The Driveway We Paved for Imogene

Imogene Bramlett was on her knees in the mud when I got there, and the dialysis van was idling down at the road with its side door open and the wheelchair lift hanging halfway down.

Reva, the driver, had her by one elbow. Imogene was holding her left arm straight up out of the mud, the arm with the fistula in it, the one the nurses at the center told her to guard like a newborn baby.

“I’m all right,” she kept saying. “I’m all right, Darcy. I just stepped wrong.” She had not stepped wrong.

There was no right place left to step anywhere on that hill, and both of us knew it.

I had come straight off a parking lot job on the north side of Madisonville in my own truck, with my orange vest still on and my hard hat riding on the seat beside me. Boyd had waved me off before I finished telling him.

The driveway ran about 300 feet from the blacktop road up to her little white farmhouse, uphill the whole way.

For forty years it had been gravel that her husband kept up himself with a box blade on his tractor and a load of fresh rock every spring.

Now it was two piles of big rock sitting at the top by the porch, never spread, and below them a rut down the middle so deep that her car had sunk to the axle in the first good rain of October.

The car was still sitting in it, crooked, with dry leaves gathering on the windshield.

It was the Buick she drove to church every Sunday until the rain came.

Reva and I got Imogene up between us. Her slacks were soaked through at both knees and her hands were shaking, partly from the cold, mostly from the shame of being seen that way, which to a woman like Imogene is worse than any fall.

“You go on,” she told Reva. “They’ll give my chair away.” Reva looked at me over the top of her head.

Dialysis does not wait on anybody. If you miss your chair, your body keeps the count until you get another one.

So we walked her the rest of the way down, one of us on each side, picking our steps in the rut.

Reva ran the lift up and strapped her in, and I stood at the end of that ruined driveway and watched the van pull away toward town.

I should say who I am to her, because people get it wrong. I am not Imogene’s daughter.

I was married to her son Ronnie for fifteen years, and we have been divorced for four of them now.

When we split, I figured I would lose her along with the house and the dog and half the furniture.

Instead she called me the very next Sunday and asked if I was still coming to dinner, because she had already cut up the chicken.

I kept coming. Ronnie mostly stopped. That tells you most of what you need to know about the two of us, though it took me fifteen years to see it plain.

Her husband passed in April, a heart attack in the barn lot with a bucket of feed still in his hand.

He was a quiet man who fixed everything on that place himself and never once in his life asked anybody for help.

He left her the house, the forty acres he rented out to a neighbor for beans, and a life insurance policy from his thirty-one years at the coal preparation plant.