when the ride which mother had arranged came for us on the day of the party , i watched the big white auto crunch over the gray gravel of the semicircular drive in front of our house and followed its progress as it nosed around the stunted bottle brushes that were spaced evenly around the inner arc of the drive ; father had insisted that the gravel beyond the bottlebrushes , in the small semicircle , be the type that was dyed pink , and in the unrelenting hot sun of an october morning this backdrop to the little bushes was like a torrid zone of dilute blood .