The Fireworks That Brought Us Back

For three years I stood alone in my own backyard on the Fourth of July, lighting the exact same fireworks my son Kevin and I used to light together, and every single one of them felt like a punishment I had signed up for on purpose.

My name is Gordon Piehl. Most everyone on Sycamore Court calls me Gordy, which is a name that sounds like a man who is easy to get along with, and for most of my life I think I was. I am seventy three years old. I lost my wife, Ruthann, four winters ago, and I lost my son Kevin the next spring, though nobody died that second time. That is the part that still knocks the wind out of me when I say it out loud. Nobody died. We just stopped talking. We let a stupid argument grow up between us like a weed nobody wanted to be the one to pull, and by the time I looked up, three summers had gone by and I could not have told you the sound of my own boy’s voice.

But I could have told you every single thing about our fireworks.

I need to back up, because you cannot understand what happened at that cookout, the one the whole neighborhood still talks about, unless you understand the fireworks first. Unless you understand that in the Piehl family, the Fourth of July was not a holiday. It was a religion, and Kevin and I were the only two members of the congregation.

It started when Kevin was six years old. Ruthann never much cared for the loud ones. She would sit up on the back porch with a glass of lemonade and a hand pressed over one ear and holler at us to be careful, and that was her whole role in the ceremony, and she was good at it. But out in the yard it was just me and Kevin and a cardboard box from the fireworks tent that set up every June in the empty lot behind the Ace Hardware. We had a system. We had a whole liturgy, if you want the truth of it.

We always started small. Snakes first, those little black pellets that curl up into gray ash worms on the driveway, because a six year old thinks those are the finest magic ever invented and honestly so did I. Then sparklers, one for each of us, and we would write our names in the dark until the light burned down to our fingers. Then the fountains, the ones that sit on the ground and throw up a fountain of gold and green, and Kevin named every single one of them. There was one we bought year after year, a big cone-shaped fountain the company called the Purple Mountain Majesty, and Kevin, who could not have been more than eight the year he decided this, declared that the Purple Mountain Majesty was the King, and that the King always went last, and that you did not, under any circumstances, light the King until everything else had been lit, because the King deserved respect.

I want you to know I lit the King last for thirty one years. Even after Kevin grew up and got a job selling farm equipment two towns over. Even after he married a sharp, kind woman named Denise and they had a little girl named Poppy who is my only grandchild and who I had not, until this summer, seen in three years either. Even after Ruthann passed and it was just me and a folding chair and a cardboard box in a backyard that had gotten very quiet. I lit the snakes, and the sparklers, and the fountains, and I said the names out loud to nobody, and I lit the King last, because the King deserves respect, because an eight year old told me so, because it was the only way I had left to be in the same ceremony as my son even though my son would not return my calls.

You want to know what those three years alone actually looked like, up close, so let me give it to you, because I think a lot of people carry a version of it and never say so out loud. Every year, in the last week of June, I drove out to the fireworks tent behind the Ace Hardware. Same tent. Same teenager working the register, or close enough, they all start to look alike after a certain age. And every year I bought the exact same box. The snakes. The sparklers. Two fountains and the Purple Mountain Majesty, the King, always the King. The kid at the register asked me one year, real friendly, whether I was setting up for a big family thing, because that is a lot of fireworks for one man, and I said yes. I lied to a teenager at a fireworks tent because the truth was too big to hand across a counter. Big family thing, I said. And I drove home with a box built for two, meant for a boy who was now a grown man with a boy’s box in his own garage, and I set it in the corner of my own garage and I did not touch it until dark on the Fourth.

