Fireworks From My Half of the Dock

She looked at me a long time, and then she nodded, once. “I won’t say anything,” she said.

“You have my word.” Then she went into the bathroom, and came out, and went back up the stairs without another word.

I believed her. Aunt Jan keeps her word. But Aunt Jan also has a face that says more than most people’s mouths do.

At ten-thirty, I started getting the kids ready. Snow pants, boots, hats, gloves. Jack had a winter coat with a hood that he refused to put up.

Hailey had the coat she got for Christmas, and she kept smoothing the front of it like she wanted Grandpa to see it.

I put on my boots, my long black puffer coat, and the knit hat Hailey made me in 4-H. Then I picked up the paper sack, and Hailey picked up the two boxes of long sparklers.

“Jack carries the lighter,” Jack said. “Grandpa always let Jack carry the lighter.”

“You carry it, I light it,” I said. “That’s the rule.” Jack nodded solemnly and took the lighter in both gloves like it was something from church.

At eleven, we went out the walkout door. The cold hit us like a wall, that hard dry cold that makes the inside of your nose stick together.

Our boots squeaked on the packed snow. Up behind us, the house was lit up in every window, and the music came through the glass.

We walked down the path to the lake, past the shed where Daddy kept his tools and his lawn chairs and the boat on its trailer.

The dock was white with snow, and the boards popped under our boots, and the ice had grown out from the shore all around the posts, gray and white and glassy at the edge.

We walked out to the end. I went to the left side. Without anyone saying anything, Hailey and Jack went to the left side with me, and none of us stepped on the middle board.

I knelt down on the boards. The cold came right through the knees of my pants.

I set the first fountain on the boards, lit it with the long lighter, and stepped back to the kids.

It went up with a whoosh, a column of bright sparks taller than Jack, lighting up the whole end of the dock and the ice around it.

Jack yelled. Hailey laughed out loud, and the sound carried across the frozen edges of the lake.

When the first fountain died down, I lit their sparklers, one each, off the end of the lighter.

Jack waved his around in big circles, the way he always does, making shapes he says are dragons. Hailey held hers very still.

Then she started to write.

She did it slowly, carefully, the sparkler leaving a trail of light in the dark that hung there just long enough to read. A big round D. Then an O. Then an N.

Don. Grandpa’s name. She wrote it in the air over his dock, on his night, and held the sparkler up when she was done, so the last of the letters could fade out against the sky.

I put my hand on her back and she leaned into me. Jack, who had seen what she wrote, stopped waving his and stood still too.

“I wanted him to see where we were,” Hailey said. “In case he was looking for us upstairs.”