"Hell if I know," said Grandpa. "That's what I got grandsons for."
It took them forty minutes and a can of compressed air and most of Grandpa's patience, but at a quarter to one the old box-shaped TV in the corner of the barn flickered on with a sound like a bug hitting a windshield, and the little blue tower of light came up on the screen, and somewhere inside it a game they'd played a hundred times when they were small began to load, slowly, the way old things do.
Caleb picked up a controller. He handed it to Jordan. Then he picked up the other one.
"Which one's Player One?" Jordan said.
Caleb looked at the cords. They were tangled together, gray on gray, impossible to tell apart. He followed his with his eyes back to the console. Port two.
"Doesn't matter," he said. "We're both in."
At two o'clock, Mom came straight from work, still in her scrubs, smelling like mint. She stood in the open barn door with the cold spring light behind her and watched her sons on an overturned crate in front of a fuzzy TV, shoulder to shoulder, shouting at each other about a level they'd both been stuck on since 2021. Grandpa came and stood next to her, and handed her a coffee, and didn't say anything.
She drank it. It was terrible. She drank the whole thing.
"Dana," Grandpa said, after a while, in a voice she had never heard him use, "how'd your science fair go?"
She looked up at him. Then she looked back at her boys, at Jordan's cowlick and Caleb's grease-black knuckles, at the two gray cords running side by side across the barn floor into the same machine.
"Second place," she said. "Bean plants. You'd have liked it, Dad. Country music killed one."
Grandpa Walt laughed so hard he had to sit down.
Later, at home, the lighthouse game took them three weeks to finish. You couldn't play it alone. They didn't try.