For 15 years, Dad told everyone I cleaned toilets because he’d once seen me pushing a mop cart at 18. At our Fourth of July cookout, my sister’s new boyfriend laughed along and asked, “So when’s the toilet guy showing up?” I stepped onto the patio, shook his hand, and said, “See you Monday.” His face went white.
I’m Dallas. I’m 34. And for 15 years, my dad told everyone he knew that I cleaned toilets for a living. I don’t. I did once for about 8 months when I was 18. Nights at the Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne after the hockey games and the monster truck shows, pushing a yellow mop cart with a squeaky front wheel from one restroom to the next. During the day, I was a first-year electrical apprentice pulling wire in strip malls for a guy who paid me in cash and cheeseburgers. The coliseum job paid for my truck insurance. That’s all it was.
My dad saw me exactly one time with that mop cart. He was at a home show with some buddies from his insurance office and he walked around a corner and there I was holding a toilet brush like a torch. He laughed so hard he had to lean on a pillar and that was it. That became my job forever as far as he was concerned. He never asked again. Not when I quit the coliseum. Not when I got my journeyman card. Not when I got my contractor license. Not when I started my own company.
In his head, I was still 18 with a mop. He even gave me a nickname for it, plunger. He’s been calling me plunger since the summer I was 18. At my apprenticeship completion dinner, which nobody in my family came to except my grandma, I got a card from my parents that said, “Congrats, Plunger.” on the envelope. Inside was a $20 bill and nothing else written. Grandma saw it and took the envelope out of my hand and put it in her purse. and I don’t know what she did with it, but I never saw it again.
My little sister Abby was the one they talked about. She’s 4 years younger than me. She’s the office manager at a dental practice on the north side, which is a good job, and she’s good at it. I’m not knocking it. But in my parents house, there’s a framed certificate in the front hallway from when she finished her office administration program. And there’s a photo of her in her cap and gown on the mantle. And there’s a ceramic tooth on the bookshelf that a patient gave her that my mom dusts like it’s a family heirloom.
There’s nothing of mine in that house. There’s a coffee mug I bought my dad one Christmas that says world’s okayest golfer. And I’m pretty sure he uses it to hold screws. At church years ago, I heard my dad introduce Abby to a new couple as our daughter. She runs a whole dental office. Then he pointed at me and said, “And that’s my other one.” My other one. Like I was the spare tire. I tried to fix it once. I should tell you that because you might be thinking, why didn’t he just say something? I did.
When I was 25, I got my state contractor license and filed the paperwork for my own company the same week, Maumee Electric, named after the river, not after us, because I wanted it to be about the work. I had one truck, one helper, and a loan from a credit union that I was terrified of. And that Fourth of July at my parents cookout, I stood by the grill and told them. I said, “I started my own company. I’ve got my license. I’m doing commercial electrical.
My dad flipped a burger, looked at my mom, and said, “Plungers playing businessman now.” And everybody laughed. My mom laughed. Abby laughed. My uncle, who was there that year, laughed so hard he coughed up a bit of potato chip. I stood there holding a paper plate with a hot dog on it. And I didn’t say anything else. Not that day. Not ever. If they didn’t want to know, I wasn’t going to make them. That was 8 years ago. In those 8 years, Maumee Electric went from one truck to 40, from one helper to 140 employees.
We do schools, hospitals, warehouses, a couple of the big distribution centers out by the highway. I still take service calls myself on Fridays, mostly small stuff, so I don’t forget what the work feels like. My office has a window that looks out on the truckyard, and some mornings I just stand there with my coffee and count them. 40 white trucks with a Blue River logo on the door. It never gets old. My family doesn’t know any of that. Not one thing. And honestly, after a while, I stopped minding. You’d think it would eat at you, but it didn’t.
