On the Thursday before our daughter’s wedding, at twenty minutes to eight in the morning, the president of the Larkspur Glen homeowners association stood on my front walk with a clipboard and told my husband his wheelchair ramp had to come down by Friday at five o’clock.
I was in my robe. I had a dish towel over my shoulder and a pan of biscuits in the oven, and I had not yet had my coffee.
Denton sat in the open front door at the top of the ramp, in his gray work shirt, with the morning sun on the side of his face.
Gordon did not come up the ramp. He stopped at the bottom of it and held out a sheet of paper the way a man hands a ticket through a car window.
“Mrs. Alcott. Mr. Alcott. This is the formal notice. Unapproved exterior structure visible from the street, Section 9. It has to be removed by five o’clock tomorrow, or the Association assesses two hundred dollars a day and places a lien.”
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“Gordon,” I said, “our daughter is getting married in this yard on Sunday.”
“I’m aware of the wedding.”
“There will be a hundred and ten people on that lawn.”
“Then they can use the garage door,” he said. “There’s a perfectly good garage.”
He said it pleasantly. That is what I still cannot get past. He had the voice of a man reading a menu.
Denton said, very quietly, “The garage has a two-step landing.”
“I am sorry for what happened to you, Mr. Alcott,” Gordon said. “But this is a neighborhood. It is not a veterans hospital. People paid for the way this street looks, and that thing is the first thing you see when you turn in.”
He laid the notice on the second board of the ramp, and he set his pen on top of it so it would not blow away. Then he walked back to his golf cart at the curb and drove off down Larkspur Lane with his little orange flag snapping on the antenna.
I am going to tell you the rest of this plainly, because some of it does not make me look good.
I am Mara Alcott. I am fifty-four years old. I run the lunch line at Copperline Elementary School, here in Copperline, Georgia, and I have done it for nineteen years. I have never once been late. I was about to be very late that morning, and I did not care.
I read the notice twice, standing on my own walk. Then I turned around and looked at the ramp the way Gordon had looked at it. It was not pretty. It was pressure-treated yellow pine, still the pale green of new lumber, running twenty feet across the front of our brick house to a porch door that sits thirty inches off the ground. It was not yet five weeks old.
Let me back up.
My husband Denton is fifty-six. In February of 1991 he was a twenty-one-year-old Army specialist driving a supply truck across the Iraqi desert a few days after the shooting stopped. It was dark. A berm that was not on any map gave way under the front wheel, and the truck rolled. Three men in the cab behind him lived. He lived. He did not walk again.
He will tell you that part in one sentence and then change the subject.