The third ready-mix truck was coming out of my lane when I turned in.
I had to pull my Buick half into the ditch grass to let him by. The driver lifted two fingers off the wheel, and I lifted two back, because that is manners. Only after he had gone did I wonder what a concrete truck was doing on my farm.
I had been in Bedford all morning having my eyes checked.
Brian’s truck was parked behind the barn. So were two others I did not know.
I walked back in my good shoes. It is a fair way, past the barn lot and the old loading chute and through the gate Carl hung in 1989, and the ground was cut up the whole length of it. Three loaded trucks will do that to April ground.
Then I came around the corn crib and saw it.
A slab. Gray and wet and flat as a church floor, sitting in the middle of my back lot, where there had been nothing that morning but orchard grass and a killdeer.
My son was on his knees at the far edge of it with a steel trowel. Two men I did not know were running a float over the middle on a long handle. Nobody looked up.
“Brian.”
He looked up then. He had concrete to the elbows and a streak of it in his hair, and he smiled at me like a boy who has finally got the mower running.
“Hey, Mom. You’re back early.”
“What is this?”
“It’s a pad.” He stood, and his knees cracked, because he is forty-one now and has spent twenty years under other people’s machinery. “Thirty by forty. Six inches thick, on account of the lift. For the shop.”
“What shop?”
“My shop.” He said it gently, as if I had forgotten something he’d told me. “I’ve got a steel building coming in June. Bolts right down to this.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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