Kyle stared at him.
“I asked you to help me build it, son.”
“I thought you’d want to.”
Something in my boy’s face came apart then.
Not all the way.
But I saw the crack.
Dale, from the driveway, in his Mercer Electric cap:
“He asked all of us, too. Forty of us signed that card. We’d have built it in a weekend.”
“He said no. He said it had to be him.”
Kyle looked at the ramp for the first time.
The rails. The lights. The height of it.
He’d seen his grandmother in her chair.
He knew what he was looking at.
“Mama,” he said, very quietly. “How much?”
“Ninety-one thousand, two hundred.”
“I’m going to pay it back.”
“I know you’re going to try.”
“And you’re going to do it from your own account, son. With your own name on it.”
“I took mine back Monday.”
He looked at the ground.
