The Wooden Fire Truck for Wesley

Saturday

Darren called me that night from the plant to say he was sorry, and I told him to be easy on her. I did not hear from Dawn for six days.

On the following Saturday, at nine in the morning, I was standing in the shop with the woodstove ticking and a cup of coffee, drawing out a cutting list for nothing in particular, when I heard a car in the gravel. I looked out the window and it was her little silver car.

She sat in it for a long time with the engine off.

Then she got out. She was wearing jeans and an old gray sweatshirt, no makeup, her hair in a ponytail, and she was carrying two paper cups from the bakery in Millersburg. She walked across the yard to the shop door and stopped on the step as if she were not sure she was allowed.

“I brought you a coffee,” she said. “I didn’t know how you take it.”

“Black.”

“Then I got it right.” She held it out. Her hand was not quite steady. “Nancy, I’ve been thinking about the dress. About my mom. I called her last night.”

“What did she say?”

“She cried. And then she told me she’s still got it. The yellow dress. It’s in a cedar chest at her house.” Dawn’s voice caught, and she waited until it didn’t. “She said she kept it because it was the best thing she ever made, and she never knew I hated it.”

“You didn’t hate it.”

“No. I hated Courtney. And I took it out on a dress for thirty years.” She looked past me at the bench, where a plain pine board sat across two sawhorses. “Is that the next one?”

“That’s just a board. I haven’t decided what it is yet.” She stood there for another moment, turning the cup in her hands.

“Nancy,” she said. “Would you teach me to sand the next one?”

I want to tell you that I said something wise. I did not. I looked at her standing in my doorway in an old sweatshirt, a woman who had spent thirty years afraid of a yellow dress, and I just reached over to the pegboard and took down a sanding block, and a sheet of 120-grit, and I held them out.

“Wrap it like this,” I said. “Fold it in thirds. Go with the grain, not across it. Let the paper do the work.”

She took the block. She laid her hand flat on the pine and pushed it, long and slow, down the length of the board, and a little curl of dust rose up in the light from the window.

“Like that?”

“Just like that.” We worked all morning. She was clumsy at first, as everyone is, and she pressed too hard and left a low spot near the end that I had to show her how to feather out. By eleven she had it.

By noon she had stopped talking about the dress and started talking about Wesley, and what he had said at breakfast, and how he had insisted on sleeping with the bell next to his pillow.

The next one turned out to be a toy barn, with a hayloft door that swings, for Darren’s niece Maddie, who would turn three in January. Dawn sanded every piece of it herself.

That afternoon she asked me to follow her home for lunch. When I pulled up behind her, Wesley was already in the driveway with the truck, ringing the bell, and four kids from up and down the street had come running.

I got out of the Chevy and stood by the mailbox, and I watched a woman in an old gray sweatshirt walk over to the push handle with a line of children in front of her.

“Two at a time, everybody,” she said. “Two at a time. Hands inside.” Wesley looked back at me over his shoulder, grinning, with the crown still crooked on his head.

I did not say a word. I just let the bell ring.