Fireworks From My Half of the Dock

I lit two fresh sparklers and put one in each of their gloved hands. Then I knelt down on the boards again, because I needed something to do with my hands, and I lit the second fountain.

And while it was going up, roaring and bright, I heard the music stop behind us.

Then I heard the back door open, and close, and open again. Voices on the deck. Boots on the stairs.

And down the path, coming toward us in the dark, the scrape and rattle of something metal being dragged over packed snow.

I turned around. Up the hill, every window in Daddy’s house was still lit, and coming down the path from the deck, one after another, were people.

Uncle Rich was first. He had two of Daddy’s old aluminum lawn chairs, the ones with the green and white webbing, one under each arm, and he was dragging the back legs through the snow because his hands were too full to lift them. Uncle Ken was behind him with two more.

“Don’s chairs,” Uncle Rich called down to us, in that truck-starting voice. “They were in the shed, right where he left them. Can’t watch fireworks standing up. Your dad would have had my hide.”

They came out onto the dock and unfolded the chairs, two on my side and two at the foot of the dock, and the webbing creaked in the cold, and Uncle Ken sat down in one of them and pulled Jack onto his knee like Jack was still four.

Behind them came Aunt Jan, with a thermos of hot cocoa and a sleeve of paper cups.

Then the Petersons. Then Hal’s sister and her husband. Then the Halls from the next cabin over, who had come to the party for an hour and stayed four.

Hal came down near the end, with his hands in his jacket pockets. He walked out onto the dock and stood next to me, on my side. He looked at the fountain, and then at Hailey, and then at me.

“Rich saw Jan’s face,” he said quietly. “Then he saw you three out the window. He didn’t say anything. He just got up, put his coat on, and went to the shed. Then everybody else got up too.”

“I didn’t ask anybody to come,” I said. “I want you to know that. I didn’t tell anybody, and I didn’t ask anybody. I wasn’t trying to take her party.”

“I know you weren’t,” Hal said. “Nobody thinks you were.” He was quiet for a while.

“She’s up there by herself. In the kitchen. With the ball drop on and the cards all over the table and nobody playing them.”

I looked up the hill. Through the big kitchen window, I could see her. She was standing at the counter with her back to us, in her black sweater, with all those gold and black balloons over the deck door behind her, and every chair at the kitchen table empty.

I want to tell you I felt good about that, but I did not. It was the loneliest thing I had ever seen.

It was my sister, who packed my lunches and signed my slips, standing alone in Daddy’s kitchen on New Year’s Eve, at the party she had planned since October.

“Should I go up?” I asked Hal.

He shook his head. “Give her a minute,” he said. “She’ll come. She just has to decide to.”

So I lit another fountain. Uncle Rich told the story about the year Daddy dropped a lit sparkler down the leg of his own boot.