I had my own life. I had a crew that respected me and a house I paid for and a dog named Pickles who doesn’t care what I do for a living as long as I get home by 6:00. The only person in my family who knows is my grandma. Grandma Mavis. She’s 84. She’s 5′ and she has a Maumee Electric magnet on her refrigerator holding up a church bulletin from 2021. She knows because after the big ice storm a few years back, I rewired her whole old house and put a backup generator in her sideyard so she’d never sit in the cold again.
She asked who did the work and I told her the truth. She looked at me for a long time. Then she went to the kitchen and came back with a slice of pie and said, “Your grandpa would have bragged about you to the mailman.” She never told my parents. I asked her once not. She said they never asked me either. Now, the 4th of July, that was my grandpa’s holiday. Grandpa Cecil, he was a union lineman for 35 years, and he loved fireworks the way some men love fishing.
Every fourth, he’d set up lawn chairs in my parents’ backyard, which used to be his backyard before he sold the house to my dad, and he’d grill brats and narrate the neighbors fireworks like a sports announcer. When he passed 6 years ago, grandma asked me for one thing. She said, “Come to the fourth every year. Sit with me. Do it for him.” So, I do one day a year. I show up around 4. I eat. I sit next to grandma. I watch the fireworks. And I leave by 9:30. I don’t do Christmas. I don’t do Thanksgiving.
I don’t do Aby’s birthday parties. I do the fourth for grandma and for Grandpa Cecil. Which brings me to last year. I pulled up to my parents house in my personal truck, an old silver with no logo on it because I don’t drive company trucks to family things. It’s just easier. I parked on the street because the driveway was full. There was a car I didn’t recognize, a shiny gray pickup with a Maumee Electric parking sticker on the back window. I noticed it, but I didn’t think much of it. We’ve got 140 people. Somebody’s always somewhere.
The gate on the side of the house was open, so I went around that way toward the patio. I could hear my dad before I could see him. He has a laugh you can hear from the next zip code. No, no, he was saying he cleans toilets for a living. Has for years out at the coliseum or wherever they send him now. And somebody else was laughing with him. A younger guy. They were both laughing. Then the younger guy said, “So, when’s the toilet guy showing up?” And he said it right as I came around the corner.
I’ll never forget his face. He was standing by the grill with a beer in one hand and a pair of tongs in the other, wearing a polo shirt with a little sailboat on it. He looked at me and his smile kind of hung there for a second like it didn’t know where to go. Then he went white. Not pink, not red, white, like somebody had pulled a plug on him. I knew him, too. Not right away, but close. Next to the patio table, there was a big blue cooler with the Maumee Electric logo on the lid. Our company coolers.
We buy them for job sites in the summer. That one was supposed to be on a job site. Abby popped up from her chair and said, “Oh, you’re here, Dallas. This is Keegan.” “Kegan, this is my brother.” Keegan. I had read that name 3 days earlier on a piece of paper on my desk with my signature at the bottom. Keegan put the tongs down very carefully like they might go off. He wiped his hand on his shorts and held it out. I walked over and shook it.
His hand was cold and a little damp, like he’d been holding the beer a long time. I looked him in the eye and said, “See you Monday.” That was all. I let go of his hand, went over to my grandma, and kissed her on the cheek. She was sitting in her lawn chair under the maple tree with a lemonade, wearing a sun visor that said Florida, even though she’s never been to Florida. She patted my hand. Behind me, my dad said, “What’s Monday?” I said, “Ask him.” Everybody looked at Keegan. Keegan opened his mouth and closed it.
Then he said, “Golf? We uh golf?” Abby said, “Dallas doesn’t golf.” I said, “I don’t.” Grandma snorted into her lemonade so hard she had to set it down. Now, I want to explain what was on that piece of paper because I don’t want anybody thinking I’m the kind of guy who fires somebody for a joke at a barbecue. I’m not. Keegan had been with us since November, about 8 months. He was an estimator, which means he looks at a building’s plans and figures out how much wire and pipe and labor a job will take so we can bid on it.
