The quarry truck was already pulling away when I got home that Thursday, its empty box still tipped halfway up, and the pile it left behind sat across our driveway like a wall.
I parked on the shoulder of the township road because there was nowhere else to park.
I got out in my work boots and my bus garage jacket and just stood there looking at it for a long minute.
Fourteen tons of riprap. That is what the slip said later, the one Lorene left taped to her own mailbox post like a receipt for a cake. Gray granite, broken and sharp, some pieces bigger than a dishwasher.
It ran from her side of the drive all the way across to the ditch on ours.
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You could not have walked a wheelbarrow through it, let alone a pickup, let alone a trailer with a lathe on it.
Emmett was standing at the near edge of the pile with his hands in his coat pockets.
He had his shop cap on, the gray one with the oil stain on the bill, and he did not turn around when he heard my door shut.
His sister was standing on the other side of the rocks, on the gravel turnout by the mailboxes, with her arms folded over her chest.
She was wearing the red barn coat their mother used to wear to feed the cats.
“Lorene,” I said. “What did you do?”
“I put my property back the way it’s supposed to be,” she said.
“That six feet is mine. The old survey says so. Mother had it drawn up in 1984, and you can look at it yourself if you can read.”
I want to say right here that I have known Lorene Pikula for twenty-four years. She was at my wedding.
She brought her green bean hotdish to every Easter dinner. She is not a monster, and I did not think so that morning either.
But I had never seen her face look like that. It was closed up like a barn in January, everything latched and nothing getting in.
Emmett finally spoke. “Lorene, I’ve got Burl coming at two for his splitter. I’ve got a fellow from Cherry coming tomorrow for his trailer hitch. How are they supposed to get in?”
“I guess that’s your problem,” she said. “You’ve got the shop. You figure it out.”
Then she turned around and walked across the turnout to her own back door, and the screen door slapped shut behind her, and that was the whole conversation.