The Driveway We Paved for Imogene

Three hundred feet by ten feet is three thousand square feet. Two and a half inches compacted is a little over six hundred cubic feet, and hot mix weighs close to 145 pounds a cubic foot once it is rolled down tight.

That comes to about 45 tons. You never order to the exact ton. You lose some to the low spots and the edges and the last of a truck bed.

Call it 50 tons, and at what the plant was charging that fall, about $4,200.

I could cover the mix out of the truck fund. What I could not do was lay it. One woman and a roller cannot pave a driveway.

You need a paver, a skid steer, trucks, a base under it, and men who know what they are doing on a hill.

Monday morning I got to the yard before anybody else and waited by Boyd’s truck at first light.

Boyd Tackett has owned our outfit for thirty years. He is fifty-eight, built like a cedar fence post, and says about forty words a day.

He hired me eleven years ago, when nobody else in three counties would put a woman on a roller.

He said he did not care who sat in the seat, as long as the joints were tight and nobody ever stopped on a hot mat.

I told him all of it standing there in the gravel lot as the sun came up behind the shop. The money, the rock, the rut, the fall.

Until Saturday, I told him, I would need to be late on her treatment mornings.

He just nodded at that. “I need the roller Saturday,” I said. “I’ll pay for the fuel and the mix. I know it’s a lot to ask of you, Boyd. I’ll work it off however you want.”

Boyd looked at the ground a while. Then he asked how long the drive was, and how steep. I told him.

Then he figured on a feed store calendar and looked up. “Fifty tons,” he said. “You’ll want dense grade under it first.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“The plant’s still running Saturdays through the end of the month,” he said. “I’ll call over and get you on the morning list.” Then he paused.

“You’re not borrowing my roller, Darcy. You’re borrowing my crew.”

I did not understand him at first. He climbed in his truck and rolled the window down.

“Paver’s no good without a screed man,” he said. “And you can’t rake your own edges from the seat.” Then he drove off to the first job.

By lunch every man on the crew knew. Four of them said they would be there Saturday before Boyd ever asked them, which made five men counting Boyd, and not one of them made any kind of speech about it.

They just started asking practical questions, the way working men do. Coy, who runs our screed, asked how much fall there was from the porch to the road, and whether the house sat above the drive or beside it.

The two young ones who rake and shovel for us asked if there would be biscuits.

Boyd ordered two loads of dense grade from the quarry for Friday afternoon, crushed limestone with the fines left in so it would pack hard as a floor.

He would not let me pay for it. “Rock’s on me,” he said, and that was the end of it.

Ronnie’s two piles were too big and loose for the top of a base, but Coy said we would use every bit of it down in the ruts, where the clay was soft.