The Driveway We Paved for Imogene

He backed all the way up the hill to the top, slow, with one of the young ones walking beside his door and calling out the distance.

Coy already had the paver sitting at the top by the porch, with the screed heated and the hopper wings open.

The truck backed until its rear tires touched the push rollers on the front of the paver.

Then the driver raised the bed, and the first of the mix slid into the hopper black and shining, with steam coming off it into the cold air.

Coy set his depth with the cranks on the screed, three inches loose, which would roll down to about two and a half.

Then he raised his hand, and the paver started down the hill, pushing the truck ahead of it with the driver riding his brake easy.

The mat came out behind the screed ten feet wide, smooth as cake batter, and so hot the air above it wavered.

I climbed up on the roller and waited for the mix to settle just enough to carry the drums.

People think rolling is just driving back and forth. It is not.

You start at the low edge, you overlap each pass by half a drum, you never stop on a hot mat, and you never turn the wheel while you are sitting still on one.

You keep water on the drums so the mix will not pick up and stick to the steel.

You come in close behind the paver while the mat is still near 280 degrees, and you finish before it drops much under 175, or it will not compact.

My first breakdown pass, vibration on, I could feel the mat settle and tighten under the drums.

I looked up the hill and saw Imogene sitting in her lawn chair at the edge of the yard, watching every foot of it go down.

She had both hands folded in her lap over the thermos. Her lips were moving.

The young ones worked the edges with their lutes, pulling the mix tight to the line and tamping the shoulders so the edge would not crumble off into the grass.

Coy rode the screed and watched his depth like a man watching a pot about to boil.

The first truck emptied at about the hundred-foot mark. It tipped its bed down and pulled away down the hill and out onto the road, and the second truck was already waiting at the culvert to back up in its place. Not five minutes between them.

Around eleven a car slowed at the road, and a woman from Imogene’s church got out with a pan of sausage biscuits wrapped in foil and a gallon jug of sweet tea.

She set them on the tailgate of Coy’s truck, hugged Imogene, and left without fuss.

The third truck came at a quarter past eleven with the last sixteen tons.

Coy took the paver down the final stretch toward the road, and the truck emptied its last ton right at the culvert with its bed raised high against that clear blue sky.

By noon the last of the fifty tons was down. Three hundred feet of fresh black asphalt ran from her porch step to the road, steaming in the midday sun, with not one low spot in it anywhere to catch a puddle.

We stopped long enough to eat the biscuits standing up around the tailgate.