It’s an office job mostly, but estimators get a company pickup and a fuel card because they go out to look at sites. Keegan was smart. He was also a problem. Our HR manager, Relle, had started a file on him back in May. There were three complaints from the field. He talked down to the electricians. He called them the help to their faces on job sites. One of my senior guys, Clem, who has been wiring buildings since before Keegan was born, did a whole materials list for a school job by hand on a Saturday, and Keegan turned it in with his own name on it and got thanked in a meeting.
He also sent an email to a coworker about a customer’s flooded basement that was mean enough that the coworker forwarded it straight to Relle. And then there was the fuel card. In June, our office caught $612 of fuel charges from a marina up on Lake Wawasi. Three Saturdays in a row. Maumee Electric does not own a boat. Michelle brought me the whole file on Thursday, the 3rd of July. When it involves company money, I sign off. I read it, I agreed with her, and I signed the termination. Monday morning, 9:00, her office. I’d never met the guy in person.
I’d have walked right past him in the grocery store. He knew my face, though. I give a little speech at our Christmas party every year, and he’d been there in December eating our shrimp. So, that’s what Monday was. Now, here’s the part I didn’t expect. The rest of that cookout was the most entertaining afternoon I’ve ever spent at my parents house. Keegan changed instantly, like somebody had swapped him out for a different guy. About 10 minutes after I sat down, he walked over with a plate and said, “Hey, Dallas, I saved you the best burger. Medium. Is medium okay?
I can do medium.” Well, I said, “Medium’s fine.” He said, “Great, great. Hey, can I get you a lemonade or a pop? We have pop.” I said, “I’m okay.” 5 minutes later, he brought me a lemonade anyway. 15 minutes after that, he brought me another one, and I had two lemonades sitting on the arm of my chair. Grandma reached over and took one. My dad was watching all this with a confused look on his face, like a dog watching a card trick.
At one point he said, “Keegan, what were you saying earlier about those Pacers tickets?” Keegan said, “Oh, that’s not important.” “Hey, you know what? I’ve always thought the trades are the backbone of this country. Honestly, people who work with their hands, that’s real work. I’ve got so much respect for it.” My dad said, “Since when?” Keegan laughed too loud and said, “Always, Barry. Always.” Then my dad, because he can’t help himself, said, “Well, don’t encourage plunger here. he’ll start thinking he’s important. And Keegan said, “Maybe ease up a little, Barry.” My dad actually turned around to look at him.
Nobody tells my dad to ease up. In 33 years, I had never heard anybody tell my dad to ease up. My mom stopped stirring the baked beans. Abby looked at Keegan like he’d grown a second head. Grandma leaned over to me and whispered, “I like this one now.” Then around 6, the breaker tripped. My mom had a slow cooker of baked beans plugged into the outdoor outlet by the patio. Then somebody plugged a box fan into the same outlet with an extension cord. And then somebody plugged the string lights into the fan cord.
And then Abby plugged in a little speaker. And then my mom plugged in a second slow cooker with little smoky sausages in it. And everything went dead. The fan stopped, the lights went out, the speaker cut off in the middle of a country song. My dad said, “Oh, come on.” And Keegan jumped up like he’d been waiting his whole life for this. I got it. I got it, Barry. Where’s your panel? My dad said, “Garage.” Keegan jogged into the garage.
And I’ll tell you, as somebody who has spent 15 years around breaker panels, what I heard from that garage over the next 2 minutes was something special. First, the garage door opener light went off. Then, we heard the refrigerator in the garage stop humming. Then, the kitchen lights went off inside the house. And my mom said, “Kegan, from the patio.” Then the kitchen lights came back on and the garage fridge came back on. And then the garage door started going up all by itself for some reason and we all just watched it. I finished my burger.
Then I got up, walked into the garage, looked at the panel, found the one breaker that was sitting in the middle position, flipped it all the way off and back on, and walked back out. The fan started spinning. The lights came on. The country song picked up right where it left off. On my way past the patio, I unplugged the second slow cooker and handed the cord to my mom. Too much on one circuit, I said. Put this one in the kitchen.
