The Ramp the Board Ordered Torn Down

He came home to Copperline in a hospital bed on the back of a church van. I was nineteen, and I went to see him in his mother’s front room with a plate of banana pudding because that was what you did. I did not leave for a very long time. We married two years later at the front of the same church, with the men carrying him up the three steps and down them again.

Two years ago, on his disability pay and my cafeteria wages, we bought a house in Larkspur Glen. Brick fronts, crape myrtles, mailboxes that match. Five stone steps up to the porch, and no way in for a man in a chair except people.

Then our daughter got engaged. Ruthanne is twenty-six, a dental hygienist in the next town over, and her young man, Sawyer, is a lineman for the electric cooperative, twenty-eight years old, big hands, shy as a deer. He asked Denton’s permission on our front steps, with Denton sitting at the bottom of them looking up.

That decided it. Ruthanne said, “Mama, I want to get married in the yard, with a ramp. I want my daddy at the front of it. Not carried to the front of it. At the front.” Every venue in three counties had a step somewhere, so we gave her our yard.

So the church men built the ramp.

There is a man named Hal, sixty-eight, foreman of the Baptist men’s building crew, who wears a carpenter’s pencil behind his ear even to funerals. Eleven of them came on the second Saturday of April with a trailer of lumber from the feed store and a thermos of coffee, and they built it in a day.

They did not ask anybody. They did it out of love, and they did not know the book.

I filled out the form that Monday. The Association requires an Architectural Review Request for any exterior change, and in the space for “Description of Work” I wrote, in my best handwriting: “Wheelchair ramp for husband, disabled veteran. Already built. Please advise if any change is needed.”

I did not hear back. Not one word, for thirty-two days.

I should have called. I did not, because I assumed no human being alive could read that line and want to do anything but say, “Good for you.”

So that Thursday, on my front walk, with the notice in my hand, I stood there and shook.

Denton had not moved. He sat in the doorway with his hands folded in his lap, the way he does when something has hurt him too badly to talk about.

“Don’t call Ruthanne,” he said. “Not yet. I will not have that child’s week ruined by a man with a clipboard.”

The ramp creaked as I stood beside him. It was steeper than it should have been, and the first week I pushed him up it I felt my shoulder go, and neither of us ever mentioned that.

I stood behind his chair and looked out over the lawn where the tent men were due on Saturday, and the oak tree Ruthanne had picked for her vows.

I said something then that I am not proud of. I said, “I hope that man’s roof leaks.”

Denton did not scold me. He is not a man who scolds. He only turned his head and looked up at me the way he has for thirty-three years, and he said, “Call Odessa.”