The ramp
He started it that Saturday.
He went to the lumber yard in town and came back with treated two-by-sixes, a bag of concrete, and a box of deck screws, and he paid for it with his own money from the first week at the feed mill. I know because I saw the receipt on the counter. He did not leave it there to be seen, either. He just forgot it.
He measured the rise off the back stoop three times. Twenty-one inches. He said the code for a ramp is one inch of rise for every foot of run, so it had to be twenty-one feet long, with a landing where it turned.
I said, “Your daddy would have eyeballed it.”
He said, “Daddy would have eyeballed it and you’d have rolled off the end into the lilacs.”
That made me laugh, the first real laugh in that house since January.
He dug the post holes by hand because the ground was still half frozen in the low spots. Ada came up the road with a thermos of coffee and a plate of cinnamon rolls and sat on a lawn chair in her winter coat to supervise.
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“That post’s not plumb,” she told him.
He put the level on it. It was not plumb. He fixed it.
“How’d you know?” he asked her.
“I was married to a carpenter for fifty-one years,” Ada said. “His name was Bud and he was terrible at it, so I learned to watch.”
It took him three Saturdays and most of the evenings in between. The pastor’s son came out one Saturday to help him set the long stringers. Two of the men from the feed mill came the last weekend and helped with the rail.
When he finished, he painted it gray to match the house trim, and he put that grit tape on the boards so they would not be slick in the rain.
The first trip down
The first Sunday in April, I walked down that ramp to go to church.
I used my cane by then, not the walker. Garrett walked beside me with one hand under my elbow, not holding, just there, the way you walk beside a child learning a bicycle.
The daffodils Ray planted along the drive were up. Ada was waiting at the bottom in her Buick with the engine running.
At the bottom of the ramp, I stopped and turned around and looked at it. Twenty-one feet of gray boards and a rail and a landing, built by my son’s hands.
“Well?” he said.
“It’s plumb,” I said.
He smiled. It was the first time in a long time I had seen him smile all the way to his eyes.
At church that morning we sang “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” and I could not get through the second verse. Ada handed me a tissue from her purse without even looking over. She always has one ready.