“Morning.”
“I’d like to try that again.”
I waited.
“If you’ll let me.”
He turned the cap in his hands.
“I’ve had a week to work on it.”
Then one corner of his mouth moved.
“My mother helped.”
I almost smiled.
“She wasn’t gentle.”
“I can imagine.”
He pointed toward that bare place near the machine shed.
“My dad stood right over there in 1961 and watched them sell his plow.”
I followed his finger.
“Not one soul put a hand out to him,” Ron said. “Not his brothers. Not the church. Nobody.”
His voice roughened.
“I was five.”
He looked toward the house.
“And I decided something standing there.”
I waited.
“If a child of mine was ever going under, I’d be there with money before they had to ask.”
For the first time, his decision at Easter made sense in a way it never had before.
“Kim was going under,” he said. “Jeff was. Stacy had those loans.”
Then he looked at me.
“You two weren’t.”
He gave a small shake of his head.
“So I figured I was finished with you.”
The sentence hurt him as soon as he heard himself say it.
“I had it all worked out. Help was for people who were drowning.”
His eyes dropped.
“Never occurred to me it might be for the ones swimming hard too.”
Neither of us spoke for a moment.
“I gave the others the farm ground,” he said. “I gave you two a pat on the head.”
He swallowed.
“And called it a compliment.”
His gaze met mine.
“You thanked me.”
I started to answer.
He raised one hand.
“Let me finish. I’ve only got it memorized the one way.”
It was the closest thing to a joke I had ever heard him make.
“I’m not writing you a check.”
That surprised me.
“I could,” he continued. “Judy wanted to bring one this morning.”
He looked toward the truck.
“But you’d be right to tear it up.”
“Ron—”
“No.”
He pointed toward the house.
“You bought this place with diner tips and a bass boat and two years of nights.”
His voice settled.
“A check from me now would just be me trying to put my name on it after you finished the hard part.”
Then he looked up at the porch.
“What I can do is build.”
He stepped closer to one support.
“That front beam is rotted through. Porch posts are standing on almost nothing.”
He glanced toward the kitchen window.
“My mother means to sit out here.”
I laughed despite myself.
“She does.”
“That porch is going to hurt somebody if we leave it.”
He put his cap back on.
“I’d take it as a kindness if you let me work on this house.”
I blinked.
“Saturdays,” he said. “As long as it takes.”
I could not get my voice working.
So I nodded.
Ron turned toward the porch.
“Nate!”
Nate leaned out from the doorway.
“Bring me that jack.”
Then Ron pointed toward the worm-drive saw.
“And don’t touch my saw.”
Nate stared at him.
“I’m thirty-six years old, Dad.”
“Then you’re old enough to know better.”
Ron came out for eleven Saturdays.
I know because I marked every one on the feed-store calendar hanging from the nail where the old seed-company calendar had been.
The first three Saturdays belonged to the porch.
Ron and Nate raised the porch roof an eighth of an inch at a time.
They supported it with cribbing blocks, removed the rotten posts, and replaced the front beam.
Ron refused to use treated pine where his grandfather had used fir.
He located tongue-and-groove fir flooring at a lumberyard forty miles away.
He paid for it himself.
When I objected, he said, “That’s lumber. Not a check.”
I let it go.
He turned replacement porch posts on his lathe at home to match the one original post that could be saved.
The next Saturday, he brought them wrapped in a moving blanket as carefully as if they were furniture.
Or babies.
The fourth and fifth Saturdays were windows.