The Driveway We Paved for Imogene

I could hear a radio and a road under him. “Darcy,” he said, the way a man says the name of a bill that came a week early.

“Your mother fell in the driveway this morning trying to get to dialysis,” I said.

“She is all right. Reva got her to her chair. I am standing at the top of the hill looking at your rock. Where are you on the paving?”

There was a long quiet. Then he said the plant had been backed up all month, and the rental place was out of pavers, and he was waiting on a call back.

“Ronnie,” I said. “I run a roller for a living. I know what the plant’s schedule looks like this month, and I know who rents pavers in this county. I am asking you where your mother’s money is.”

He did not answer that. He said Mama understood, Mama was not pressing him, and it was not any of my business anyway, was it, since I was not family anymore.

Then he hung up on me, and I stood there holding the phone.

I heard the rest at the gas station that week. Ronnie had been $9,000 behind on his truck, with the bank sending letters. The week after his mother wrote that check, the truck quit being in danger.

He had told a man at the feed store that his mama would never press him over it. He said it like it was a joke.

Imogene knew. She told me so herself that Friday evening, sitting at her kitchen table with both hands around a cup of coffee she never drank.

She said she had known since the rock came and nothing else ever did.

“Then let me call the sheriff,” I said. “Or let me drive you to the Commonwealth’s attorney Monday. That is stealing, Imogene. That is your husband’s money he took, and he took it with his hand out at your table.”

She set the cup down very carefully. “He is my son,” she said.

“I will not have the law come up this hill for my son. I will not sit in a courtroom and look at him across it. Don’t you ask me again, Darcy.”

“And if I did,” she said, softer, “how long would it take? A year? Two? I need to get down this hill on Monday morning, honey. I can’t wait on a trial. My body won’t wait on one.”

She was right, and I knew it the second she said it.

Even if a judge took her side, the money was already gone into a truck, and the rain was not going to wait on the circuit court docket.

I drove home that night and sat in my truck in my own driveway a long time with the engine off.

I had about $5,000 in a savings account I called my truck fund, and that was all of it.

My truck has 230,000 miles on it and a transmission that slips going up any grade steeper than a church step.

That money was for the day it finally quit on me. I thought about that transmission for maybe two minutes.

Then I took a pencil out of the console and did the math on the back of a pay stub, the way Boyd taught me my first year on the crew, back when I did not know a lute from a flat shovel.