The Night the Lineman Came Home
“Is that you up there?”
“It’s me.”
He stood there with his mouth open a little and his coffee steaming in the cold. Then he looked down at his own feet, at the slippers in the snow, like he had just noticed them.
“Brad, go inside,” I said. “You’re going to freeze. You’re in your slippers.”
He did not go inside. He stood there. I lowered the bucket down, slow, and came down to about eye level with him and stopped.
My hands were shaking. I could not have told you if it was the cold or something else.
“I didn’t call you,” he said. “I want you to know I didn’t call you.”
“I know. Nicole did.”
“I told Kara not to.” He shook his head. “I didn’t think I had the right.”
“It wasn’t about calling me,” I said. “Your road was next on the list anyway. I don’t get to pick. Thirty-one houses. It just happened to be yours at the end.”
“But it’s three in the morning,” he said.
“We were supposed to quit at two,” I said. “The boys wanted to finish it. It was Luis’s idea, really.” I nodded down at Luis, who was standing by the truck in the cold. “That’s Luis. He’s got a little boy at home. Eight months.”
Brad looked over at Luis, and then at Kyle and Tom, and then back up at me. And then he said the thing I had not expected him to say, not then and not ever.
“Dad used to come home at three in the morning,” he said. “Just like this. I’d hear the truck in the drive. I used to sit at the window and wait for the truck.”
I did not say anything. I let him talk.
“Every storm. Every Christmas, it seemed like. Every ball game I ever had. He missed my confirmation for an ice storm in Brookings County. Mom would keep the porch light on and his plate in the oven, and I’d sit at that window till I fell asleep on the sill.”
He took a breath, and it came out white.
“And then he died in the pole yard when he was fifty,” Brad said. “Fifty. I was twenty-one. And I thought, that’s what that job does. It eats a man and it gives you a plate in the oven. And I swore I’d never be around it. And then my sister went and married it.”
He laughed, a little, but it was not really a laugh.
“I’m sorry about Thanksgiving,” he said. “I’ve been sorry about it since the car ride home. Kara let me have it. I was so tired I could hardly see, and you sat there and passed the rolls, and I hated you a little more for that, for not even fighting back.”
“It was your mom’s table,” I said.
“I know it was.” He looked at me. “That’s why you didn’t. I figured that out about a week later. You didn’t do it for my sake. You did it for Mom.”
“I did it for Mom,” I said. “And for Nicole. And because you had a four week old baby and you looked like something the cat dragged in.”
He laughed for real that time.
Then he did what I keep coming back to. He did not go inside. He stood at the end of his own driveway in his bathrobe and his slippers in seven degrees and wind, and he watched us finish.