The Driveway We Paved for Imogene

Imogene asked Boyd to bless it, and he took off his cap and did, short and plain, the way he does everything.

I was making my finish passes, static now with no vibration, ironing out the drum marks, when a pickup slowed at the road just past noon and stopped behind the dump truck, which still sat at the culvert with its bed in the air.

It was the truck he had caught up in September, washed and shining, sitting at the bottom of his mother’s new driveway like it had every right to be there.

Ronnie got out and stood at the very edge of the mat.

He had on a canvas work jacket and his good boots, and he had his hands in his pockets, and he was looking up the hill at his mother sitting in her lawn chair.

I stopped the roller on the cool end, where it would not leave a mark, and set the brake.

Up at the top, Imogene leaned over and set the thermos down in the grass beside her chair. She did not get up. Not yet.

The whole crew had stopped. The young ones leaned on their lutes. Coy climbed down off the paver and wiped his hands.

Nobody said anything, and the radio in Coy’s truck was still going, a preacher reading out the week’s sick list.

Ronnie took one step like he meant to walk right up the drive, and Boyd said, “Don’t.” Not loud. Boyd is never loud.

“It’s still soft. You’ll leave a boot print in it. And nobody drives on it till Monday. That’s how it holds.”

So Ronnie stood there at the bottom on the gravel shoulder, and Boyd walked down the grass alongside the mat to meet him.

When he got there he pulled his gloves off, one finger at a time.

I was close enough by then to hear, because I had climbed down off the roller and walked along the edge behind him. I do not think he minded.

“Ronnie,” Boyd said. “You’ve been buying the leftover tons off the end of my loads for six years. Patch jobs. Your little driveways. I sold it to you cheap because you were married to my best operator, and I kept on after.”

“I’ll never sell you another ton of mix,” Boyd said. “Not off my trucks, and not on my name at the plant. And I will tell any man who asks me why.”

He said it in front of all of us, plain as reading a scale ticket out loud.

Ronnie’s face went red up past his collar. “That’s between me and Mama,” he said.

“This isn’t any of your business, Boyd. And it sure isn’t hers.” He jerked his chin at me without ever once looking at me.

“You made it my business,” Boyd said, “when your mama fell in that rut holding her arm up out of the mud. Five men gave up a Saturday to fix what you took eleven thousand dollars for. Look at it, son. Go on and look.”

Ronnie looked. He looked at the tight edges and the clean joint at the road and the steam still rising off the black where the sun hit it.

He looked at his mother’s car sitting in the grass by the barn. Then he looked up the hill again.

Imogene had stood up. She had her cane in one hand and the other hand on the back of the lawn chair, and she was standing very straight in that red flannel coat that had been his father’s for forty winters.