The Pontoon Key on a Sparkler
The kitchen table
After everybody was gone, Bill and I sat at the kitchen table with the back door open. You could hear the frogs down at the cove and smell the gunpowder still hanging over the water.
He had his hands flat on the table. Big hands, nicked up from a lifetime of turning wrenches.
“I was going to talk to you,” he said. “I swear I was. I thought, after the cookout, I’ll tell her, and she’ll be mad, and then she’ll come around.”
“Come around to what, Bill? Giving away Jeff’s house?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t think that far. I just saw Lisa with that quilt, and Ron with that lot, and I thought, what do I have? A truck with two hundred thousand miles on it.”
“You have her,” I said. “You raised her. You slept on a couch for a year so she could have a room with a door on it.”
He put his face in his hands.
“I didn’t want to be the poor side of the wedding,” he said through his fingers. “That’s the whole ugly truth of it. I didn’t want them looking at me like I was the poor side.”
I reached across and pulled one of his hands down off his face, and I held onto it.
“You don’t get to spend me to look big, Bill,” I said. “Not me, and not Jeff. You can be anything you want in front of those people. But not with what’s mine.”
“I know,” he said.
“Do you?”
“I do now,” he said. “I sat on that dock an hour knowing it.”
I let that be enough. Eight years is a long time, and one foolish night does not wipe it out. But I wanted him to hear it once, plain, at our own table, so we never had to have it again.
“There is something you can give her,” I said. “Something nobody else in that family can.”
He looked up.
“Your hands,” I said. “Whatever house she finds, it’s going to need a roof or a furnace or a deck. And you’re the only one in either family who can fix all three.”
He looked at me for a long time. Then he laughed, just a little, the first time since the grill.
“That’s not much of a wedding present,” he said.
“It’s everything,” I said. “Ask anybody who’s ever paid a roofer.”