I almost told him then. I had the words in my mouth. But I looked at his face and thought, no. Not on a porch in the afternoon with the ballgame on. He was owed better than that.
“What do you want for your birthday?” I asked.
“Not a thing,” he said. “I’d like to see my house one more time before they sell it. That’s all. Just drive past it.”
“I think we can do better than drive past it,” I said.
That night I called Phil. He was out in his driveway when he answered. I could hear the gravel under his boots and his truck door creak.
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“Did you know about the lanterns?” I asked.
There was a long pause. “Know what about them?”
So I told him. The table, the paper plate, five dollars each, the coffee can, the fifteen minutes, the bank machine.
He did not say anything for so long I thought the call had dropped.
“I was at work,” he said finally. “She told me she was getting rid of some boxes. I thought she meant the boxes. Joelle, I swear I thought she meant the boxes.”
“I know you did.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“Phil, wait.” I took a breath. “I’m not calling to start anything. I’m calling because I need you to bring Dad out to his old house a week from tomorrow, at dusk. For his birthday. And I need you not to tell him why.”
“What are you doing?”
“You’ll see. Just bring him around seven-thirty. Park in the drive.”
He was quiet again. Then he said, in a voice I had not heard from him since our mother’s funeral, “I should have asked her, you know. Before I moved him in. I just told her. I came home and said Dad’s coming Saturday, and that was the whole conversation.”
“You wanted him off those stairs.”
“I did. But she’s been living with his recliner in her living room and his deep freeze in her garage for six weeks, and nobody asked her a thing.” He blew out a breath. “That doesn’t make the table right.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
“Seven-thirty,” he said. “I’ll have him there.”
My brother is fifty years old and works on the line at a plant that makes truck parts, and he has never in his life been a man of many words. But he has never once in my life failed to show up when I asked. I hung up and sat on the back steps with the lanterns for a long time.
Dad’s old house is a small white house on a short street on the east side of Galion, one story, with a porch on the front and a backyard that runs back to a wooden fence.
On the other side of the fence, maybe fifteen feet off, is the railroad. One track, laid on crushed stone, running out of town in both directions.
He bought that house in 1971, the year he married our mother, because he wanted to hear the trains from his own bed. Mom used to say he was the only man in Ohio who would pay extra to live next to a railroad.
The For Sale sign had been in the front yard since Labor Day. The real estate agent had put a lockbox on the door, but Phil had a key to the back gate, and we were only going to use the yard.