The Night the Lineman Came Home
He watched us pick up every piece of that broken crossarm. He watched us coil up the hand lines and stow the grounds.
It took twenty minutes. Kara came to the door twice and called to him, and both times he waved her back in and stayed where he was.
He just stood there with his coffee getting cold in his hand, watching four tired men in the ice.
When we were buttoned up and Luis had the truck running, Brad came over to my window. His lips were blue. His feet had to have been soaked through and freezing.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait right there. Two minutes.”
He went back up the drive as fast as he could go on the ice, and he came back with a big steel thermos, the old green kind, and a sleeve of paper cups.
He poured four coffees on the hood of my truck in the wind, his hands shaking so bad he spilled half of the first one.
“That was Dad’s thermos,” he said. “Mom gave it to me when I moved out. I’ve never used it. I didn’t want to.”
We stood there in the headlights and drank it. It was terrible coffee, boiled on a gas range by a man who had not slept in three days, and it was the best coffee I have ever had in my life.
Kyle said so. Tom said so. Luis just held his in both hands and closed his eyes.
“Thank you,” Brad said to each of them, one at a time, and shook their hands. When he got to Luis, he held on a little longer. “Go home to your boy,” he said.
It was three forty when we pulled out. Rick got his call at three forty two. We were inside our sixteen by eighteen minutes.
We finished the rest of the Spring Lake taps on Friday. The last of our members came back on Saturday afternoon, three days and two hours after the ice came down.
I slept fourteen hours on Saturday night in my own bed, with Nicole’s cold feet on my shins, and I did not dream at all.
Nicole had heard the whole story from Kara before I ever got home. Kara had heard it from Brad, who had come in at four in the morning and sat down on the edge of the bed in his wet slippers and cried, Kara said, for the first time since his father’s funeral.
“He told me about the window,” Nicole said, Sunday morning, at the kitchen table. “About sitting at the window waiting for Dad. I never knew that. I was too little. I thought Dad was a hero. Brad was the one who waited up.”
“He waited up a long time,” I said.
“He waited up twenty years,” Nicole said. She wiped her eyes with a dish towel. “And then you came down the road in the middle of the night, and somebody finally came home.”
The Monday after, Brad came to the co-op shop. I was in the break room filling out time sheets, and I heard the front desk say, “There’s a man here with coffee for Jake’s crew,” and I came out and there he was, in his bank quarter zip, holding two cardboard carriers of coffee from the café downtown.
He had something else under his arm, too. It was a picture in a cheap wooden frame from the drugstore, the kind you get for four dollars.
It was Harper. Six weeks old, in a little red Christmas dress with a white collar, propped up on a pillow on the floor in front of their Christmas tree.