The Hoop Across From the School

The pour

I called the ready-mix plant Tuesday afternoon. I ordered a yard and three quarters, which is what you need for a ten by ten slab at four inches plus a footing that size. That is a short load, and they charge you extra for it, and I paid it without arguing, which the dispatcher told me was a first.

The truck came Wednesday morning at eight, right as the buses were pulling up across the street.

You would have thought it was a parade. Every kid getting off those buses stopped on the sidewalk to watch that big drum turning and the chute swinging out over my yard. A few of the teachers came out on the steps with their coffee.

I had set the anchor cage in the hole the night before, hung it from a two-by-four across the top so it would sit at the right height. The driver filled the footing first. I checked the bolts with a level and nudged the cage until it was dead plumb.

Then he filled the forms. I raked the concrete out and screeded it off with a straight two-by-four, working it back and forth across the top of the forms. Then I floated it smooth and ran an edger around the sides.

A man I used to work with at the elevator drove by and stopped. He leaned out his window. “Orvin,” he said. “You need a hand?”

“I’ve got it,” I said.

“You don’t look like you’ve got it,” he said, and he parked and got out and grabbed a float, and we finished that slab together in about forty minutes. He did not ask what it was for. Men like that never do.

By nine o’clock it was done. A square of wet gray concrete in my front yard, smooth as a tabletop, with four steel bolts sticking up out of it near the back edge.

The waiting

The anchor kit instructions say to let the concrete cure at least seventy-two hours before you bolt the pole on. I would have waited a week if it had said a week. You do not rush concrete. It does not care how much you want it.

I covered the slab with plastic that night because it was supposed to get down to thirty-eight. I wet it down in the mornings when the sun came up, the old way, so it would cure slow and hard.

Brody came by every morning before school. Kirsten was on early shifts that week, so he had been walking over to our house for breakfast anyway. He would eat whatever Lena put in front of him, standing up, and then go out and stand by the slab.

He would press one finger to the corner, very gently, like he was checking a sleeping baby for a fever.

“Now?” he would say.

“Not yet,” I said.

“When?”

“Saturday,” I said. “Saturday afternoon.”

Thursday morning he pressed his finger to the corner and then looked up at me. “It’s hard,” he said. “It’s hard already.”

“Hard on top,” I said. “Concrete keeps getting stronger for a month. You want it strong enough to hold a pole when you hang on the rim.”

“I don’t hang on the rim.”

“You will,” I said, and he grinned for the first time that week.