The Sidewalk We Poured Twice

What we kept

Ilse walks to her mailbox now. Every day at about eleven, when the mail comes, she goes down her new walk with her cane and back again.

The retired mail carrier across the street says she has not missed a day, and he would know.

She goes to church on Sunday mornings again too. A woman from her circle picks her up at the curb, and she walks the whole sixty feet to the car on her own, and on the way back she stops at the corner and looks down at the initials before she goes in.

Anders runs my second truck now. The young man from Pelican Rapids is learning to edge, and Anders is patient with him in a way I suspect nobody was ever patient with Anders.

Brody has three more jobs on the board for spring, every one of them bid under his own name.

Clint and Brody had coffee together at the cafe on Lincoln Avenue the week before Thanksgiving. Brody did not tell me much about it.

He said they talked about Grandpa Rasmusson and the auction. He said his dad cried a little, and then pretended he had not.

I do not know what comes next between them. That is theirs to work out, not mine.

But Clint has not driven down Elm Street since, except once, slow, when I happened to be at the stop sign, and I saw him look at that walk the whole way past.

I paid the plant the eight hundred forty dollars. I paid the rental store and the dump. I never once regretted it, and I would pay it again tomorrow.

Ilse’s check is a different story. Brody never cashed it.

He bought a plain wooden frame at the hardware store, the kind with the little easel on the back, and he put the check in it.

It sits on the shelf above the desk in my shop, right where you see it when you come in the door.

Every time somebody asks him what it is, he tells them the same thing. “That’s the first pour,” he says. “The one somebody drove over.”

Then he tells them what the memo line says. And he does not say one more word about his father.

Brody framed the check instead of cashing it.