The Night the Lineman Came Home
Every light on the tree was lit. You could see the glow of them on her face and in her eyes.
“First Christmas picture,” Brad said. “We took it Friday night. First night we had the tree lit. Kara wanted the crew to have the first one.”
He turned it over. On the back, in Kara’s handwriting, it said: “For Jake, Luis, Kyle and Tom. You turned on my first Christmas lights. Love, Harper.”
Luis took the frame from me, because I could not hold it right then, and he walked it over to the bulletin board in the break room and hung it on the nail above the coffee maker, right next to the safety meeting schedule.
It is still there. Every lineman who comes through that room for a cup sees her.
Rick came out of his office and looked at it for a long time. Then he shook Brad’s hand. “You’re Dale Kessler’s boy,” he said.
Brad nodded.
“I climbed with your dad for twelve years,” Rick said. “He was the best hand I ever worked with. He used to talk about you kids every single night in the truck. Every night. He had your ball schedule taped to the dash.”
Brad stood there in the middle of the co-op shop with his mouth open, the same way he had stood at the bottom of the pole. He had not known. All those years, he had not known.
Christmas was at Janet’s again, the same table, the same pilgrims on the tablecloth, swapped out for the poinsettia one.
The house smelled like ham and the cinnamon rolls Janet makes from her mother’s recipe. Harper was asleep in a bouncy seat by the tree, in the red dress.
We sat down, all fourteen of us, the cousins and the aunt and Nicole’s grandpa Walt, who is ninety-one and was a farmer out by Oldham for sixty years.
Janet asked Walt to say grace, the way she always does, and he did, slow, the way he always does.
And then, before anybody could pass anything, Brad stood up with his glass of wine.
“I want to say something,” he said.
The table got quiet the way it had at Thanksgiving. I felt Nicole’s hand come down on my knee again, under the tablecloth. Only this time she squeezed.
“At Thanksgiving I said something at this table that I’ve been ashamed of every day since,” Brad said. “I said linemen get paid to sit in a truck. I said it about my brother-in-law, and I said it about Dad, too, even if I didn’t say his name.”
Janet put her napkin up to her mouth.
“Two weeks later, Jake and three other men stood in the ice at the end of my driveway at three in the morning, for thirty-one houses, and one of them was mine,” Brad said. “And I came out in my slippers and I saw him up there, and I finally understood what Dad was doing all those nights.”
He had to stop. Kara reached up and put her hand on his back.
“He wasn’t away from us,” Brad said. “He was out there doing that. For somebody else’s baby. And I sat at the window being mad at him for twenty years, when I should have been proud of him.”
He raised his glass. His hand was shaking a little, the same way it had shaken pouring the coffee.