My dad said, “Lucky guess.” Grandma said, “Barry, in 40 years, you have never once found that panel without a flashlight.” Keegan came out of the garage last. He didn’t say anything. He sat down and drank one of my lemonades. The rest of the evening was normal, mostly. We ate my mom’s potato salad, which is heavy on the mustard and always has been. My uncle wasn’t there that year, thank goodness. When it got dark, we watched the fireworks from the backyard like always, and Grandma held my arm and named the big ones the way Grandpa used to. That’s a peony.
That’s a willow. That one’s just showing off. I didn’t say much. I didn’t need to. At 9:30, I got up, kissed Grandma, and said good night. Nobody else really looked up. My dad said, “Drive safe, Plunger.” Abby waved without turning her head. Keegan followed me out to the street. He caught up to me at my truck and he was talking fast. Hey. Hey, Dallas. Look about earlier. That was just your dad talking. I was just going along with it. You know how it is. It’s his house. He’s telling stories. I’m new. I’m trying to fit in.
I opened my truck door. He said, “I didn’t even know you were Aby’s brother. I swear. She just calls you her brother. Your dad calls you Plunger. How was I supposed to know? I said, “That’s kind of the whole point, Keegan.” He said, “Can we talk about this like now, man to man?” I said, “Monday, 9:00, Relle’s office.” And I got in and drove home. That weekend, he texted me three times. He got my number from the company directory. The first one said, “Hey, it’s Keegan.
Can we talk?” The second one said, “I really think there’s been a misunderstanding.” The third one said, “I have so much respect for the trades.” I didn’t answer any of them. I mowed my lawn. I took pickles to the creek. I made a pot of chili on Sunday and ate it in front of a ball game. It was one of the calmest weekends I’d had in months. Monday morning, I got to the shop at 7:00 like always. At 7:40, Keegan’s gray pickup pulled into the lot. He came in the front door carrying two dozen donuts in two big boxes.
And he set them on the front desk and told our receptionist, Tiffany, “These are for everybody, just because. Just because I appreciate everybody.” Tiffany looked at the boxes, then looked at me through my office window, and I gave her a little shrug. At 9:00, Keegan walked into Relle’s office. I was already there sitting in the chair by the window. Michelle was at her desk with the file in front of her. Michelle is in her 50s. She wears reading glasses on a beaded chain and in 12 years I have never once seen her surprised by anything.
Keegan sat down and immediately said, “Before we start, I just want to say something. I’ve prepared something. I just want to say that I have the utmost respect for this company and for the trades in general and for you, Dallas, personally as a leader.” Michelle said, “Okay.” He kept going. And I think we all say things at family gatherings that we don’t mean. Barry’s a funny guy. He’s a jokester. I was being polite. Michelle said, “This meeting isn’t about Friday.” Keegan blinked. It’s not. She opened the file and slid the first page across the desk.
This is a fuel card statement from June. Three Saturdays, a marina on Lake Wawasi, $612. Keegan looked at it. Okay, so that’s actually a work thing. I was meeting with a potential client. Michelle said, “On a boat.” He said, “On a work boat.” Relle said, “Maumee Electric doesn’t own a boat.” He said, “It’s his boat, the clients.” Michelle said, “Which client?” He said, “I’d have to check.” Michelle didn’t say anything. She just slid the second page across. That was the email about the customer’s basement. Keegan read about two lines of it and then turned it face down on the desk.
Like, that would help. Then the third page, Clem’s complaint about the school job with a photocopy of Clem’s handwritten materials list and a copy of the list Keegan turned in, which was the same list typed up with Keegan’s name on it. Keegan said, “Clem and I collaborate.” I said, “Clem says you’ve never spoken to him except to ask where the bathroom is.” He turned to me, and this is the part I’ll always remember. He leaned in, dropped his voice like we were buddies, and said, “Dallas, come on, man.
