It was nothing special.
It was cardboard and bedsheets and milk jugs and tape.
But families would stop on the sidewalk to see what the boys had made. Little kids pointed at the ghosts. Parents laughed at the tombstones. The high school kids who’d had Joel for shop class drove by slowly and honked.
Joel would sit on the front porch steps in his flannel shirt with a mug of cider, grinning like he’d built the Eiffel Tower.
“Look at that, Laur,” he’d say. “That’s ours. We made that.”
He died on November third. Two years ago.
An aneurysm. In his brain. He was forty-one. He was grading birdhouses in his classroom after school. A student found him on the floor next to a half-finished cardinal feeder.
They told me he didn’t feel anything. They said it was like a light switching off.
I don’t know if that’s true. I hope it is.
That first year, the decorations were still up when he died. The ghosts were still hanging from the porch. The milk jugs were still lined up along the walk.
I couldn’t take them down.
I left them up until Christmas. Then until January. The ghosts got gray and soggy in the snow. The tombstones fell over. The neighbors started to stare.
In February, Max took them down himself. He was nine. I came home from work and found him on a stepladder on the porch, crying, pulling down the last ghost.
“Dad wouldn’t want them to look like this,” he said.
The next October, I didn’t think we’d do it.
I didn’t think I could.
But on the first Saturday in October, Theo came downstairs with an old bedsheet dragging behind him.
“Mom,” he said. “When do we make the ghosts?”
I looked at him. Five years old. With Joel’s cowlick and Joel’s crooked smile.
“You want to?” I said.
He nodded.
“Dad would want to,” he said.
So we did.
We sat on the living room floor with bedsheets and grocery bags and a box of markers. We made five ghosts. They were lumpy and uneven. Theo drew a mustache on one. Max drew Joel’s glasses on another.
We cut faces into milk jugs. We painted cereal boxes gray. Max wrote the jokes. Joel’s jokes. He remembered every single one.
HERE LIES LES MOORE.
We hung it all up on a Saturday morning in the rain.
When we were done, the three of us stood in the front yard and looked at it.
“It’s not as good as Dad’s,” Max said quietly.
“No,” I said. “It’s ours.” 