Page 43 of The Last Thing You Said

“Eddie’s superstitious,” he says. “I don’t blame him. Bad luck and pyrotechnics don’t mix.”

“Drinking and pyrotechnics don’t mix, either, but I see that hasn’t stopped them.”

“Eddie’s not drinking today. Me neither.”

“When do you?” I ask. “I’ll drink enough for the both of us.”

“Where’s Dana today?”

I lean over into the boat for number seven, layer cakes. “Apparently I’m not as irresistible as she originally thought. She’s shopping with her mom and her sisters at the Mall of America.”

“That sounds miserable.” He picks up a box and laughs. “Check this out. God of Fire. Warning: shoots flaming balls. This is gonna be so good.”

• • •

By the time everything’s wired and ready to go, Guthrie’s backyard and beach are crawling with people.

“You might as well watch from down there,” Eddie tells me and Guthrie and points to the shore. “Like I said, we light it once and the rest takes care of itself.”

“How much did you spend on this shit?” I ask.

Eddie shrugs. “About a grand, I think.”

Shit. If I had an extra grand lying around, I sure as hell wouldn’t use it to buy fireworks.

“All that money, all that time, and what do you get? Twenty-five, thirty minutes?”

“If that,” Eddie says. “But it’s a freaking amazing thirty minutes.” He waves his arms over the platform of fireworks. “This setup is a work of art. It takes a lot of time and knowhow to create the perfect sequence, you know?”

“Doesn’t seem worth it.”

“Is anything we do worth the effort we put into it?” Eddie says. “Say you sit out on the boat all day and never get a single bite. Worth it?”

“Never happens,” I joke.

“I’m speaking in generalizations,” Eddie says. “Sometimes it’s about the experience, you know?”

The experience.

We move our camp chairs down to the shore. I’m not drunk. I thought maybe by now I would be. But I’m tired. I push up from the chair and stretch out on the cool sand. There’s nothing like summer in Minnesota lake country. The air is humid and still. The wake of a slow-moving pontoon laps against the shore in a gentle rhythm.

“Everybody set?” Eddie yells, and the first of the shells launches.

I think about what he said, about how sometimes it’s more about the experience, even if the show only lasts for a fraction of the time it took to prepare for it.

The sky fills with blinking, flashing sparks of white.

“Nice,” Guthrie says. “Diamonds.”

A mosquito buzzes in my ear. I slap at it and another one on my arm.

“Lucy,” I say. It comes out of nowhere. I haven’t thought about her all day. “There’s a song, right, something about Lucy and diamonds in the sky?”

Guthrie laughs. “Something like that.”

24 · Lucy

Simon goes home for the Fourth of July, so I spend the night at Hannah’s. We sit on the deck, waiting for sundown and the fireworks over Halcyon Lake.