We’re practically family.” I said, “You met me Friday.” Relle looked down at her desk and I’m pretty sure that was the closest she’s ever come to laughing in a meeting. Keegan sat back. Then he said, “Does Abby know?” I said, “That’s up to you. I’m not going to call her.” He was let go for cause. Michelle walked him through the paperwork. He signed an agreement to pay back the $612 out of his last check. He handed over his laptop, his building badge, his fuel card, and the keys to the gray pickup, which it turns out was a company truck.
He’d put his own parking sticker over half of our logo on the back window, which meant he didn’t have a ride home. Michelle checked the board to see who was free, and the only person on site with a truck and nothing scheduled until 11:00 was Clem. Clem is 61. He has a gray mustache that he’s had since the first Bush was president and he chewed sunflower seeds from about 7:00 in the morning until about 4 in the afternoon. When Michelle asked him if he could run somebody home, he said, “Who?” She told him. Clem took his time.
He finished the seed he was working on. Then he picked up his keys and said, “Well, the help will drive you home.” Tiffany told me later that Keegan rode the whole way with a donut box on his lap because he’d taken one of the boxes back. Clem played a country station the whole way loud and sang along to every song. He doesn’t know most of the words. That didn’t stop him. That was 9:30 in the morning. By 6:00 that evening, my parents were standing in my lobby. Here’s how that happened.
Keegan went home and sat around for a few hours and then called Abby at work around 3:00. He told her he’d been fired and that it was her brother’s fault and he told her it was because of what happened at the cookout. Then somewhere in that phone call, it came out that he’d known since Friday afternoon that I was his boss. He’d known the whole weekend. He’d sat through the fireworks with her and said nothing. Abby called my mom. My mom called my dad. Then my mom called my grandma because they had no idea where my office was.
They had no idea I had an office. Grandma told me later that she gave them the address and then said, “Wear comfortable shoes. It’s a big building.” And hung up. Tiffany called back to my office at 6:05 and said, “Dallas, there’s a Barry and Rita here to see you. They say they’re your parents. They brought a casserole.” I walked out to the lobby. My parents were standing by the front window, and my dad wasn’t looking at the receptionist desk or at me. He was looking out the window at the yard. 40 trucks.
Most of the crews were back by then, so they were all parked in rows. White trucks with the Blue River logo lined up like teeth. My dad’s mouth was a little bit open. My mom was holding a chicken and rice casserole in a glass dish with tin foil on it. My dad turned around and said, “You work here.” Tiffany, behind her desk, said, “He owns it.” She didn’t even look up from her computer. I took them back to my office. My dad walked in slowly and looked at everything. my contractor license on the wall.
The framed first dollar, which is actually a five from my first job, a laundromat on Wells Street, the photo of the whole company at last year’s picnic, 140 people in blue shirts. My dad stood in front of that photo for a long time. Then he sat down and said, “Okay, okay, look, there’s been some kind of mixup.” I said, “There hasn’t.” He said, “Keegan’s a good kid. He made a mistake. Everybody makes mistakes. You give him another chance and we’ll forget the whole thing. I said, “I signed the paperwork on Thursday, the day before the cookout.
I didn’t know who he was. I’d never met him.” My mom said, “Thursday?” I said, “Thursday. It’s dated. Relle has it.” My dad said, “Well, now you know who he is. He’s Aby’s boyfriend. He’s practically family. He’s going to be family.” I said, “That’s what he said, too.” Then my dad tried the other direction. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and said, “Be honest with me. You’re doing this to get back at me for the jokes.” I said, “Dad, I signed it Thursday. I didn’t know who he was. You didn’t know who I was either.
Seems to be going around.” My mom set the casserole on my desk like it was a peace offering. She said, “It’s chicken and rice for the office.” Then she said, “Why didn’t you ever tell us any of this?” And I said, “I did.” She frowned. When? I said, “The 4th of July, eight years ago. I stood by the grill and told you I got my license and started my own company.” Dad said, “Plungers playing businessman now. Everybody laughed. You laughed. I’m not mad about it anymore, but I did tell you.” My dad opened his mouth and then closed it.