Then I would carry my folding chair out. One chair. I want you to sit with that for a second, because I have. One folding chair, in a backyard, on the Fourth of July. Ruthann’s porch was empty, no lemonade, no hand over the ear, no hollering to be careful. And I would light the snakes, and there was no six year old to squeal at the ash worms, so I watched them curl up gray on my own driveway in silence. I would light a single sparkler and hold it until it burned down to my fingers and I did not write my name, because who writes their name in the dark for nobody to read. And I would light the fountains and I would say their names, Kevin’s names, out loud, to the fence. And then the King. Always the King, last, in a backyard so quiet you could hear the fuse hiss. And when it burned out I would sit in the dark another twenty minutes because going back inside meant it was over for another year, and out here in the dark I could almost, almost, pretend the ceremony was still running, that any minute now a voice would say Dad, do the King, and I would.

Now let me tell you how we broke.

I would love to be able to hand you some grand betrayal. I would love to tell you Kevin did something unforgivable, or I did, some cruelty with teeth in it, because at least then three years of silence would make a lick of sense. But that is not what happened. What happened is that grief makes a man stupid, and I was about as stupid as they come.

It was maybe eight months after Ruthann died. Kevin came over on a Sunday to help me clean out her closet, because I had not been able to make myself open that closet door and he knew it and he came over to do it with me, which was a kind thing, a son’s thing to do. And we were doing all right, folding her cardigans into a box for the church, until he picked up her recipe tin. That little rusted green tin with the rooster on the lid, the one that sat on our counter my entire marriage. And Kevin said, real quiet, that he would like to take it home. For Poppy. So Poppy would have something of her grandmother’s in the kitchen someday.

And I said no.

I did not just say no. I said it mean. I said something about how he had barely called his mother the last year she was alive, which was not even true, it was grief talking, it was the ugliest thing in me looking for a target, and I picked my own son. I told him he did not get to come in here after the fact and pick over her things like a yard sale. I watched his face close up like a garage door coming down, and he set that tin on the counter very gently, and he said, all right, Dad, and he took his keys and he left. And I let him.

He called twice that week. I did not pick up. Then he stopped calling, and I told myself he had given up on me, which was easier than admitting I had thrown the first stone. Denise sent a Christmas card that first year with a photo of Poppy in reindeer antlers, and I meant to call, I sat with the phone in my hand for an hour, and I did not call, because by then too much time had passed and I did not know how to start, and every day I did not call made the next call harder, until the not-calling had a weight of its own, a gravity, and I was a small planet stuck in orbit around a thing I could not touch.

Three years. Three Purple Mountain Majesties lit last, alone, in the dark.

Which brings me to this Fourth of July, and to Sycamore Court, and to the single most humiliating and most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me in front of an audience.

Our cul de sac does a block party every Fourth. Has for years. The Hendersons at the top of the court host, and everybody drags a folding table out to the shared grass in the middle and there is too much potato salad and the Ramirez kids run through everybody’s sprinklers and old Walt Kaczmarek plays the same six Merle Haggard songs off a speaker the size of a cinder block. It is a good time. For three years I had gone, and I had smiled, and I had brought my macaroni salad that everyone politely pretends to like, and then at dusk I had quietly excused myself and gone back to my own yard to do my fireworks alone, because I could not stand to shoot them off in a crowd, because the crowd would have made it a celebration and it was not a celebration, it was a vigil.

But this year, Deb Henderson caught me by the elbow before I could slip off. Deb is the unofficial mayor of Sycamore Court and she does not take no for an answer, and she said, Gordy, this year you are doing your fireworks out here with everybody, I have watched you sneak off for three years and I am not having it, we have all seen the glow over your fence and we want the real show. And there were a dozen people standing right there, the whole cul de sac, kids on shoulders, lawn chairs in a horseshoe, and I did not have it in me to say no to all of them.

So I went home and I got my box.

Now, here is a thing I had not accounted for, because I am an old man who is set in his ways and had done this ceremony alone for so long that I had stopped thinking about it as anything but muscle memory. The Piehl family fireworks liturgy was built for two people. It was built for me and a boy. When I did it alone, I did it slow, I had all the time in the world, I was in no hurry because there was nobody there and nothing after. But now there was a horseshoe of neighbors watching, and lawn chairs, and Walt had turned off Merle Haggard, and a dozen faces were looking at me with the friendly, expectant, slightly terrifying patience of people who have been promised a show.

