The Driveway We Built Around Her Rocks

Burl again

The second Saturday in November, Burl came by in his old Chevy, without the trailer.

He drove right up the new drive and parked by the shop and got out with a coffee can in his hands.

Inside the coffee can was a pound of venison sausage his grandson had made, and folded up underneath it, a check for the splitter repair plus twenty extra dollars. On the memo line it said “for the jack.”

“I split four cords with that splitter,” he told Emmett. “Runs better than new. I’m set till April.”

Then he turned to me and gave me back my coat, washed and folded, the one I had put around his shoulders in the road.

He had kept it all that time and had not known how to bring it back without a reason.

“You folks didn’t owe me that,” he said. “I’m the one who drove in the ditch.”

“You were in the ditch because of us,” I said. “We owed you a lot more than a coat.”

He looked down the new drive toward the road for a while.

Then he said, “Your mother-in-law would have liked this. She always said Emmett’s dad should have run the drive along the fence in the first place. Said it was better ground.”

I had never heard that. Emmett had not either. He laughed out loud, the first real laugh I had heard out of him in a month.

The sign

The plasma table that Saturday afternoon, when Emmett disappeared into the shop for two hours, had been cutting a sign.

He did not show it to me right away. He waited until the first snow, the week before Thanksgiving, when the plow man came and did the new drive for the first time. Then he walked me out to the hayfield gate.

He had set a new steel post beside our mailbox, and on top of it was a little sign, maybe ten inches across, cut from quarter-inch plate and painted dark green. It was shaped like a birch leaf.

In the middle of the leaf he had cut two letters, clean and square. C.V. My initials. Underneath, smaller, it said the year.

“What’s this for?” I said, and my voice came out all wrong.

“It’s your road,” Emmett said. “You thought of it. You drew it on the propane bill. You ran the machine. I just followed you with the box blade.”

“You built it too.”

“I built it behind you,” he said. “That’s different. I’ve been walking behind you for twenty-four years, Corinna, and I never once had to worry about where we were going.”

I stood in the snow by the hayfield gate and cried like a little girl. He put his arm around me and let me.

The plow man drove by and lifted two fingers off the wheel and did not slow down, bless him.

That sign is still there. The paint has faded some. Every time I turn in at the gate after a long day at the bus garage, I look at it, and I think about my husband at his plasma table with the door shut so I would not hear.

The plowing, again

We paid the plow man that whole winter, every push, forty-five dollars, for the new drive. It was ours. It was our bill. I never once minded writing that check.

Lorene had her own short apron from the road to her garage, and she had a man come do it for her. We saw his truck go by. Nobody said anything about anything.

Emmett did not go up to her house all winter. I want to be honest about that. I did not either.

It was a long, quiet winter between those two houses, and it hurt him more than he let on.

At Christmas I made a plate of my mother’s sugar cookies, the ones with the almond frosting, and walked them up to her back door and set them on the step and knocked and walked away before she could answer.

The plate came back three days later, washed, sitting on our new mailbox post under the birch-leaf sign. There was no note. But the plate came back. I took that as something.