Fireworks From My Half of the Dock

We went back up to the house. The party started up again, louder than before, and this time everybody was in the kitchen at once, and the kids were in the middle of it.

Uncle Rich taught Jack how to bid in euchre. Aunt Jan made Hailey a plate of everything on the counter, including the onion dip.

The kids fell asleep upstairs a little after one, both of them in the big bed in the front room, which had been Daddy’s room. Rachel tucked them in.

I stood in the doorway and watched her pull the quilt up under Jack’s chin, and smooth Hailey’s hair back, and stand there looking at them for a long time.

In the morning, I came upstairs at about eight and smelled coffee. Rachel was already in the kitchen in her robe, with Mom’s old recipe tin open on the counter and Daddy’s card propped up against the sugar canister.

Daddy’s pancakes are nothing special, which is what makes them special. Buttermilk, a little more sugar than the card says, a handful of wild blueberries from the freezer that we picked on the jack pine plains past Atlanta every August, and a griddle as hot as the stove will go.

The trick is the flip. Daddy flipped every pancake with a plow driver’s wrist, one quick turn and no peeking, and he always made the first one ugly on purpose so nobody else’s would be.

Rachel mixed. I heated the griddle. Hailey measured the blueberries, counting them out like money. Jack stood on a kitchen chair with the spatula and made the first pancake, and it was the ugliest pancake anybody in our family has ever made, and Rachel cheered for it like he had won the state championship.

“That’s how Grandpa did it,” Hailey told him. “The first one’s supposed to be ugly. So the rest of them are good.”

Hal came in stamping snow off his boots, Uncle Rich and Aunt Jan came over from their cabin down the road, and we ate every pancake at Daddy’s table, with Michigan maple syrup and too much butter, and nobody played euchre, and nobody needed to.

Before we left that afternoon, Rachel walked me out to the car. The kids were already buckled in, worn out, both of them half asleep in the back seat.

She stood by my door in her coat this time, with her hands in her pockets.

“Next year,” she said. “Same thing. Everybody. Kids and all. And you’re doing the fireworks.”

“We’re doing the fireworks,” I said. “Both of us.”

She smiled. “Both of us,” she said. “On whose half?”

“Middle board,” I said. “Just once a year. He won’t mind.”

She laughed and hugged me through the car window, a long one, the kind Hal gives.

Then she stepped back and waved, and stood in the driveway of Daddy’s lake house watching us until we turned onto the county road.

On the drive home, somewhere south of Gaylord, Hailey woke up long enough to ask me whether Grandpa had seen her write his name.

I told her I was sure he had. I told her he was standing right there on the middle board the whole time, where he always said he would be.

I have a lot of pictures from that New Year’s. Uncle Rich in Daddy’s lawn chair. Aunt Jan with her thermos. Jack and his ugly pancake.

Hailey with her sparkler held up in the dark. But the picture I keep is the one nobody took: two sisters on one dock at midnight.