The Trunk I Set at the Far End

Loading the Tailgate

Dale found me in the garage that night with the tailgate down on the Silverado and a box of orange lights I had bought myself three years back and never had a reason to use.

“What are we doing,” he said. Not what are you doing. We. My husband is a man of few words and most of them are the right ones.

“Mick and Jo got left off the sign-up,” I said. “I’m not going to fight Shanna about it. But those kids have been talking about handing out candy for three weeks.

Jo’s being a scarecrow. Mick’s a cowboy, which is just his regular clothes and a hat, but he’s proud of it.”

Dale stood there a minute. He is a quiet man and he loves his daughter and I watched him understand, slow and then all at once, what Shanna had done.

His jaw worked. He did not defend her and he did not run her down. He just reached past me for the other box of lights.

“We’ll set up at the far end,” I said. “By the cedar at the edge of the gravel. We won’t crowd anybody. We won’t make a thing of it.”

“Far end’s fine,” he said. “Line of sight’s good from the road, too. Folks coming in’ll see us first.”

He said it flat, the way he says everything, but I caught it. My husband had just told me where to park to catch the most traffic, and he had done it for his step-grandkids, against his own daughter’s wishes, without one extra word.

I could have kissed him in that cold garage.

We loaded the truck the next morning. Four hay bales from the barn, the small square kind, two dollars of my own labor and a summer of sweat.