The Lanterns on Dad’s Back Fence

“First come, first served,” she said, and she said it lightly, like it was a joke between friends. “It’s a yard sale.”

The woman in the sweatshirt set the lantern back down. “Five dollars?” she asked.

“Five,” Tamra said.

“I’ll take all of them,” I said, louder than I meant to. The woman looked at me and put her hands in her pockets and moved on to a box of Christmas ornaments.

Tamra did the math with her lips. “That’s a hundred and five. Cash. I’m not doing any of that phone payment stuff.”

I opened my purse. I had sixty-two dollars, mostly in fives from the vending machine change I always meant to put back in the bank.

I want to say here why I did not do the obvious thing.

I could have called Phil. He was at work at the plant in Bucyrus, pulling Saturday overtime, and he would have had to walk off the floor to answer. I could have walked inside and told Dad. I could have stood in that driveway and said every true thing I was feeling.

But Dad slept under Tamra’s roof now. He ate at her table. He asked her for the remote and for his pills and for a ride to the barber. I was not going to start a war in her driveway that he would have to live in the middle of after I drove away.

“Will you hold them?” I asked. “I’ll run to the bank machine.”

Tamra looked at her watch. “You have fifteen minutes,” she said. “A man from Bucyrus already asked about the red ones. He said he’d be back.”

I drove to the gas station out on Portland Way and stood in line behind a man buying lottery tickets, and I took out sixty dollars and paid the fee and did not care about the fee.

I was back in eleven minutes. The lanterns were all still there. The man from Bucyrus was not.

I counted out the money on the table. A hundred and five dollars, in a pile of fives and twenties. Tamra counted it again. Then she counted it a third time and put it in the coffee can.

“You know you just bought twenty-one lamps that nobody is ever going to light again,” she said.

I didn’t answer that. I carried them to my car two at a time, holding them by the bails, and set them on the back seat and the floor and wrapped the clear globes in the sweatshirt I keep for the hospital air conditioning.

Across the street, an older woman stood on her porch with a broom she was not using. She watched every trip I made. She did not say a word, and neither did I, but I knew she would say plenty later.

On my last trip I looked up at the house. Dad’s curtain was still open, but he was not at the window. I was glad. I did not want him to see the row of lanterns walking away from him, two at a time, in his daughter’s arms.

I did not sleep much that day.

I live with my son, Toby, in a second-floor apartment on the south end of Galion, two bedrooms, a narrow staircase and a back landing with wooden steps down to a little patch of grass. Toby is twelve. He was sitting on those back steps with a bowl of cereal when I pulled in.