I got flustered. Let me just say it plain. Seventy three years old and I got stage fright in my own neighborhood over a box of fireworks I have lit a hundred times.

I did the snakes fine. The kids loved the snakes, the little Ramirez girl squealed at the ash worms, that part went great. I did the sparklers, handed them out to the kids, that was a hit. And then I got to the fountains, and this is where it all came apart, and where, I have come to believe, God or luck or my dead wife reached down and knocked the whole thing sideways on purpose, because there is no other way to explain the timing.

I had the fountains lined up on the driveway. And in my nervousness, in front of all those people, I reached for the King.

I reached for the Purple Mountain Majesty first. Out of order. First instead of last. Thirty one years of ceremony and I broke the one commandment, the one an eight year old gave me, and I did not even notice I had done it because my hands were just moving on their own while my brain was busy being embarrassed. I lit it first. I lit the King first.

And the King, I want you to understand, is a serious piece of equipment. It is not a little cone. It is the big cone. And when I lit it out of order and stood up too fast and my foot caught the edge of the driveway and I stumbled backward into Deb Henderson’s folding table full of red white and blue cupcakes, the Purple Mountain Majesty tipped over.

It did not stop. Those fountains do not care about your dignity. It kept right on going, on its side now, a roman candle of gold and green and purple fire hissing sideways across my driveway and my lawn like a garden hose gone to war, and it chased the Ramirez kids, who thought this was the greatest thing that had ever happened, and it set off two of the other fountains in a chain reaction, and Walt Kaczmarek dove behind a cooler, and Deb Henderson was screaming and laughing at the same time, and I was sitting flat on my behind in a folding table full of cupcakes with a frosting American flag stuck to the back of my shirt, and the whole cul de sac was a screaming, laughing, sparkling circus of my own making.

It was, I would learn later, the funniest thing anybody on Sycamore Court had seen in a decade.

And I would have died of the shame of it, I really believe I would have, except that in the middle of all that noise and light, over the top of the hissing and the laughing and Merle Haggard which Walt had somehow turned back on, I heard a voice I had not heard in three years say one word.

“Dad?”

I want to tell you exactly what that was like, because I have tried to describe it to myself a hundred times since and I keep coming up short. You know how, when you have been holding your breath underwater and you finally break the surface, that first gulp of air does not even feel like relief, it feels like pain, it feels like your whole chest cracking open. That is what that one word did to me. Dad. Sitting in a ruin of cupcakes with a fire I had personally set chasing children across my lawn, and there, at the edge of the driveway, in the flickering purple light, was Kevin.

My son. Standing there with Denise beside him and Poppy on his hip, a Poppy who was three years bigger than the last Poppy I had held, and all three of them had that same look on their faces, that half-laughing, half-crying, what-on-earth-are-we-looking-at look, and Kevin took a step toward me, and I could not get up, partly because of the cupcakes and partly because my legs had quit on me entirely, and he crossed that lawn and he got down on one knee next to his old man in the wreckage and he said, over the noise, “Dad, you lit the King first.”

And I lost it. I just came apart, right there on the driveway. Because of all the things my son could have said after three years of silence, of all the accusations he had every right to make, the first thing out of his mouth was that I had lit the King first. Which meant he remembered. Which meant that for three years, on his side of the silence, he had been carrying the exact same box I had. The snakes. The sparklers. The King goes last, the King deserves respect. He had never forgotten a single word of it either. We had been apart for three years and we had somehow been standing in the same backyard the whole time.

I have to back up again, because you deserve to know how Kevin came to be standing at the edge of my driveway on that particular night, and it is its own small story and it is not an accident, though it felt like one.

It turns out that Denise, my daughter in law, the sharp kind woman I had written off along with everything else, had been quietly waging a campaign. Poppy had started asking about her grandpa. Little kids do that, they just ask, they have not learned yet that some questions are supposed to hurt. Poppy wanted to know why she had a grandpa in a picture on the wall but not one she could visit, and Denise, God bless her forever, did not give the easy grown up answer. She started working on Kevin. Slow. Patient. The way you work a splinter up out of the skin.

