The Lane I Lit With Sixty Pumpkins

The Phone Call

The call came while I had my hands in a bowl of pie crust, flour to the wrists, the radio low on the station out of Marion.

I wiped one hand on my apron and pinned the phone to my shoulder the way I always did, and I said hello, and Brittany said my name like it was a chore she had put off.

“Glenda,” she said. “I wanted to tell you before the boys got their hopes up.”

I turned the radio down. You learn, after a certain age, to turn the radio down when a sentence starts that way.

“Tell me what, honey,” I said.

“It’s about Halloween.”

“What about it.”

“The lane,” she said. “Your lane.”

I waited. I had learned to wait, too.

“We’re not going to do the lane this year.” She said it quick, the way you rip a bandage. “I was talking to the other moms, and Halloween at your place is just, I don’t know. It’s a lot of nothing. It’s dark out there. It’s spooky in the wrong way.”

I looked out my kitchen window at the lane. A quarter mile of gravel running straight from the county road up to my porch, maples on both sides, their leaves already down and gold in the ditch.

For twenty-eight years my grandsons’ father had walked that lane in a sheet with eyeholes I cut with the kitchen scissors. For eight years the boys had walked it in their turn.

“Spooky in the wrong way,” I repeated. I was not trying to be sharp. I only did not know what the right way to be spooky was.

“There’s nothing to do,” Brittany said. “No activities. The boys are older now. They want the real experience.”

I set the pie crust down. I did not know a crust could feel heavy, but it did.

“They walked it last year,” I said. “Mason found the owl’s nest in the big maple. Trey wouldn’t take his hand off my coat the whole way up.”

“They were babies last year,” she said. “They’ve grown up a lot since then. Trust me.”

I did not say that Trey was seven last year and eight now and that one year is not a lifetime, no matter how it looks to a mother in a hurry.

I only said, “All right.”

“Don’t be hurt,” she said, and I could hear her moving around her own kitchen, a dish going into a rack, a cabinet closing. “It’s just one Halloween. There’ll be others.”

That is a thing young people say to old people. There’ll be others. As if we have not learned to count how few others there are.