Lyle stood up beside him in boots and a faded county ball cap, held up my grocery list, and read it out line by line, so loud you could have heard him at the corner. Rise, thirty inches. Slope, one inch for every twelve. Run, thirty feet. Width, thirty-six inches rail to rail. Handrails both sides, thirty-four to thirty-eight. Landings five by five at the top and at the turn. Two-inch curb on the open edges.
“Now say it back to me.”
And the whole lawn said it back.
I cried so hard I had to sit down on the step.
There were the eleven men of the church, and thirty-some women with coolers and a pot of beans. A retired surveyor from three streets over, a stranger who had heard it from his barber, with his own laser level.
And neighbors. That is what I was least prepared for. They came out of the houses of Larkspur Glen one at a time. A man in a golf shirt with a thermos. A young mother with a baby on her hip. A pair of retired sisters who had not spoken to me in two years, each carrying a pound cake, standing at the edge of the lawn as though afraid of being sent home.
Nobody sent anybody home. Hal wrote down every name that picked up a tool, and by the time the posts were in, the pad said forty-eight.
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I have never watched people work like that. The surveyor shot the grade and called off the numbers. The men set the posts in concrete they mixed in wheelbarrows on my driveway. At nine somebody set a radio on the porch rail and the old hymns came out of it, and half the lawn was humming. I carried water, which was all they would let me do.
At nine thirty, two people I did not expect came walking up from the corner.
Opaline and Winnie. The treasurer and the secretary. Opaline wore khaki pants and a straw hat and carried a circular saw older than the two of us put together. Winnie had on garden gloves and carried a plastic bin of sweet tea and lemons.
They stopped at the edge of the lawn. I walked over with my pitcher, not knowing what to say.
Opaline took off her hat. She is fifty-eight or so, with short gray hair, and her eyes were red.
“Mara, I voted no.”
I looked at her.
“Tuesday night, when he brought the notice to the board. I voted no. So did Winnie. But I didn’t stand up in the meeting. I let it go three to two and told myself that was enough. And then yesterday at noon I stood at my kitchen window and watched those people pray, and I heard my own name in it.” She swallowed. “I heard my name.”
Winnie said, “We came to work.”
I put the pitcher down on the grass.
“What do you need?” Opaline said, and held up the saw.
I pointed her to Hal. She walked across the lawn with her hat in one hand and the saw in the other, and Hal looked at her for exactly one second and said, “Opaline. I need ten balusters cut.” She said, “I can do that.” Hal wrote two more names on the pad. Forty-nine, and fifty.
By ten the first fifteen feet of ramp stood on its posts across the lawn with the decking going down in tight rows. By eleven the landing was framed. By eleven thirty the second run was rising along the front of the house.