I could see him trying to remember it. I don’t think he could. That was the worst part, honestly. It was the biggest day of my life at that point. And it wasn’t even a memory for him. It was just a Tuesday joke. My mom said, “I ask how work is every year.” I said, “You ask if I’m still at the coliseum, mom?” She looked at her hands. My dad sat back in the chair and said, “So what now?
You’re just going to let your sister’s boyfriend lose his job over this after everything we’ve done for you?” And I said the thing I’d been carrying around for about 15 years without knowing I was carrying it. I said, “I don’t owe you anything. I don’t owe Keegan anything. I come one day a year for grandma because she asked me to. That’s the deal. That’s still the deal. Nobody said anything for a little while. Somewhere out in the yard, a truck backed up, beeping. My dad stood up. He looked at the company photo one more time.
Then he said, “This is a nice office.” Like it physically cost him something to say it. And they left. They didn’t take the casserole. Michelle and I split it the next day. It was good. It needed salt. That night around 8, Abby called. I picked up and she yelled for about 11 minutes. She yelled about how I humiliated her, about how I always thought I was better than everybody. About how I could have warned her, about how I’d ruined the best relationship she’d ever had. I let her go.
I sat on my back porch with Pickles and listened to her until she ran out of breath, which took a while because Abby has good lungs. When she finally stopped, I said, “Are you done?” She said yes. I said, “Okay, good night, Abby.” And that was the call. I want to say I felt bad. I didn’t. I felt tired and I felt kind of light, like I’d put down a box I’d been holding for a long time. On Wednesday, Keegan broke up with Abby by text.
Grandma showed me the screenshot later because Abby sent it to the family group chat, which I’m not in and never have been, but Grandma is. The text said that he’d been offered a job in Indianapolis and he was taking it. It said, and I’m paraphrasing because it was long, that he couldn’t be with someone whose family had embarrassed him in front of his employer and that her dad had literally told his boss he cleaned toilets to his face in a backyard and he could never come back from that.
And then at the very bottom, it said, “Also, I need my air fryer back. I’ll send someone for it Saturday.” The air fryer is what got me, not the breakup. the air fryer. Abby drove straight to my parents house that night. My mom told grandma and grandma told me, so this is secondhand, but I trust grandma’s reporting. Abby walked in the front door, passed her own framed certificate in the hallway, and stood in the kitchen and said, “You told my boyfriend’s boss he cleans toilets in our backyard to his face.” My dad said, “How was I supposed to know he was his boss?” And Abby said, “By asking once.” In 15 years, you could have asked him once.
And then she said, “I never asked either.” And she sat down at the kitchen table and cried. And my mom made her a grilled cheese because that’s what my mom does. The group chat, though. The group chat was where it really went off the rails. The next afternoon, I went over to grandma’s to check on the generator, which I do every summer, and she made me sit on the porch while she read the group chat out loud to me with her reading glasses on the end of her nose.
My dad had written that the whole fourth was a disaster and that if the potato salad had been ready on time, it wouldn’t have been such a long afternoon and people wouldn’t have been talking so much. My mom had replied, “Are you blaming my potato salad, Barry?” My dad had replied, “I’m saying there were factors.” My mom had then left the group chat. My aunt in Ohio, who wasn’t at the cookout and had no idea what was going on, had posted a picture of her cat in a little Uncle Sam hat.
Then Abby had written, “Can everyone please stop?” Then my dad had added my mom back to the group chat. Then my mom had left again. Grandma looked at me over her glasses and said, “There’s a little yellow face here with tears coming out of its eyes. Is that happy or sad?” I said, “It depends, Grandma.” She said, “Well, your aunt sent it under the cat picture, so I hope it’s happy.” The last part happened about a month later in August, and I didn’t even plan it.
