The Tower We Raised for Dad’s Sunday Net

The Reason I Did Not Fight Him

People have asked me since why I did not just stay there and have it out with him. My best friend at work said she would have taken that saw and thrown it in the river.

I thought about it. I thought about it the whole way home on Highway 59, with my hands shaking on the wheel.

But I knew my father. If I made a scene in Florentine’s yard, Dad would come home from the heart doctor to a fight, and the first thing he would do is apologize to Florentine for the trouble.

He has been apologizing in that house for eleven years. For his radio. For his workbench in the garage. For the boxes of old tubes and parts. For being a widower who married a widow late and brought his whole life with him.

Florentine is not a hard woman. She is kind to my father, and she takes him to every appointment, and she makes his coffee the way he likes it. But Tyler is her only son, and she does not know how to tell him no.

I was not going to make my father pay for Tyler’s choice with one more apology. So I called my husband instead.

Reinhold was on a job north of town, setting a new pole after a pickup had taken one out on a county road. He has climbed for the power company for twenty-eight years. He does not talk much on the phone. He let me tell the whole thing without one word.

When I finished, there was a long quiet on the line. I could hear a diesel idling behind him and somebody calling out a measurement.

“He cut the legs?” Reinhold said.

“Right above the concrete.”

“And the guys?”

“Unhooked and coiled in the grass.”

Another quiet. Then he said, “Find me a tower, Hedwig. Forty foot. Used is fine. I’ll do the rest.”

“Where would we even put it?”

“Behind our house. We have three acres. Your dad can drive out on Sundays.”

I sat at my kitchen table after he hung up and cried for about five minutes. Then I washed my face and got on the computer.