The Ramp My Brother Built for Dad

I found a spot at the end, by a ditch full of chicory, and got the wheelchair out of the trunk and set the brakes.

Getting Dad from the car to the chair takes about two minutes when I do it right. I’m a respiratory therapist.

I’ve done ten thousand of these transfers. He put his arms around my neck and we pivoted together, like a slow dance.

“Ready?” I asked.

“I’ve been ready,” he said.

I pushed him down the gravel drive and around the side of the cabin.

It was new, with tan siding and green trim, and the lawn was still patchy where they’d seeded it. A deck ran the whole length of the lake side.

And at the end of the deck, there was a ramp. A wooden ramp with handrails, the lumber still yellow and new.

It ran from the lawn up to the deck at a gentle slope, exactly the slope a wheelchair needs.

I stopped at the bottom of it. My hands went tight on the handles. Dad looked at the ramp too, and then he looked up the ramp, and he didn’t say anything.

I found out later that Terry built that ramp the first month after they closed on the cabin.

He told Jolie it was for Dad. He told his friends it was for Dad. He told everyone he was going to bring Dad up.

He never did. Not once in two summers. I believe he meant to. I believe that every weekend he told himself next weekend.

I believe it got harder every month the money went out on the fifth.

I started up the ramp. It was a sunny July afternoon, and the lake behind the deck was so blue it looked painted. The boards made a hollow sound under the wheels.

Terry was at the grill on the deck in a gray polo shirt, holding a pair of tongs over a row of bratwurst.

He’s a heavy man now, heavier than Dad ever was. He looked up and saw us and stopped turning the brats.

He just looked at us. He didn’t move. The tongs stayed in his hand, and the smoke came up around him, and he stood there like a man who had just heard his name called in a place he didn’t expect.

I didn’t rush. I kept my face calm. I pushed my father up that ramp the way I push every patient I’ve ever pushed, steady, one board at a time, with my weight behind it and my eyes ahead.

There were two men in lawn chairs near the railing. One of them was Hal Dvorak.

Hal has been Terry’s friend since high school wrestling. He did twenty-two years in the Iowa National Guard and retired a sergeant.

Hal looked over at us. He looked at my dad in the wheelchair, thin as a fence post, in his old red plaid flannel shirt and the plain navy cap.

I watched Hal see the cap and the shirt and the age of him, and I watched him understand.

Hal put his hands on the arms of his lawn chair. He set his feet. And slowly, without a word, he started to stand.

The man next to him, Hal’s brother-in-law, saw him do it and started to stand too.

Nobody told them to. Nobody said a word. Down on the lawn, an older man by the cornhole boards saw them stand, and he stood up straight. A man by the cooler took his cap off.