Fireworks From My Half of the Dock

Jack laughed so hard he nearly fell off Uncle Ken’s knee.

At about twenty to twelve, I looked up the hill and saw the deck door open one more time.

Rachel came down the path by herself. She had not put on a coat. She had on her black sequined sweater and a pair of Hal’s barn boots, unlaced, that she must have grabbed from beside the door, and her arms were wrapped around herself against the cold.

The whole dock got quiet. Everybody looked at Rachel, and then at me, and then at the ice, the way people do when they do not know where else to look.

She walked to the foot of the dock and stopped. She did not come out. She just stood there on the shore, with her arms crossed and her face red from the cold, looking at the end of the dock where I was standing with my kids.

I did not want to say anything that sounded like I had won something, because I had not won anything. I had just used my half of the dock.

It was Jack who moved first. He picked up one of the long sparklers out of the box, walked all the way down the dock to the shore in his unzipped coat, and held it out to his aunt.

“You have to hold it,” he told her. “That’s the rule. Everybody gets one. Grandpa’s rule.”

Rachel looked down at him. Her mouth did something I had not seen it do since we buried Daddy. Then she took the sparkler.

Jack held up the long lighter like he was going to light it, remembered the rule, and turned around and yelled for me.

I walked down the dock and lit it for her. Our hands were close together over the end of that sparkler.

It caught, and sputtered, and threw sparks up between us, and in the light I could see that my sister was crying.

“Hold it out away from you,” Jack told her. “And don’t touch the hot part. And you can write stuff with it if you want. Hailey wrote Grandpa’s name.”

“Did she,” Rachel said. Her voice was very small.

Jack took her free hand and walked her out onto the dock, right past everybody in Daddy’s lawn chairs, all the way to the end.

He walked her onto the right side, her side, without anyone telling him to. Then he stood next to her with his own sparkler, and the two of them held them out over the ice together.

I stayed where I was, on my side. Hailey came and stood next to me. And for a while nobody said anything, and the sparklers burned, and the fountain behind us crackled down to nothing.

When Rachel’s sparkler burned out, she handed the wire to Jack and came over to the middle of the dock. She did not step on the middle board.

She stood right at the edge of it, on her side, and I stood right at the edge of it on mine.

“I can’t have kids, Missy,” she said, very low, so only I could hear. “We stopped trying in the spring. Nine years. Three rounds in Grand Rapids. The doctor finally told us to stop. I never told you.”

I did not say anything. I just listened, the way Daddy used to listen, with as few words as possible.