The Driveway We Paved for Imogene

I told Imogene on Wednesday evening, after work, when she was worn out and gray on the couch with an afghan over her knees.

That morning I had driven her down to the van myself in four-wheel drive, the same as Monday. Dialysis takes it out of you. On treatment days she slept most of the afternoon and was cold all the time.

“You can’t,” she said. “Darcy, that’s your money. And those men have families of their own to see to on a Saturday.”

I told her the men had already decided, and arguing with paving men was like arguing with the weather.

She was quiet so long I thought she had gone to sleep. Then she said, “Does Ronnie know you’re doing this?”

I said no. She nodded and looked toward the front window, toward the road, and did not say anything else for a while.

Before I left she asked me to get something down from the closet in the back bedroom.

It was her husband’s barn coat, red flannel with a quilted lining, the cuffs frayed and the elbows worn nearly through from forty winters of feeding cattle.

“I’ll be out there,” she said. “I’ll be outside watching it. Don’t you tell me I can’t.” I did not tell her that.

I hung the coat on the hook by the front door where she could reach it from her chair.

Friday afternoon the neighbor came with his tractor and a log chain and pulled her Buick out of the rut.

It took him three tries and a good deal of mud on his overalls, and he would not take a dime for it.

He parked the car in the grass by the barn and stood looking at it a minute.

“He shouldn’t have done her that way,” he said, meaning Ronnie. That was all he said about it, and it was more than most folks said.

The dense grade came at four o’clock, two loads on a quarry truck, and the driver dumped it in long rows along the side of the drive the way Boyd had told him to on the phone. Then it sat there in the late sun, waiting for us.

I went by the plant Friday after work and paid at the scale house window with a check out of the truck fund, $4,200 for fifty tons of surface mix on Saturday morning.

Eighty-four dollars a ton, which was the contractor price Boyd had gotten for me.

Saturday came up clear and cold, and I wore a jacket over my gray T-shirt until the sun got on us. It was forty-four degrees at seven o’clock, with frost on the bean stubble across the road.

Boyd’s rule is fifty degrees and climbing before the first truck dumps, and the radio said we would see sixty-two.

Boyd brought the skid steer and the roller on the gooseneck trailer behind his one-ton. Coy pulled the little track paver on a tag trailer behind our dump truck.

The roller is a small double-drum machine, about three tons, with a water tank on top that sprays the drums so the mix will not stick to them.

I have run that same roller for six years. I know every sound it makes.

Imogene was already outside when I pulled in, wrapped in that red flannel coat, sitting in a folding lawn chair at the edge of the yard by the porch with a thermos on the grass beside her. She had been up since five making coffee.