And Denise knew about the fireworks. Kevin had told her, back when they were dating, the whole liturgy, the snakes and the King and all of it, because it was the best of his childhood and you tell the best of your childhood to the person you are going to marry. And every Fourth of July for three years, Denise told me later, Kevin had gotten quiet and gone out to their own garage and stood there, and she knew he was thinking about it. So this year she made a decision. She loaded Kevin and Poppy in the car on the evening of the Fourth and she said they were going for a drive, and she drove them, without telling Kevin where, straight to Sycamore Court. To see if the old man still did the fireworks. Just to see. She was going to have them sit at the end of the street in the car, she said, and just watch from a distance, and if it felt right, maybe, maybe get out.

She was parked at the mouth of the cul de sac, with Kevin in the passenger seat saying this was a mistake and they should go home, at the exact moment I lit the King first and blew up Deb Henderson’s cupcake table and set the Ramirez children on fire, figuratively speaking, everyone was fine, I want to be clear that everyone was fine.

And Kevin, watching his seventy three year old father land in a folding table in a shower of purple sparks with a frosting flag stuck to his back, could not help himself. Denise said he was out of the car before she got the engine off. Three years of stubbornness and grief and not knowing how to make the first call, and it all fell down in one second because his dad did something so ridiculous, so exactly like the man he had been trying to stay angry at, that Kevin’s heart just made the decision his pride had been refusing to make. That is the thing about the ceremony breaking. The King going first. It broke the spell. You cannot stay solemn and wounded and righteous watching your father get chased by his own fireworks. There is no dignified silence to protect anymore. There is just your dad, on the ground, being your dad.

We did not have a big talk that night. I want to be honest about that, because I know the movies would give you the big talk, the tearful driveway confession where all is explained and forgiven in a single scene. We did not do that. What we did was, Kevin helped me up, and Deb Henderson got a hose on the last of the fountains, and somebody found me a paper towel for the frosting, and Poppy, who did not know me at all, who had every reason to be shy of the strange loud old man in the wrecked shirt, walked right up and put her small hand in mine and said, “Are you my grandpa that lives in the picture?” And I said yes. I said yes, sweetheart, I am the grandpa that lives in the picture, and I have come out of the picture now, and I am not going back in.

Then the four of us, and half of Sycamore Court, cleaned up the cupcakes and the ash and the spent cardboard, and Deb Henderson, who is the finest woman I know, went into her house and came back out with a fresh box of fireworks she had been saving, and she set it down next to me and Kevin on the driveway and she did not say a word, she just patted my shoulder and walked away.

So we did it right. My son and I, on the Fourth of July, for the first time in three years, in front of the whole neighborhood, with a little girl named Poppy sitting on a cooler between us clapping at every single one. We did the snakes. We did the sparklers, and Kevin wrote his name in the dark and then he wrote Poppy’s, and she screamed with joy. We did the fountains, and Kevin said the old names, the ones he named as a boy, and I heard them out loud in his voice for the first time in three decades and it about took the top of my head off. And we saved the King for last. The King goes last. The King deserves respect. An eight year old told us so.

Now I promised you the rest, and I keep my promises, so let me give it to you.

Two weeks later, Kevin came over on a Sunday, the first of what has become every Sunday, and we sat at my kitchen table with two cups of coffee going cold between us, and we finally had the talk. I started it. I made myself start it, because I had thrown the first stone three years back and it was only right I be the one to set down the last one. I told him I was sorry. Not the small sorry, the kind you toss over your shoulder. The whole sorry. I told him that what I said that day over his mother’s recipe tin was the ugliest thing that has ever come out of me, that it was not true, that he had been a good son to his mother right up to the end and we both knew it, and that I said it because I was drowning and I grabbed the nearest thing to pull under with me and it happened to be him. I told him three years of silence was my fault and my doing, that he called and I would not pick up, that I sat with a Christmas card in my hand and a photo of a little girl in reindeer antlers and I did not call, and that every day I did not call I told myself a lie about who had walked away from who.

