The Driveway We Paved for Imogene

I did not spread it. I did not have to. I will be honest that I did not feel sorry for him, either.

A man who will leave his mother in the mud for a truck payment has a long road to walk back up.

The bank got its $9,000. Imogene never got hers back, and she has never once said she wanted it.

She said the money was gone the day she wrote the check, and she would rather have her son back than any amount of money.

Ronnie came to Sunday dinner once, the week before Christmas. He drove up the paved driveway and parked by the porch and sat in his truck ten minutes before he came in.

She said he did not say much. She said he ate, and he cleaned his plate, and before he left he carried in two armloads of firewood from the barn and stacked them by the stove without being asked. She said that was a start.

“It’s not eleven thousand dollars,” she told me, “but it’s a start.” I said it was more than I would have given him credit for.

She patted my hand and said that was why she was his mother and I was not anymore.

My transmission went out for good in January on the hill below the quarry.

Boyd towed my truck to the yard himself and handed me the keys to one of the outfit’s pickups, and told me to drive it until I had saved back up. He has never mentioned it since.

But the part I keep is that Saturday, right after Ronnie’s truck went over the rise toward town and the road was quiet again.

The whole crew stood there a minute not saying anything, the way men do after a thing is finished.

Then Coy went back to loading the paver on the trailer, and the young ones went to scraping down their lutes and shovels, and Boyd walked up the grass and stood beside Imogene’s lawn chair with his cap in his hand.

I climbed back up on the roller. The mat had cooled enough for one last finish pass, no vibration, just enough to take out the last faint drum line near the top.

I started at the road end and came up the hill slow, watching the edge the way Boyd taught me.

Imogene was standing at the edge of the grass with one hand on Boyd’s arm and the thermos in the other.

When I came even with her she lifted the lid of it at me like a toast, and I lifted two fingers off the lever back at her.

I ran the last pass of the roller right up to the porch step and shut it off.

I climbed back up on the roller. Monday morning the dialysis van would come up that drive at a little after nine, slow, and stop at the foot of the porch steps with its lift already down.

Reva would get out and stand looking at it a long moment. Then Imogene would walk down her own steps in her good shoes, dry-footed, and ride to her chair.

That was two days off. Nobody would drive on it before then, and Boyd laid two sawhorses and a strip of orange tape across the mouth of it to say so.

“Well,” Imogene said from her chair, with the thermos in both hands. “That’ll do.”

I ran the last pass of the roller right up to the porch step and shut it off.