Eleven Driveways Cleared by Noon

Nobody said a word. Not one person on that road said one word.

Hollis stood on his step for a long time. Then he came down it and started walking down his lane toward us. Slow. Hands at his sides. His boot laces dragging in the snow.

It took him a long time to walk that quarter mile, and the whole road watched him do it.

He came out to the end of his lane and stopped. He stood there at the edge of the road, maybe ten feet from the loader, and he looked up at me in the cab, and then he looked at Aunt Ione, and then down at the bare gravel at the end of her drive.

He took his cap off.

“Ione,” he said. His voice was rough from sleep. “How long were you stuck?”

Aunt Ione looked at him. She’s never been a woman to make a thing bigger or smaller than it is.

“Nine days, Hollis,” she said. “As of this morning.”

He closed his eyes for a second.

“Your pills,” he said. “Jessa said, before Christmas. Your mail.”

“They’re at the post office,” she said. “Jessa’s driving me in after dinner.”

Hollis stood there with his cap in his hands. I’ve known him my whole life, and I’d never seen him look like that, like a man who’d been handed something heavy and didn’t know where to set it down.

“Dad always pushed it right,” he said finally. “Forty years. I never once looked to see where it went.” He looked at my father. “Arvid, you always had it gone by morning. I never even knew you were doing it.”

“I know you didn’t,” Dad said. That was all.

“I should have known.” Hollis turned the cap around in his hands. “Jessa asked me twice. Twice. And I said I’d see.” He looked at me again. “You could’ve called the town on me.”

“I didn’t want the town,” I said. “I wanted her mailbox.”

I didn’t say anything else. I could have. I’d had all morning on the loader to think of things to say. But I looked at him standing there in his unlaced boots with his whole road watching him, and I didn’t need to say any of it. The road had said it already.

It was Aunt Ione who spoke next.

“Hollis,” she said, “your mother used to bring me rhubarb every June. Every June for thirty years, in a paper sack, and she’d stand right here at the end of my drive and talk my ear off.”

He looked up.

“You come for coffee,” Aunt Ione said. “Not today. You’ve got to sleep. But you come.”

Hollis swallowed. He put his cap back on, and then took it off again.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

He turned and looked down the road one more time, at all of them, at Merle and Sonja and the widower and the twins. He lifted his hand. It wasn’t much of a wave. More like a man owning up.

A couple of them lifted their hands back. Merle did. Sonja did, after a second.

Then Hollis walked back up his clean lane, slow, the whole quarter mile, and went inside, and the road began to go back into their houses.

I drove Aunt Ione into town that afternoon in my truck, while the sun was still high. The post office lady came around the counter to hand her the package herself.