My father is rebuilding the wooden steps leading to the front door. A tree branch fell in yesterday’s storm, and splintered the original stairs to bits. I’ve watched Dad build with wood before. He can knock together small projects easily. There have been other, larger ones, too, which I have never seen. At the high school downtown, Dad has directed students in constructing stage sets for the theater department’s plays. It’s a part of his life I don’t know. I’ve never seen a production there, nor will I even see a photograph of his work, until I’m an adult, and he is long dead.
I want to watch Dad as he kneels to his work on the front steps, but this day he seems not to welcome it. It isn’t so much his brusque tone, as the tension in his shoulders and arms as he moves. He drops the small bundle of unpainted boards onto the cement apron, and the hollow clatter feels like a dismissal. I will not see Dad wield a hammer and nails again, but I remember the sound of metal hitting metal as he proceeds, an angry sound.
The splintered steps are necessary. Mom has warned us girls against going through the front door until Dad tells us it is safe. The fall from the stoop to the cement apron isn’t far, except for the legs of a 7-year-old-child. Something about not having front steps feels like an emergency. We have the back door and its postage stamp of porch, but from the gravel street in front of our house, the missing porch steps are alarming, like the sight of a broken-out front tooth. An unacceptable gap that is something to hide. When I lose a front tooth just before school picture day, Mom tells me sternly that I am not to smile with my lips parted when the photographer asks me to say, “cheese.”
Dad has to build the steps because there is no one else to do it, because hiring somebody costs money, because he is the one who is supposed to fix things. Usually, Mom is the one to point out what my father is to fix. Either Dad doesn’t notice the problem, or he is willing to tolerate the broken or imperfect much longer than my mother can live with it. Dad can solder, tack down a loose shingle, saw, and hammer, and glue. He can put things together. But he’s not built for labor, with his sensitive hands, fragile skin, and history of enlarged heart. I have rarely seen him run, never hit a baseball, nor do lifts on a chin-up bar. I remember the hand grip strengtheners in his first apartment after the divorce, and the chest expander with rows of resistance springs connecting two handles. I remember my sister and I seated on the toboggan, crying out for Dad to pull us and run! and the wheezing way his voice came back to us, “I am running!”
My father has to rebuild these steps, even though, as it turns out, he won’t need to use them for much longer. One thing that is unusual about the broken porch is that neither Mom nor Dad was the one to point it out. It was my sisters and me who, where we were in the living room near the front door, heard the crash of the tree branch just after the boom of thunder. I remember the rattle of the screen door when the branch struck it on the way down. We ran to the windows to see what was trying to break in. Wet black bark and leaves loomed, reaching. It looked like an entire tree had fallen across the front door. But Mom and Dad didn’t hear it, or our shrieks of surprise. It was a shock to go into the kitchen and see only the looks of annoyance on their faces. That was the first time I recall my parents in deep discussion, apparent serious talk that seemed to shut out all other things. Talk that was more important than the house falling down. Perhaps that was a lead-up to Dad’s leaving. I didn’t think of it as a clue, when I looked back on it later. There had been plenty of others: tiny quarrels which Dad lost quickly, issues about money, issues about providing better, issues about seeing what things Mom saw were wrong. The deep talk in the kitchen that day was secondary to the chaos at the front door.
I didn’t see Dad’s cross undertaking of rebuilding a set of steps he wouldn’t use as a sign of the change to come, either. He finished them, cut up the wayward branch, cleared things away in his usual manner. When he moved out of the house, I was as blindsided as my parents had been by lightning hitting the tree and bringing a branch down onto the steps, just missing the house. An impact concealed beneath ongoing thunder.
fresh out of my mind 