Four Flashlights in the Back Pasture

Midnight

At midnight, by my watch, the porch light came on.

I heard the storm door, and then I saw a shape come down the porch steps, and then a flashlight, swinging.

Whoever it was came across the yard and around the machine shed and started down into the pasture, straight toward our fire.

Grady was on his feet before I was. He grabbed all four flashlights, two in each hand, and lit the path through the snow.

It was my dad, in his barn coat and seed cap, with a steel thermos under one arm and a wool blanket over the other.

He stopped at the edge of the firelight and looked at the tent, and at Grady with his flashlights, and at me.

He looked like a man who had been standing at a dark window for a long time.

“Your grandma made cocoa,” he said to Grady. Then he stopped, and corrected himself. “No. I made cocoa. Your grandma’s asleep. I don’t know if it’s any good.”

“I bet it’s good,” Grady said.

“Room on that log?” my dad asked.

Grady scooted over so fast he almost went into the snow. My dad spread the wool blanket on the log and sat down between us with a grunt, and his knees cracked, and he unscrewed the thermos and poured cocoa into the lid and handed it to Grady first.

What My Dad Said

We sat a long time without talking, which is normal for my family.

Grady drank his cocoa and declared it the best cocoa in the world, which it was not. It was Swiss Miss and too much water. But it was hot.

“Saw your flashing,” my dad said finally. He said it to the fire. “From the kitchen. What was it?”

“Good night,” Grady said. “In Morse code.”

My dad nodded slowly. “I figured it was something like that.” He was quiet for a minute. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“I learned it from a library book,” Grady said. “It took me all of November.”

My dad laughed, one short laugh, the first one I had heard from him all day. Then he looked at the flashlights lined up on the log, all four of them, still on, and I watched him count them. I watched him realize what they were.

When he finally talked, he talked to me, though Grady could hear every word.

“Jill sends a list,” he said. “Every year. Your mother buys off the list. She doesn’t like shopping. She never did.”

He turned the stick over in his hands. “You never sent anything. Not once. Not since the divorce.”

“I know, Dad.”

“We told ourselves he didn’t care,” my dad said. “That’s the truth. We told ourselves he was a boy, and boys don’t care about all that, and he seemed happy.”

He looked at the flashlights again. “He did seem happy.”

“He was happy,” I said. “He is happy. He’s the happiest kid I know. That’s not the point.”

“No,” my dad said. “I know it isn’t.”

I could have said a great deal right then. I had three years of things saved up. I had the numbers, every year of them, $1,200 for the girls and $15 for Grady, four times over.

But I looked at my father, sixty-six years old, sitting on a frozen log at midnight in his barn coat because he had seen his grandson flash good night at a dark house and had not been able to stand it.

I didn’t need to say any of it. He had already done the math.

“He doesn’t ask for things,” I said instead. “He doesn’t know how. He learned that from me.”

My dad was quiet a long while. Then he said, “Well. He learned it from somebody before you, too.”

And I knew he meant himself, and I knew that was as close to an apology as I was ever going to get, and that it was a very close one.