The Driveway We Paved for Imogene

She did not come down. She could not have walked on it anyway.

She called down the hill instead, not loud, but that hill carried it fine. “Ronnie. That’s your daddy’s coat I’ve got on. Do you remember it?”

He said, “Yes ma’am.” It came out small. I had not heard Ronnie Bramlett say ma’am to anybody in twenty years, not even to her.

His hands came out of his pockets and hung there at his sides.

“He’d have been ashamed,” she said. “I am not going to tell you any different. But I’m still your mother. When you’re ready to sit at my table and tell me the truth, you know where the porch is. And Monday it’ll be easier to get to.”

Ronnie stood there another long moment.

Then he turned around and got in his truck and backed it out onto the road, careful of the new edge, and drove off toward town.

Boyd watched him go. Then he put his gloves back on, one finger at a time, and walked back up the grass alongside the mat.

“Darcy,” he said as he passed me. “You’ve still got a finish pass to make.”

I will tell about Monday first, because Monday was the whole point of it.

Boyd’s rule is that fresh asphalt gets a couple of days before anything heavy rolls across it, so nobody drove on that driveway all weekend.

Sunday I drove Imogene to church and back in my truck and parked at the road.

We walked up the new driveway together, slow, her hand tucked in my arm. She kept looking down at it like it might be gone if she looked away.

Monday I told Boyd I would be late to the job, and he said he had figured as much.

I was sitting on the porch steps beside Imogene, both of us in our coats, when the dialysis van came along the road at a little after nine and slowed at the culvert.

Reva had been turning around at that culvert for a month. I watched her look up the hill at the black driveway, and I watched her put her blinker on, which nobody needs out on our road, and turn in.

The van came up the new driveway smooth as a church aisle, all three hundred feet of it, and stopped right at the porch step.

Reva put it in park and sat there a second with both hands on the wheel, just looking.

Then she got out and came around and ran the lift down, and the lift settled flat on fresh asphalt instead of mud.

Imogene stood up off the step with her cane and said, “Well. Would you look at that.”

She rode the lift up herself with her cane across her knees.

Reva strapped the chair down and climbed back in, and before she pulled away she leaned out the window. “First one up it,” she said. “Don’t anybody tell me different.”

I stood in the yard and watched the van go back down the hill and turn out onto the road toward town, and it did not spin a tire or slide an inch.

Then I sat back down on those porch steps and cried for the first time in the whole business.

Word gets around in Hopkins County faster than weather. By Thanksgiving most folks who hire out driveway work knew why Boyd Tackett would not sell Ronnie Bramlett mix anymore, and Ronnie’s phone got quiet that fall.