The Pontoon Key on a Sparkler

The sparkler

I had on my navy and white striped dress, and my short platinum hair was spiked up the way I do it for company. I set the paper plate down. I did it very carefully, like it was full of something that might spill, and I wiped my fingers on a napkin.

Nobody was looking at me except Paige. Everyone else was looking at Bill, or at Logan, or at the card with the silver bells. Lisa was already saying something about how generous it was.

On our table there was a box of sparklers I had bought at the stand on Highway 5 for the little ones. Next to it was a roll of masking tape we had used to hold the tablecloths down against the lake wind.

I took my key ring out of my pocket. On it was the key to the pontoon, a little brass key on a plain ring, the kind you keep a close eye on.

The pontoon was sitting up on its trailer by the garage that night. The lift at our dock had thrown a cable in June, and the part had been on order from Osage Beach for three weeks.

It is a twenty-two foot pontoon, eleven years old when I bought it, with new carpet and a 115 on the back. I paid thirty thousand dollars for it, and I financed it through our credit union.

I made every payment myself, out of my own check. Five years of them. I made the last one in April and took the paperwork home and set it on the kitchen table and just looked at it.

Jeff always wanted a pontoon. He used to say, when we get the house paid off, Tam, we are getting a party barge and we are never coming in off the water. I bought it for him, in a way.

But it was Paige who loved it. She learned to dock it the first summer, at twenty-one, better than Bill ever did. She brought her college friends down on weekends and packed it with coolers and towels.

The night Bill’s father died, she drove down from Springfield after midnight. She did not go into the house. She came down to the dock where I was sitting, and we took the pontoon out to the middle of the cove.

We sat out there with the motor off for an hour. Neither of us said one word. Then she put her head on my shoulder, and we came in.

So I peeled off a strip of masking tape, and I taped that key to the end of a sparkler. I wound the tape around three times so it would hold.

Bill was still talking. Something about how Paige’s grandmother would have been proud. I picked the long grill lighter up off the table and I lit the sparkler.

It caught with that hiss they make, and it threw sparks everywhere, and the little kids at the next table went “Ooooh.” That was when people finally looked my way.

I stood up. I held the sparkler up the way you would hold up a glass for a toast.