Clare

SO HE BUILT that porch. Night after night, he was out there laying blocks, and I was pulling weeds from the flower beds, the two of us talking back and forth to each other the way married folks do, and the only one who ever stopped to visit was Henry Dees.

He came one evening just after supper. I was sitting on a kitchen chair in the yard snapping beans, a mess of Kentucky Wonders one of the girls who worked at Brookstone Manor had brought me from her mother’s garden. There were people there, you see, who cared for me—high school girls who called me Gram. They didn’t live in Gooseneck. For the most part they were girls from the Heights, holding down summer jobs, making a little spending money working at the nursing home. They had long hair that they had to tie back in ponytails or put up in hairnets if they worked in the kitchen, and they had tans from going to the swimming pool on their days off. Their boyfriends came by to get them after work, and I saw the way they flirted. They wrote the boys’ names on their paycheck envelopes and drew hearts around them. In the laundry, they played the radio, and I went home with their tunes in my head. I caught myself singing their words, and when I did, I felt the way I did that night at the Top Hat Inn when Ray kissed my hand. I was, as the girls at Brookstone Manor said about themselves, in L-U-V.

I was humming one of those songs to myself the evening Henry Dees came to see Ray. It was a song the girls sang over and over that summer, “Betcha by Golly, Wow,” a song about being in love forever. Oh, I know it sounds silly. An old dame like me. But that was the truth of my life then.

You have to know how wonderful it can be in summer in that part of Indiana. Early summer, I mean, before the heat comes and the muggy air. Bobwhites call from the meadows, and mourning doves coo. Chicory blooms on roadsides—patches of blue—and the brown-eyed susans put on their yellow pinwheels. The monarch butterflies come to feed on the milkweed, and hummingbirds hover over the orange-red bells of the trumpet creeper. It’s enough, my mother used to say, to make you sing at the kitchen pans. “That’s from a poem,” she told me. “I learned it in school.” Summer, she said—the heart of summer—it was enough to make you shout all over God’s Heaven.

Henry Dees spooked me. My head was full of that song, and I was bent over those beans, snapping them one, two, three, and he said my name. “Clare,” he said, and I near jumped out of my skin.

He was fiddling with his eyeglasses, trying to get them to set right on his face. He took them off and messed with the left temple. Then he gave up and put the glasses back on and left them to sag.

“You ought to go into Blank’s,” I told him. “Get those glasses straightened up. They’ll do it for free.”

“Screw’s loose.” He put a finger under that left temple and jiggled it up and down, showing me the play. “I thought maybe Ray had a screwdriver.”

“Itty-bitty screwdriver?” I said. “Well, I expect he might.”

Behind us, Ray hefted a block into place and then tamped it down with the butt of his trowel handle. He was laying a low wall that would front the porch. He’d set the leads at each end and then stretched a line tight between them. The secret, he’d told me, was to plan the wall out ahead of time, to see exactly how the blocks would fit, and then to lay them in plumb and level. “It takes a world of patience,” he’d said. He swung the trowel around and used the point to scrape away the mud that had oozed out. Then he slapped that mud back onto the mound on his mortarboard.

“Is that the professor?” he called over his shoulder. “Teach, what’s the good word?”

Henry Dees hesitated. He glanced at Ray and then back at me. He’d always broken my heart, truth be told. A man like him. Maybe he put me too much in mind of who I would have been without Ray. That night, I felt lucky. I thought I had everything just the way I wanted it. Betcha by golly, wow. A new porch, a garage, a mess of Kentucky Wonders, and summer in all its glory. “Go on,” I told Henry Dees. “Don’t be bashful. Tell Ray what you need.”