The Pontoon Key on a Sparkler

What Paige did

“Daddy,” Paige said again, and she was still half laughing, with tears in her eyes. “You know I love you. But you cannot give anybody Tammy’s house.”

She picked up the card with the silver bells, with Bill’s spare key taped inside it. She closed it. And she slid it all the way back down the picnic table to me, past the deviled eggs and the baked beans.

It stopped right in front of my plate.

“That’s Jeff’s house,” she said, to everybody, to the Teagues. “Tammy’s first husband. He died young. She paid it off with what he left her. I’ve known that since I was eighteen.”

Then she reached out and took the sparkler out of my hand, right as it was sputtering down to the wire. She held it up over her head.

“But I am keeping the boat,” she said.

And the whole yard laughed. All forty of them. Logan’s uncle Dale slapped the table and said, “Now that’s a wedding present,” and one of the cousins started to clap, and then everybody clapped.

The sparkler went out. Paige pulled the key off the wire, tape and all, and she held it in her fist against her chest.

She reached past me and laid the burnt wire on the porch rail behind our table, so none of the little ones would step on it. Then she came around the end of the table and hugged me so hard my glasses went crooked.

“Thank you,” she said into my hair. “For the boat. And for not making me cry in front of Lisa.”

“You’re crying anyway,” I said.

“That’s different,” she said. “These are the good kind.”

Then she let go of me, and she stood back, and she said something I did not expect.

“Will you help me find a house? A little one. Of our own. You know about loans and all that. Logan and I don’t know what we’re doing.”

“I know a little,” I said.

“You know everything,” she said. “You’re at the bank.”

I have been a teller at the same branch in Camdenton for twenty-two years. I do not know everything. But I know which loan officer will sit with a young couple for two hours and not make them feel stupid.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll help you.”

The dock

When I looked back at the grill, Bill was gone.

The burgers were still on. They were starting to smoke. Logan, bless him, walked over without a word and took the tongs off the side shelf and started moving them to a plate.

I found Bill with my eyes. He had gone down the yard to the water, under the oaks. He was sitting out at the very end of our dock with his feet hanging over, where the lift stood empty.

He sat there alone through the whole start of the fireworks. Through Dale lighting the mortars off the gravel. Through the little kids running circles with sparklers I had bought.

I did not go down. I am not proud of that, and I am not ashamed of it either. A man needs to sit with a thing by himself sometimes, and I needed to stand by Paige.

Lisa Teague came over to me with two paper cups of lemonade. She handed me one and sat down on the bench beside me.

“I didn’t know,” she said quietly. “About the house. About your first husband. I’m sorry I said ‘oh, Bill’ like that.”

“You couldn’t have known,” I said.

“No,” she said. “But he knew.” She was quiet for a second. “I think he wanted us to think a lot of him.”

“You should,” I said. “He’s worth thinking a lot of. He just picked the wrong way to show it.”

She nodded. Then she said, “Ron’s brother Kenny did something like that once. Promised a cousin half of a hayfield he didn’t own. It took him two years to live it down.”

I laughed, and I needed to.

It was almost an hour before Bill came back up the yard. The fireworks were done, and people were picking up paper plates and folding chairs, and the little ones were asleep on laps.

He walked straight to the middle of the picnic tables, right where everybody could see him. He did not go to me first. He went to the Teagues.

“I need to say something,” he said. His voice was rough. “I spoke out of turn tonight. That house was never mine to give. It’s Tammy’s. It always was.”

The Teagues went quiet. Logan’s father, Ron, stopped stacking chairs.

“I wanted my girl to have something from me,” Bill said. “And I didn’t have it to give, so I gave away what wasn’t mine. That was wrong. I’m sorry, Paige. And I’m sorry, Tammy.”

Then he turned and looked at me. In front of all of them.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I should have asked you. I should have never had to ask you, because I should have never said it.”

It was quiet for a long second.

Then Ron Teague walked over and put a hand on Bill’s shoulder and kept it there. He did not say anything. He did not have to. One farmer to another, that hand said plenty.