The Sidewalk We Poured Twice

Why I did not call anyone

Ilse wanted to call the police. She had the phone right there in her hand, and her late husband had played cards with the police chief for thirty years.

She said she would tell them exactly what she saw, and she would sign anything they put in front of her.

I asked her please not to, and I want to be honest about why, because I have gone over it a hundred times since.

A police report would have put Brody’s name next to his father’s on a county form. Brody would have had to stand up and say whose pickup it was.

He would have had to pick a side of his own family out loud, at nineteen, in a town of thirteen thousand where everybody buys their coffee at the same three gas stations.

And when it was all done, Mrs. Brandvold would still have had ruts in her sidewalk.

“Then what are you going to do?” Ilse asked me. She was not angry.

She just wanted to know, the way my mother used to want to know what I planned to do about a bad report card.

“We are going to break it out in the morning,” I said, “and pour it again.”

Brody stood up then. He had gray paste on the knees of his jeans from kneeling on the board earlier, and his face was white under his tan. “I want to go to his shop,” he said. “Right now.”

“I know you do,” I said.

“He did this to her walk. Not mine. Hers. She can’t even get to her own mailbox.”

That was the thing, and he was right. Ilse had fallen on her old walk in August, where a maple root had heaved one slab up two inches above the next.

She broke her left wrist. Since then she had been getting her mail by having the neighbor girl bring it up to the step.

“If you go to his shop,” I said, “you will say something, and he will say something back, and both of you will mean it. And tomorrow her walk will still be ruts. Help me pull these stakes. We have a phone call to make before the plant closes.”

He looked at me for a long time. Then he went to the truck for the claw hammer.

The afternoon it happened

We had poured that morning at ten. Gus Tollefsrud brought the load. Gus is fifty-nine and has driven a ready-mix truck for the same plant for twenty-six years.

He has poured for my dad, for me and for Clint, and he knows every finisher in the county by the way they wave a truck back.

I had ordered three and a half yards of four thousand pound mix, air entrained, with hot water and a non-chloride accelerator because the nights were already getting down near freezing.

You order a little extra on a walk. Running short with the truck gone is the one sin you never get to undo.

Brody screeded it with a straight two by four while I worked the chute. Then he ran the bull float, I edged, and we cut the joints every four feet with a groover.

We gave it a light steel trowel and then a broom finish so Ilse would not slip on it in the winter.

It was the prettiest walk I had seen in a long time, and I am not saying that because my son made it.

The joints were straight. The edges were clean. The broom lines ran across it like corduroy, all the same depth, which is harder than people think.

Ilse came out on the step a little before noon and looked at it with her hands folded on top of her cane.

“My husband would have liked that,” she said. “He used to say a good walk is the first thing a house says to you.”

We picked up a little after noon. We had a set of porch steps to look at in Battle Lake, a half hour away, and I told Brody we would come back at three to put the curing blankets on and let him sign the corner while it was still green.

That was the plan. He was going to put his initials and the date in the corner by the front step, the way my dad always did, the way I always do.

It is a small thing. In our trade it is not small at all.

At ten minutes after one, my phone rang in Battle Lake. It was Ilse, and she was out of breath from getting across her living room.

We were back on Elm Street by two. By then the accelerator had done its job.

The slab had gone stiff, past where you could float it back down and make it right, and still too soft to break cleanly. There was nothing to do but wait for morning.