The Booth Bench On Moms Porch

I leaned down and looked. In the wood of the frame, low on the end where the bench met the wall, somebody had cut letters with a pocketknife. They were small and square, the way a farmer cuts.

G.H. and D.H. And between them, a little crooked heart, and under the heart a date. 6/16/89.

My father carved that. I knew it as surely as I know my own handwriting. He carved it, I would guess, one Friday after the second old fashioned, while my mother was in the ladies’ room. She told me once, years ago, that she had spotted it the next week and said nothing, and sat on top of it for thirty-seven years like a hen on an egg.

I did not cry in the truck. I want that on the record. I put my face against the oak and breathed in, and it smelled of fryer oil and lemon polish and Dad’s Old Spice, which I swear to you is not possible after fourteen months.

Then I sat up, because we were coming to the mailbox.

My mother’s farmhouse is a white two-story with a gray porch that runs the width of the front. Dad built that porch in 1991, eight feet deep and twenty-four feet long, with a rail he spent a whole winter sanding. It has a swing at one end and two rocking chairs, and it faces west across the section road.

Mom was in the yard in her barn coat, raking the last of the maple leaves. She stopped when she saw the flatbed. She stopped altogether when she saw what was on it.

Scott cut the engine. For a moment there was no sound but a crow somewhere.

“Ashley Marie,” Mom said.

“I bought it,” I said. “It was eighty-five dollars.”

“Eighty-five.” She leaned the rake against the lilac. “That’s robbery. They’d have taken forty for that.”

I laughed. I could not help it. That is my mother, standing in front of her dead husband’s booth in a barn coat, haggling retroactively.

We got it off the truck, seven of us again, because Eldred and Lyle had followed in Lyle’s pickup and would not hear of going home. We carried it up the porch steps and set it against the front wall, under the window, where the swing used to hang before Dad moved it.

Mom did not say anything. She stepped past us and sat down, on the left, her side, her coat still on and her rake gloves still in her hand.

She laid her palm flat on the seat beside her, on his side. Then she bent over and ran her thumb under the frame until it found the letters.

When I came back up, she was sitting very straight, with her hands in her lap.

“Well,” she said. “It needs a good wipe.”

“I’ll get a rag.”

“And Ashley.” Her voice was perfectly level. “Thank you. I am not going to say anything more, because I’ll make a fool of myself, but thank you.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“No,” she said. “But I’m going to need a table.”

I thought she meant for the porch. I did not understand yet that my mother, who had never in her life asked a favor of a living person, had just decided to have people over.