The Sidewalk We Poured Twice

Supper

We ate at my kitchen table that evening, with the sun going down orange behind the grain elevator.

I made hot dishes on Tuesday because Tuesday was always hot dish night in my mother’s house, and some habits you keep because they keep you.

Brody pushed his tater tots around for a while. Then he asked me something he had never asked me in nineteen years. “Was he always like this?”

I put my fork down. I thought about lying. I thought about the young man I married, who used to sing along to the radio in the cab with the windows down and could float a garage floor faster than anyone I ever saw.

“No,” I said. “He wasn’t. When his dad’s business went under, he was twenty. He watched them load his dad’s trucks on a trailer. He told me once it was like watching them load his dad.”

Brody did not say anything.

“Your dad wanted you to have what he did not get to have,” I said.

“He wanted to hand you a business with his name on it, so nobody could ever take it from you the way they took his dad’s. That is the reason. It is not an excuse.”

“He drove over a widow’s sidewalk.”

“He did. And that was wrong, and there is no reason in the world that makes it right. But you asked me if he was always like this, and the true answer is no. Something broke in him a long time ago. That is not your job to fix.”

Brody nodded. After a while he got up and rinsed his plate and stood at the sink looking out at the last of the light on the yard. “Can I sign it tomorrow?” he asked. “The new one?”

“It’s your job,” I said. “You sign it.”

Sunup on Elm Street

We were on Elm Street by seven-forty, when the sky over the elevator was just going gray to pink. The grass on the boulevards was white with frost.

The maples down both sides of the street had gone all the way yellow, and they were dropping leaves every time the wind moved.

I had the breaker hammer and a generator in the back of the truck, and the dump trailer hitched behind.

Brody had his gray hooded sweatshirt on, and a thermos of coffee he did not touch until nine.

Breaking out a slab that is one day old is not like breaking out an old walk. It is still green.

It comes apart in big honest chunks instead of fighting you. But it is still concrete, and it is still sixty feet, and every chunk has to be picked up by hand.

Brody ran the breaker first. I let him. He worked down the length of the walk with his jaw set and his eyes squinted against the dust, and he did not stop once, not even when the generator hiccuped and I thought it was going to die.

I came behind him with a pry bar and lifted the chunks out of the forms. We piled them on the boulevard by the curb to load in the trailer.

The sun came up over the rooftops at the end of the block while we were about halfway down.

That was when Ilse came out.

She had her blue cardigan buttoned up to her chin, and she was carrying two mugs of coffee.

She came out on the front step one careful foot at a time and stood there in the low sun with the steam coming off the mugs and her white hair lit up like a dandelion.

“I am not supposed to carry two,” she said. “My daughter would have a fit. But I am not making two trips.”

Brody shut off the breaker and went to her. He took both mugs, handed one to me, and stood on her step with her while she held the rail.

She looked down the length of her yard at the mess we had made.

“You are doing it all again,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you will not let me pay for it.”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “It was ours to do right.”

She looked at him for a long time, the way old women look at boys when they are deciding something.

Then she said, “My husband put that old walk in the year we bought this house. He did it himself, with a borrowed mixer and three of his brothers. It lasted fifty-one years.”

“This one will last longer,” Brody said.

“I believe you,” she said. “Drink your coffee before it gets cold. Then go finish.”