The Driveway We Paved for Imogene

It was not a fortune. It was enough to keep her careful and keep her home.

In August Ronnie came to Sunday dinner for the first time in months. He ate two plates of her chicken and dumplings and told her that driveway was going to kill her come winter, and he was just the man to fix it.

He does odd driveway jobs around the county, seal coating and patching, and he can talk an old woman into nearly anything.

He told her $11,400 for the whole job. Grade it, put in a proper rock base, and pave it, 300 feet long and ten feet wide, done before the weather turned. He told her he was giving her the family price.

That price was not crazy, and that was part of how he got away with it.

A real contractor around here might have quoted her somewhere close to that number. The difference is that a real contractor would have shown up and done the work.

She wrote him a check in September for the full amount out of the insurance money.

She did not ask for half down and half when it was finished, because you do not do that with your own boy. Not if you are Imogene.

Two days later a dump truck brought two loads of big number two rock, stone the size of a man’s fist, and dropped them in two piles at the top of the drive. Ronnie came out the next morning with a borrowed skid steer.

He scraped at the old driveway for about an hour. He tore up the packed gravel crust her husband had kept up for forty years and left the bare clay underneath it open to the sky. Then he loaded the skid steer and left.

He never came back. Not that week, not the next week, not when the first rain came through the second week of October and turned that bare clay into something you could not walk across without losing a shoe.

Her car went down in it the first afternoon of the rain, right in the middle of the drive, up to the axle.

She called a wrecker, and the wrecker driver took one look at the hill from the road and said he could not get to her.

The dialysis van came Monday, Wednesday and Friday at a little after nine in the morning.

It is a big van with a wheelchair lift, and the drivers are not allowed to take it anywhere it might get stuck.

So Reva turned around at the culvert by the road, and Imogene walked down to her.

Three hundred feet of mud and rock, three mornings a week, sixty-eight years old, with a cane in one hand and a fistula in the other arm.

A neighbor down the road had been driving her down to the van in his four-wheel-drive truck when he could.

But he had cattle to feed and a wife in poor health of her own, and some mornings he could not, and Imogene would never ask twice.

She did not tell me any of this. She did not want to be a bother.

I found out the Friday Reva called me, because Reva had my number from the emergency card I filled out for Imogene back when she first started treatment.

I walked back up the hill past her car and called the man who had put that rock there. Ronnie answered on the fifth ring.