The Lanterns on Dad’s Back Fence

He watched me take the first two lanterns out of the car.

“Are those Grandpa’s?”

“They are.”

“Is he moving back?”

That one hurt more than anything Tamra said. “No, bud. Grandpa can’t do stairs anymore. You know that.”

Early in August Dad had gone down his cellar stairs to check the sump pump in the rain. He missed the third step from the bottom and lay on the concrete for almost an hour before the neighbor heard him calling. He broke his left wrist and cracked two ribs, and it could have been his hip and his head.

The doctor at the hospital, a kind man I have handed charts to for years, sat with Dad and Phil and me and said plainly that Dad should not live alone in a house with a cellar anymore.

I could not take him. My apartment is up a staircase, and I work twelve-hour nights. Phil and Tamra have a ranch house with no steps at all, a spare room and a walk-in shower. So Phil moved him in the second weekend of August.

Phil did it fast, the way Phil does everything. He borrowed an enclosed trailer from a buddy at work and moved the recliner, the dresser, the tools and the deep freeze in one Saturday. He did not want Dad on those cellar stairs one more night.

What I did not think about, and what I am ashamed I did not think about, is whether anyone asked Tamra.

Toby carried the rest of the lanterns up and set them in a row along the landing railing. In the sun they did not look like junk. They looked like a family.

“They’re so dirty,” he said.

“Forty years in a garage will do that.”

“Can we clean them?”

So we did. I slept four hours, and then Toby and I spent the rest of that weekend and three evenings the next week on the back steps with two dishpans, a jug of dish soap, a bag of rags and a stack of old newspapers from the neighbor’s recycling.

I showed him how to do it the way Dad showed me when I was his age. You lift the globe out of the frame by the little latch. You wash it in warm water, not hot, because an old globe can crack if you shock it. Then you dry it and polish it with crumpled newspaper so it won’t streak.

The frames we wiped down with a damp rag and a little oil. Some of the bails squeaked. One of the burner caps was rusted tight, and Toby worked at it with a pair of pliers and a towel for twenty minutes and never once asked me to do it for him.

“Grandpa would say use a bigger hammer,” he said, and I laughed for the first time in days.

On the second evening Toby turned one of the lanterns over to dry the bottom and stopped.

“Mom. There’s a number scratched in here.”

I took it from him. On the bottom of the fount, in thin, careful scratches from a nail or a pocketknife, it said 1974.