Fireworks From My Half of the Dock

I called Steve that night on his break. He was in the truck somewhere south of Roscommon, waiting on a crew to finish a pole, and I could hear the heater running and the radio chatter in the background.

“She said what?” he said, when I told him. Steve does not raise his voice. He has spent twenty years up in a bucket on live wires and he has learned that loud does not help anything. But I could hear him go still on the other end of the line.

“I’m going anyway,” I said. “With the kids. I’m taking the food, and we’ll stay downstairs, and we’ll do the fireworks on the dock at eleven, like we always do. I’m not going to make a scene.”

“You never make a scene,” he said. “That’s what worries me about you.” He was quiet a minute. I could hear the crew radio crackle behind him.

“Fireworks are legal till one on New Year’s,” Steve said, because he is Steve and he cannot help himself.

“State law. Eleven in the morning on the thirty-first until one in the morning on the first. Just so you know, if anybody says anything.”

“Of course you did,” he said, and I could hear him smiling. “Tell the kids I said happy New Year. Tell your dad I said hi, out there on the middle board.”

I did not trust my voice for that one, so I just said goodnight.

On the thirty-first, I closed the salon at one. I loaded the food into coolers in the back of my car, and the kids’ bags, and the paper sack of fireworks, and a long lighter from the junk drawer, and we drove up I-75 to Gaylord and then east on the county road to the lake.

It had been cold all week, single digits at night. The lake was not frozen all the way across yet, but the ice had crept out from the edges, and the shallow bays were white.

The balloon arch was up over the deck door. Gold and black. It was beautiful. I want to say that. My sister has always had a good eye.

I carried in the first cooler and Rachel met me at the door. She was in a black sweater with sequins on the shoulders and her hair was done, which I could tell because I had taught her the curl myself, years ago, at Daddy’s bathroom sink.

“Oh good, you’re here,” she said. She took the cooler from me and set it on the counter and started unloading it, fast, checking things off in her head.

Then she looked past me, out the window, and saw the kids getting their bags out of the back seat.

Her face changed. Not much. Just a tightening around the mouth, the same look Mom used to get when she found mud on the kitchen floor.

“Missy,” she said quietly. “I told you.”

“I know you did,” I said, just as quietly. “We’re not coming to the party. We’ll be downstairs in the bunk room. You won’t even know we’re here. At eleven we’re going to go down to the dock and do the fireworks, on my side, and then we’ll go to bed. That’s all.”

She looked at me for a long moment. I could see her deciding whether to fight about it, and I could see her decide not to.

Rachel has never liked a scene any more than I have. It is the one thing we got from Daddy in equal shares.