And Kevin let me finish. That is a hard thing, to let a man finish an apology without rushing in to make it easier on him, and my son did it, he let me say every word. And then he told me his side, and this is the part that knocked me flat all over again, the part I said I would give you.

Kevin told me that for three years, every Fourth of July, he had bought the same box. The snakes. The sparklers. Two fountains and a Purple Mountain Majesty. The King. He bought it every year from a tent by his own house two towns over, and every year he carried it out to his own garage, and every year he stood over it in the dark and could not make himself light a single fuse. Because lighting it without me, he said, felt like admitting it was really over. So he would stand there, and then he would put the box up on the shelf, unlit, and go back inside. Three unlit boxes, he said. He had three unlit boxes on a shelf in his garage. And I had three boxes I lit alone in a silent yard. Same box. Same King. Two hundred miles apart, on the same night, both of us standing in the dark over the exact same cardboard, neither one of us able to pick up a telephone. I have not stopped thinking about those two garages since. His full of unlit boxes. Mine full of the smell of spent ones. Two men, one ceremony, torn clean down the middle, and both halves still running.

We cried at that table, the both of us, two grown men, and I am not ashamed of it. Then we drank the cold coffee anyway because that is what you do, and Kevin fixed the hinge on my screen door that had been sagging for a year, and it was the best Sunday I had had since Ruthann was alive.

And there is the thing Poppy said, the first night, at the end, when the fountains had all burned out and the cul de sac had gone home and it was just the four of us on my back steps. Poppy had fallen half asleep against my arm, this grandchild I had known for one single evening, and she looked up at me with her eyes going heavy and she said, “Grandpa Gordy, are you going to be in the picture tomorrow, or are you going to be real?” She meant it plain, a four year old sorting out where a person goes when the day is over. But it landed on me like a house. Because for three years I had been a man in a picture on a wall, a grandpa she visited in a frame, a fixed and framed and finished thing. And here was this baby asking me, in the only words she had, whether I was going to disappear again. I told her, real, sweetheart, I am going to be real, tomorrow and the day after and every day. And that is when Kevin had to get up and walk into the yard for a minute, because he could not have that on his face in front of us. I let him have his minute. I know now what those minutes are for.

So that is the whole of it. For three years I lit the King last, alone, because it was the only ceremony I had left. And on the night I finally got it wrong, on the night I broke every rule of the liturgy in front of everyone I know, that is the night the whole thing was made right.

I have thought a lot, this summer, about how I spent three years being so careful. So precise. Lighting everything in the exact correct order, alone, like a man performing surgery on a corpse. And how the healing, when it finally came, came from the mess. From the fall. From the King going first and the table going over and the frosting flag on my back and my own son laughing so hard he cried on my ruined lawn. I was trying so hard to do it right that I forgot the whole point of the ceremony was never the order. It was the company. It was having somebody standing next to you in the dark.

Kevin comes over every Sunday now. Poppy calls me Grandpa Gordy and she has claimed my recliner as her own personal throne. And that little green recipe tin with the rooster on the lid, the one I would not let my son take, the one I said such ugly things over: it sits on the counter in Kevin and Denise’s kitchen now, where Poppy can reach it, where it always should have been. I drove it over myself. I put it in his hands. I did not trust myself to speak, so I just put it in his hands, and he understood, because that is the kind of son I somehow managed to raise even after I did everything I could to lose him.

Next Fourth of July, we are doing the fireworks at my house. The whole cul de sac is invited. Deb Henderson is already planning the potato salad. And Kevin has informed me, with a straight face, that this year he is in charge of the King, because I have proven I cannot be trusted with it, and I told him that was the finest thing anybody has said to me in years.

The King goes last. The King deserves respect. And I have my son back.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.