The man had already dragged the second stringer up the bank by the time I got there. It lay in the grass beside the branch with its pegs sticking out like broken teeth, and the decking boards were piled crooked against a pine where he had thrown them.
I was still in my scrubs. Grandpa had called the clinic on a Thursday afternoon in April. I was out back walking a boarder dog along the fence, and Mrs. Whaley from the front desk came out the back door and handed me the phone with her hand over it, which she never does.
“They’re taking out my bridge, Leanne,” Grandpa said. That was all. He didn’t ask me to come. He has never once in my life asked me to come anywhere, so I handed Mrs. Whaley the leash and drove.
It is eleven miles from the clinic in Warsaw out to the homeplace. I made it in about nine. The pine pollen was so thick that week my wipers smeared yellow paste across the glass.
Grandpa was standing at the edge of the yard with his hands in his pockets. He is seventy nine. He is thin now in a way he wasn’t five years ago, and he had on his old plaid shirt and the faded navy cap he wears everywhere, the plain one with nothing written on it.
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He didn’t look at me when I walked up. He was watching the man. Mr. Pridgen from down the road had seen the loader go in, called him, and carried him out there.
The man was a stranger to me, somebody with a little tracked loader and a trailer from over toward Faison. He was working the last of the old decking loose one board at a time, and every board came away with a dry crack.
“Sir,” I said. “Sir, would you hold off a minute.”
He shut the machine down and looked at me with the patience of a man who gets paid by the job. “Ma’am, the lady paid me to take it out. Nine hundred dollars, take it out and haul it off. I’m about done.”
The Lady Who Paid Him
The lady was my sister in law, Kristen Tart, and she was coming down the porch steps with her arms folded.
I want to be fair to her from the start, because the rest of this only works if I am. Kristen is thirty six. She married my brother Brett eleven years ago and has never once felt at home here.
She painted the shutters and pulled up Grandma Loretta’s old daylilies for something from a catalog that died the first August. She is not a mean woman, and I don’t think any of us ever helped her feel at home.
“Leanne,” she said. “Don’t start.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re about to. It’s an eyesore. It’s a pile of old boards over a ditch, and the boys play down there, and I’m not going to stand at that window every afternoon wondering which one of them goes through it. I paid nine hundred dollars to be rid of it, and it’s done.”
I looked at Grandpa. He still hadn’t moved. He was looking at the gap over the branch where his bridge had been since before my daddy could tie his own shoes.
“It’s not a ditch,” I said. “It’s the branch.”
“It’s a ditch with water in it,” Kristen said. “And it’s not your yard.”
That was the part that stopped me, because she was right about it.