By David Fairdale

Randy’s playing poker at the senior center, as he does every Wednesday, when his friend Joan walks in and waves him over. Standing beside Joan in the doorway is a woman Randy has never seen before, and wow, is she beautiful. She has wavy strawberry-blonde hair that falls perfectly around her face. Most people here are seventy or older, so he knows it’s dyed, but who cares. She’s wearing a summer-bright pink polka-dot button-down shirt that doesn’t match her orange flower-print pants, but Randy doesn’t care about that either. In fact, he sort of loves it. He aims for a swagger as he approaches, but he probably looks like he’s trying to hide a limp. Being 6’2” isn’t the gift it used to be. 

Joan says, “Thanks for coming over, Randy. This is my friend, Pam.”

Randy and Pam nod politely at each other. Pam smiles. There are deep dimples on both sides of her maraschino-cherry lips. Randy can’t take his eyes off her.

Joan nudges Pam. “Show him.”

Pam is holding her phone. She taps, scrolls, then hands it to Randy. A video is playing. This video shows lights flickering under a cabinet on a kitchen counter. It lasts about half a minute. After Randy watches it, he hands the phone back, a bit discombobulated. Whenever somebody shows him a video on their phone, it’s usually something he can say “that’s cute” to—a toddler or a puppy.

Pam and Joan are both staring at Randy. Finally, Joan says, “You told me once you learned Morse Code in the Army, right?”

Randy nods. Now he thinks he knows where this conversation is headed.

“So can you tell Pam what the lights are saying?”

He wants to say, “Pam, what you need is an electrician.” 

But that’s when Pam sighs and rolls her big jellybean-green eyes. “I know it’s crazy,” she says, “but when those lights started flickering, I thought it was my husband trying to tell me something from beyond the grave. He died on a fishing trip with his buddies last year. We never got to say goodbye.” When Pam looks up at him, Randy’s knees feel a different kind of rubbery than when he stands in one place for too long. “Then Joan said the lights looked exactly like Morse Code.”

Instead of saying what he should, about hiring the electrician, he says: “I’d need to see more, in person, to translate the dits and dahs.”

~

Over the next month, Randy is invited to Pam’s house eight times. The first three times Joan is there too; the next five times, it’s just him and Pam. Randy gets invited back for sandwiches; for three-, then two-person card games; for dinner by month’s end. He knows the invitations are to interpret the flickering lights, but so far Pam’s light fixtures always emit a steady beam as bright as the sun.

With each visit, Randy gets to know Pam a little more. Pam tells Randy she had two boys: Tom, thirty-nine, who lives a ten-minute drive away, and Benny who died when he was fifteen. She doesn’t share that Benny was born with cerebral palsy, but Randy studies the photos of him in the hallway on his way from the bathroom—photos of Benny with his brother, photos of Benny with his mom, and with his dad, who was woefully as handsome as Pam is beautiful. In the photos, Benny’s arms are skeletal thin. His fingers are curled, his neck and wrists are hyper-extended, and in every shot, his mother’s grin and dimples are displayed. 

Pam’s love for her family is obvious, even to the least attentive observer, even when the lighting is too dark. Her head leans in. She is usually touching Benny in a comforting way that makes Randy know it’s not for the photo.

It’s Joan who confides that Benny’s condition was severe. He couldn’t walk or talk.

Randy shares some of his own history with Pam, like the fact that his wife is also deceased, but she died seven years after she’d divorced him. He doesn’t share that his wife told him many times before she left, “You gotta let shit go, Rand.” She’d added, as she slammed her car door one last time, “You can’t control everybody.” He’s working on it. 

Randy wants to ask Pam out on a real date, but he’s afraid she will turn him down. He doesn’t think Pam is ready for a relationship. After all, she thinks her husband is talking to her through malfunctioning lights. 

~

After five weeks, the night before Halloween, the lights start flickering again. Pam texts Randy and he rushes over. When he gets there, not only are the kitchen lights flickering, but so are the lights in the living room and the floodlight on the side porch.

He still wants to say, “Pam, what you need is an electrician.” It crosses his mind that Pam already knows this.

Randy asks Pam for a paper and a pencil. He sits at the kitchen table and studies one of the blinking lights under the cabinet. He’s tempted to scribble out the code for “I’m ready for you to move on with your life.” He doesn’t.

Instead, he carefully draws .. .-.. — …- . -.– — ..- — .- — .-, circling the pencil around a few times when there’s a dot, delineating the dashes so they’re sure to show up. 

When he’s finished, he stands up, hands Pam his sketch of lines and periods. “It says ‘I love you, Mama.’”