The Driveway We Built Around Her Rocks

Spring

The snow went off in April, the way it does up here, all at once and muddy. The township road was a mess for two weeks.

The frost came out of our new drive and it held firm, just like the high ground I said it was.

The old drive, the one with the six feet Lorene had fought so hard for, was a wreck by May.

Nobody had driven on it all winter. Frost heaves, potholes, quack grass coming up through the gravel.

One Saturday morning in May, I was out by the gate pulling the dead leaves out of the ditch, and Lorene walked down from her house.

She stopped about ten feet away, with her hands in her coat pockets. The same red barn coat.

“Corinna,” she said.

“Morning, Lorene.”

She looked at the new drive for a long time. Then she looked at the sign on the post, and I saw her read it, and I saw her face move a little, not much.

“Mother always said it should have gone along the fence,” she said. “Did you know that?”

“Burl told us,” I said. “Last fall.”

She nodded. She kicked at the gravel with the toe of her boot. She was quiet so long I thought she was going to turn around and walk back up to her house.

“The garden spot behind my garage,” she said finally. “I can’t get the tiller back there anymore without going across that old drive, and it’s all heaved up. I was wondering if I could use your drive. Just to get back there. Just in the spring.”

There are a lot of things I could have said. I had a whole winter to think of them. Some of them were pretty good.

But I thought about their mother, and about Burl in the ditch, and about the plate coming back washed.

I thought about Emmett at the plasma table with the door shut. And I thought about how tired I was of being angry at somebody I had known twenty-four years.

“Yes,” I said. “You can use it.”

She let out a breath. Her shoulders came down. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be careful with it.”

“I know you will,” I said. Then I smiled at her, just a little. “You’ll just have to plow it.”

She looked at me for a long second. Then, for the first time in more than a year, my husband’s sister laughed.

“Fair enough,” she said.

She walked back up to her house. I went back to pulling leaves out of the ditch.

When Emmett came out of the shop at noon and asked what Lorene wanted, I told him, and he leaned on the fence post for a long while without saying anything.

Then he said, “Sunday dinner, you think?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Let’s start with the plowing.”

The next winter, there were two names on the plow man’s bill for the new drive. Hers and ours. Half and half. She paid every one of them on time.