The Thirty One Driveways on Haskins Road

Merna

Merna Shue is sixty. She has driven that van for fourteen years.

She knows every driveway on the hill, and she knows which ones are going to be open on a storm morning and which ones are going to make her late.

She got out and looked at the drive and looked at the banks along the road and looked at me.

Then she looked at the banks again, at the end of every driveway up and down the road, all of them freshly cut.

“Rollin,” she said, “did you plow these twice this morning?”

I could have lied. I thought about it. Instead I said, “The town truck came back through.”

Merna is not a foolish woman. She looked at the long gray wing marks down the shoulder.

She looked at the turnaround out at the end, where she could see the tracks where the big truck had swung around.

“Twice?”

“Twice.”

She did not say anything else. She went up the drive with the chair. I stayed by my truck.

The twenty dollars

Merna brought Fern down the drive in the chair, with a blanket over her knees and her purse in her lap. When they came even with me, Fern put out her hand and said, “Stop a minute, Merna.”

Merna stopped.

Fern reached up and took hold of my right hand, the glove still on, and I felt her press something folded into the palm. I looked down. It was a twenty-dollar bill, folded in quarters.

“Fern, no,” I said. “You paid me in October.”

“You plowed it twice,” she said.

“That was not your fault.”

“I know whose fault it was,” she said. “I watched you from the door. I prayed for you the whole time, you know. That you wouldn’t slide off into the ditch.”

I tried to give the twenty back. I tried to push it into her purse.

She closed both her hands over my glove and held on, and she was stronger than she looked, an eighty-one-year-old woman who had lifted pots of macaroni for thirty-one years.

“You keep that,” she said. “You keep that or I’ll be upset all the way to Watertown.”

So I kept it. I did not want it, and I could not give it back. Those are two different things, and I have thought about the difference many times since.

Merna loaded her into the van. Fern waved at me through the side window.

They pulled out of the drive at eight-oh-four and went down the Haskins Road toward the village, and on to Watertown, and Fern made her chair at nine-thirty.

I stood there in the sun with that folded twenty in my glove for a while. Then I went and drove the milk route.