Brooke had gotten out of the truck by then. She came up and stood next to Brad and took his arm.
“He hasn’t slept, Carol,” she said quietly. “He keeps saying, what if Dad doesn’t come home. He said it in his sleep last night. Three times.”
I looked at my son.
And I saw him at four years old, up on his father’s shoulders, waving at those letters.
He wasn’t cruel. Brad has never been cruel.
He was scared.
And he’d done exactly what his father would have done. He grabbed a tool and started fixing the thing in front of him.
Even if it was the wrong thing.
The difference was that Arlo would have asked me first.
“Brad,” I said. “I need you to hear something. And then we’re done talking about it.”
He nodded.
“You don’t get to decide your father isn’t coming home. Not you. Not me. Not the doctors. Him. He decides that. And until he does, this place stays exactly the way he left it.”
“Okay,” Brad said.
“And the next time you’re scared, you call your mother. You do not call a spray crew.”
He laughed then. A wet, broken laugh.
Brooke laughed too.
And I put my arms around my son, right there in front of twenty-two teenagers and a Methodist youth pastor.
He held on for a long time.
He smelled like his father’s Old Spice. He started wearing it in high school because he thought nobody would notice.
I noticed.
When he finally let go, he looked back over at the northwest corner.
“What’s that?”
“That’s where we ran out of hill,” I said. “Nobody’s going up a ladder on that slope. It’ll keep.”
He looked at that gray strip for a long time.
And he didn’t say anything else about it.
He and Brooke stayed until the sun went down. They carried empty pails. They folded drop cloths. They hauled trash.
Brad didn’t pick up a brush.
I didn’t ask him to.
The kids finished the north side at a quarter to seven.
They all stood out in the yard and looked at it. Somebody started clapping. And then all of them were clapping. The dads too. And Merle, still up in the lift basket.
Twenty-two kids. One day.
A red barn. All but one corner.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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