The Lights on Route 9

Christmas Eve

Arvid had kept a box of Christmas lights in the storage room since 1966. Big old colored bulbs, the kind that get hot enough to melt snow.

Every year the station was open, he had strung them along the front edge of the canopy, and every year people driving Route 9 had looked for them.

On Christmas Eve afternoon, the kids and I got the box down. Half the bulbs were burned out.

Emma rode to Larsen with Arvid in the Buick and bought replacements, every bulb the hardware store had, and they came back with a sack full.

By four o’clock it was nearly dark, the way it gets in North Dakota at Christmas. Snow was coming down light and dry. I had the stepladder out under the canopy.

Emma was on the ladder handing down the old strings and Jack was untangling them on the concrete, and Arvid was supervising from a lawn chair with a blanket over his knees.

That was when Dale’s pickup pulled up to pump one.

He got out and filled his tank. Forty-some gallons of diesel, which took a while on those old pumps. He stood there with his hand on the nozzle, watching his kids work.

Jack was trying to reach the last hook at the end of the canopy, on his tiptoes on the second step of the ladder, and he could not quite get it.

Dale hung up the nozzle. He walked over and steadied the ladder.

“Here, bud,” he said. “Hand it up.”

Jack handed him the end of the string, and Dale, who is six foot two, reached up and hooked it on the last bracket without even trying.

Then he stood there a second with his hand still up on the canopy rail.

“I said a wrong thing about your mother,” he said to them both. “In September. At supper. I was wrong, and I’m sorry, and she’s not going down in the world. She’s doing just fine. Better than I am, probably.”

Emma looked at him a long time from the top of the ladder. Then she climbed down and hugged him, quick and hard, the way fourteen-year-old girls hug when they do not want to be seen doing it.

“Merry Christmas, Dad,” she said.

He went in and paid me for his diesel at the counter. He paid with a card, like everybody else. He did not say anything else to me, and I did not need him to.

He wished Arvid a merry Christmas and drove back toward the farm. We were not getting back together. Both of us knew that. But the kids had heard him say it, and that was what mattered.