the single-wide, bright against the daylight, and Mom’s old kitchen clock began to tick on the wall as if it had been there for years.

I stood in the middle of that tiny mauve-countered kitchen and thought, This is it. We did it.

We had done it in one day. The home was set, blocked, skirted, wired and plumbed, and the county sanitarian’s signature was drying on a form on my dashboard.

By five, the crowd was thinning. The ones with cattle to feed had gone. The ones with kids had gone. A handful of the old guard stayed behind with Mom, sitting on overturned buckets in the grass.

I made a list in my head of what I had left. The roof money was gone. I had about two hundred dollars in checking and a truck payment due Tuesday. I felt no regret at all.

Roy came across the lot wiping his hands on a rag.

“We’re short,” he said.

“Short what?”

“The skirting. We’ve got one panel short on the north side. And the porch light.” He nodded at the little bare box over the door. “Hal ordered a fixture on Thursday and the supplier said Saturday morning. It’s not here.”

“It’s fine. Mom can live with a dark porch for a day.”

“She can,” he said. “I’d rather not say she has to.”

He wouldn’t look at me quite straight. I did not understand that then.

“Hal says somebody’s bringing it,” Roy added.

“Who?”

“Hal says somebody.”

That was all. He went back to the rafters.

Hal, in the course of that day, had told me nothing about Curtis. But Hal knew things. Hal had known Curtis’s father, and had sat across from Curtis at the sale barn for twenty years, and in a county this size, a man cannot carry three properties without somebody noticing when his taxes come due. I was to learn all of that later.