The Lane I Lit With Sixty Pumpkins

Down The Lane

She stood by her open car door with the dome light on her and she did not come up right away.

She looked down the lane, sixty faces still burning, the last families drifting up through them, Earl’s flashlight small at the far end, Darlene’s cider steaming on the tailgate. She looked at her boys with their arms around me. And her face, under the dome light, was not the face I had braced for.

“The barn was forty-five minutes each way,” she said finally, coming a few steps closer. “And eighteen a head. And a line. And Mason asked in the car, he asked me why we didn’t just go to Grandma’s.”

She stopped at the bottom of the porch steps. Her eyes were wet and she was not hiding it, and I understood then that she had wanted flashy and store-bought the way you want a thing you think will measure up, the way a girl from a bright close street thinks a quarter mile of dark cannot be enough.

“I didn’t know it could look like this,” she said. “I’m sorry, Glenda. I called it spooky in the wrong way. I didn’t know there was a right way until I drove up it.”

“The barn was fine, I’m sure,” I said. “The boys had a good time.”

“They did.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand, the way you do when you did not plan to cry.

“And then they got in the car and Mason looked out the window the whole way home and didn’t say a word. I asked him what was wrong. He said nothing. Just nothing.”

“And I knew it was this,” she said. “I knew I’d driven them past the thing they wanted to get to the thing I wanted.”

“They’re here now,” I said.

“How did you do all of them? There must be fifty.”