My parents’ church had built a new fellowship hall that spring, a big room for potlucks and funeral lunches and the youth group. The church didn’t have the money for the electrical, which on a building like that is not small money. The pastor, Pastor Henning, had come to Grandma’s Bible study asking if anyone knew a contractor who might give them a deal.
Grandma gave him my number. I did the whole job for free. My guys volunteered on two Saturdays and Mommy covered the materials. I asked Pastor Henning not to make a big deal out of it.
He made a big deal out of it. At the dedication Sunday in August, in front of the whole congregation, Pastor Henning stood up and thanked Dallas and the whole crew at Maumee Electric who wired this entire building at no cost to the church. And then he unveiled a little brass plaque by the door. It had my company’s name on it, and under it, it said, “Light for the work.” My dad was sitting in the fourth row with his men’s group, the same men’s group he’d told for 15 years that his son cleans toilets.
Grandma said she watched the back of his neck go red all the way up to his ears and stay that way through the closing hymn. After the service, one of the men from his group shook my dad’s hand and said, “Barry, you never told us your boy owned mommy.” And my dad said, “He doesn’t talk much.” Grandma said she laughed out loud in the church parking lot. My dad sent me one text after that. It came in on a Tuesday night in September. It said, “Saw the plaque. Proud of you.” I guess that was the whole thing.
I read it a few times. Then I wrote back, “Okay, I didn’t add anything. Some things you don’t get to fix with one text, and some apologies have, I guess, in them for a reason.” He hasn’t called me plunger since. I’ll give him that. So, that brings us to this past 4th of July. In June, grandma called my parents and told them that this year the fourth would be at my place. She told them she’d be riding with me and that she was the only one invited.
My mom told me later that my dad started to argue and grandma said, “Cecil’s holiday, Cecil’s rules.” And hung up on him. She is 85 now. She does what she wants. I have a little place north of town, a few acres with a pond. I set up lawn chairs by the water. Clem came with his wife, and he brought sunflower seeds and a bag of brats from a butcher he swears by. Michelle came and sat in the shade and said almost nothing all afternoon and seemed to have a great time.
Tiffany brought her two kids who chased pickles around the pond for 3 hours. A couple of the young guys from the crew brought fireworks, which I’m pretty sure were not all legal in Indiana. And grandma narrated every one of them. That’s a peony. That’s a willow. That one’s just showing off.
Around 5:00, a car pulled into my driveway. It was Abby alone. She got out holding a store-bought cherry pie, the kind in the clear plastic box with the price sticker still on it. She walked across the yard and everybody kind of went still because everybody there knew the story.
She stopped in front of me. She said, “I’m sorry.” Then she said, “I never asked you either. Not once. I’m sorry.” She didn’t explain. She didn’t say, “But.” She didn’t bring up Keegan or the air fryer or our dad. She just said it twice and then stood there holding the pie. I looked at her for a second. Then I took a hot dog off the grill, put it in a bun and handed it to her.
She said, “Thanks.” I said, “Mustard’s on the table.” She sat down in a lawn chair next to Clem, who offered her a sunflower seed, and she took it. Later, when the sun was going down and the crew boys were setting up the next round of fireworks, I was flipping the last of the brats.
Grandma was in her lawn chair by the pond in her Florida visor with a lemonade. She waited until it was quiet. Then she called out loud enough for everybody to hear, “So, when’s the toilet guy showing up?” And everybody laughed.
Clem laughed so hard he dropped his seeds. Abby laughed into her hot dog. Michelle smiled, which for Relle is a full-belly laugh. And I laughed, too, standing at my own grill at my own house on my grandpa’s holiday. Grandma held out her paper plate and said, “Bring me a brat, toilet guy. Your grandpa would have loved this.”
Disclaimer: This story is fictional and created for entertainment purposes only. Any names, characters, places, or events are fictitious or used fictitiously. No real person or organization is intended to be portrayed.
