He helped me build the ramp

My uncle Boy built the first ramp on a Saturday and he was pau before lunch, and I told him it was good, because he's seventy-one and he'd been out there since six in the morning.

It wasn't good. A ramp goes up one inch for every foot it runs out. That's the number. You don't need to know anything else. Our front door sits twenty-six inches off the grade, so the thing had to be twenty-six feet long, and he built it fourteen. I did roofs for eleven years. I could read a pitch off a house from the road, so I knew what he'd made before I got anywhere near it.

Going down you're braking on the rims with your hands the whole way and there's no place to stop, and when you get to the bottom you've still got the turn. Third week I went off the low side into my mother's hibiscus. Everybody came running out the house and I'm sitting in the bush going no, no, I'm good, check the plant. Auntie Puna still tells that one. She does the voice.

My mother wanted to ask the church. She was going to put it in the bulletin. Twelve guys from Sunday standing in my yard, and every one of them knew me from before. I said no. I said Junior's friend does concrete, let me call him first.

That's Kimo. Him and my cousin Junior been tight since Waianae Intermediate, so I've known him twenty years in the way you know your cousin's friend. He's in the pictures from my grandmother's funeral and we'd never once had a conversation. He finishes flatwork for an outfit out of Campbell, and he's got the truck, which matters, because a sixteen-foot two-by-eight doesn't go in anything else.

He came six Saturdays.

First one we ripped out Uncle Boy's, and then we stood in the driveway about an hour while I explained why twenty-six feet doesn't work, which is that twenty-six feet straight out the front door puts you in the mango tree. So it's two runs with a turn. Down the front, landing, back along the side of the house. The landing gotta be five by five or you can't come around, and guys build them four by four all the time and then act surprised.

I no can dig. I did the measuring, string and a line level, and he dug. Second Saturday was footings, sonotubes and post bases, and then it sits a week. Third was posts and stringers. Fourth was decking, and we used the stainless, the 305, not the coated ones, because out here the coated ones weep rust in a year and a half. Cost double. Ho, Auntie Lei about died at the receipt. My nephew Kaimana carried the screw box around the whole six weeks like it was his job.

Fifth was handrail. That's the part most guys get wrong. Gotta be something your hand actually closes around, so an inch and a quarter up to two inches, no wider, and it's got to run past the end of the ramp. If it stops where the ramp stops you find that out with your fingers.

Sixth was paint, which is where I'd been headed the whole time, because wet wood under rubber is a slide. You mix grit into it. There's a bag you buy and it's nothing, six bucks, and you gotta keep stirring the bucket or it all settles and you're painting the last third with plain paint.

Everybody was at a baby luau in Nanakuli that day, which is a full day. Even Kaimana went. So the house was empty. Radio on, the Hawaiian station out of town. It was hot and Kimo had his shirt off and I kept mine on, and neither of us said anything about that.

It happened in the garage with the saw still set up, and afterwards we put on the second coat, and then I went Tamura's and got a twelve of Primo and we drank four of them out there looking at it.

He said, straight down the middle you got about nine and a half percent. Code's eight point three. I said yeah, I know. He said he better move his truck off my mother's side, and then everybody came home from Nanakuli.

That was March. It's happened maybe a dozen times since.

Some of them were real. The rail did work loose, that end post takes everybody's weight going down. Water was pooling at the bottom where the ramp meets the walk, that was real too. He came about the gutter over the back door one time and the gutter was fine, but I let him get up there.

Lately they're thin. Two weeks ago he brought back my four-foot level. I never loaned him my four-foot level. Mine's been on the same nail since 2019. He set his down next to it.

My aunties love him. Auntie Lei has a plate made before he's through the door. Last month she asked him when he's going to find a nice girl and settle down and he said soon, Auntie, and she said that's what you told me last time, and everybody laughed. I laughed too.

They still call me for everything, by the way. Washing machine walking across the floor, the screen door that never sat right. Takes me longer now and nobody's ever said anything about that either.

Second Sunday after we finished, Uncle Dennis asked me who did the ramp. I said Junior's friend. I did his roof in 2016. He still brings up the roof.

Junior asked me a while back if Kimo's been around a lot. I said he's been helping me out with the yard. That was the whole conversation. I didn't look up.

There's four of them in this house and one bathroom. My mother's had the third row on the left since before I was born. I'm not doing anything about any of that.

The water thing, though. I fixed that Tuesday. Grinder and a masonry blade, cut a channel across the walk, took me forty minutes. Then I sat out there and ran the hose down the ramp a while and watched it go where it's supposed to go. It's dry.

He texted me last night. Said he's going to swing by Saturday and look at that low spot.

I typed k.

I've been holding the phone about ten minutes now.

Kaimana's at the table behind me doing his homework with the TV on. He just asked me how to spell tournament.