The next Saturday, I drove out at seven a.m. Nate was already there working.
At twenty minutes to seven, he told me, a truck had turned in at the lane.
His father’s.
The truck bed was full. Sawhorses. A table saw under a tarp. Two twenty-ton bottle jacks. A stack of cribbing blocks. The old worm-drive saw Nate had been forbidden to touch as a boy. And a four-foot level in a canvas sleeve.
When I walked up, Ron was lying on his back under the porch. All I could see were his boots.
He slid out.
He had cobwebs in his eyebrows. He stood up slowly, the way a man his size has to.
And he took his cap off.
“Emily,” he said. “I’d like to try that again. If you’ll let me. I’ve had a week to work on it. And I had my mother helping me. And she wasn’t gentle.”
“All right,” I said.
He pointed with his cap. At that place in the grass where there was nothing.
“My dad stood right over there in 1961 and watched them sell his plow,” Ron said. “Not one soul put a hand out to him. Not his brothers. Not the church. Nobody.”
He turned the cap in his hands.
“I was five years old. And I made up my mind standing there. If a child of mine was ever going under, I’d be there with money in my hand before they ever had to ask.”
He looked at me.
“Kim was going under. Jeff was. Stacy had those loans. You two weren’t. So I figured I was done with you.”
He shook his head slowly.
“I had it all worked out that help is for people who are drowning. It never once came into my head that help is for the ones who are swimming hard, too.”
He looked at the porch.
“I gave you two a pat on the head. And I gave them the farm ground. And I called it a compliment. And you thanked me for it.”
His voice got rough.
“I’ve thought about that thank you every night this week.”
“Ron—”
“Let me finish. I’ve only got it memorized the one way.”
It was the closest thing to a joke I ever heard that man make.
“I’m not going to write you a check,” he said. “I could. Judy wanted to bring one this morning. But you’d be right to tear it up. And I’d be buying my way out cheap.”
He looked up at the house.
“You two bought my grandfather’s house with tip money and a bass boat. A check from me now would just be me trying to put my name on it.”
He put his cap back on.
“What I can do is build. That front beam is rotted clean through, and the porch posts are standing on nothing. That porch is going to hurt somebody. And my mother means to sit on it.”
He looked at me straight.
“I’d take it as a kindness if you’d let me work on this house. Saturdays. As long as it takes.”
I couldn’t talk. I just nodded.
“Nate,” Ron called. “Bring me that jack. And don’t you touch my saw.”
“I’m thirty-six years old, Dad.”
“Then you’re old enough to know better.”
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