“The Army had you folding flags, right?” my cousin Kaitlyn said in front of the whole birthday party, and when I told her my work had mostly been bare-knuckle, she laughed until beer came out her nose.
“Bet your call sign was Cupcake.” I gave her one word.
The old sailor at the grill dropped his spatula.
The spatula hit the deck so hard it rang, and every conversation in the yard died at once.
It bounced one time and lay on the gray boards with grease running off the end.
Thirty-some people whipped around to look at the grill.
Nobody could believe it was Rodney.
He’d been working that grill for two hours and hadn’t dropped so much as a bun.
His eyes never even went to the boards.
He was looking at me.
His mouth hung a little open, and his right hand was still raised where the handle had been.
I’d seen that face before, on other men, in other places.
It’s how a man looks when somebody he helped bury comes walking up the driveway.
Right then I’d have given anything to be two and a half hours north, in my own kitchen, with the door locked.
It was Sherrie’s seventy-eighth birthday, and the whole family had crammed into her backyard in Hot Springs.
Kids tore around the yard with orange popsicles running down their wrists.
A radio on the porch rail played the same oldies station my uncle Pedro used to keep on in his truck.
Smoke from the grill hung low under a sky the color of dishwater.
Sherrie had called me ten days before.
“Yolanda, honey, don’t you dare tell me you’re busy,” she said.
“I’m seventy-eight and your uncle’s gone, and I want all of you in one yard while I can still count heads.”
I couldn’t tell her no.
So I made a pan of banana pudding with the wafers standing up around the edge, the way she’s liked it since I was little, and I drove down.
My plan was easy.
Hug her, eat something, be on the highway before dark.
I got maybe twenty minutes out of that idea.
Kaitlyn found me before I’d even set the pudding down.
Since she was twelve, my cousin has had the biggest mouth at every family gathering.
She sells pontoon boats at a dealership out on the lake, and she talks to everybody like they’re about to sign.
There was always a beer in her hand and a backup sweating in the cooler.
“Well, look who finally showed,” she said, loud enough to reach the fence. “It’s G.I. Jane.”
“Did they let you out on a weekend pass?”
A couple of aunts laughed the way you laugh at a dog jumping on company.
I hugged Sherrie, put the pudding in her hands, and didn’t give Kaitlyn anything.
My cousin can’t stand being ignored.
Quiet only makes her work harder.
All afternoon she kept drifting back to wherever I was standing.
“You cashing those Army checks every month?”
“No.”
“You clocking in somewhere for ACTUAL pay these days?”
“Yes.”
“They let you carry a gun to it?”
“No.”
Every one-word answer seemed to make her happier.
Her daughter Eliza, who’s nine, stood at her elbow with a popsicle and watched me like I might do a trick.
“Salute her, baby,” Kaitlyn said. “Go on, she loves that.”
Eliza lifted a sticky orange hand to her forehead and looked at me to see if it was okay.
I gave her a little nod.
Kaitlyn laughed so hard she had to grab the picnic table.
Around four, a white pickup crunched up the gravel and parked behind the minivans.
The man who climbed out was about seventy, lean as a fence post, with a white crew cut and a shirt ironed so sharp you could see the creases from the porch.
His name was Rodney Engel.
He’d been Uncle Pedro’s best friend since high school, and he’d spent his whole career as a Navy SEAL.
Sherrie cried a little into his shoulder.
Ten minutes later he’d taken the spatula from Kaitlyn’s husband and was running the grill himself.
People who’ve served pick each other out without anybody pointing.
The way they stand.
Where they choose to sit.
How their eyes check every door and every gate before they let themselves settle.
Rodney went around the deck with a handshake for every single person.
Kaitlyn walked him right up to me.
“Rodney, you gotta meet my cousin,” she said.
“She was Army too, typed a LOT of forms, right, Yol?”
He didn’t laugh.
His grip on my hand held a half-second too long.
He squinted at me like he was trying to read something printed very small.
Neither one of us spoke.
Then he let go and went back to his burgers.
I figured that was the end of it.
I was wrong.
By the time the light started going, Kaitlyn had herself an audience.
Five beers in, she was louder than the radio.
She crossed the deck to the folding chair where I was sitting with a can of ginger ale.
“Okay, everybody, listen up,” she said.
“My cousin spent eighteen years wearing Army green and she has NEVER told us what she actually did.”
“Not one time, so come on, Yolanda, what did you do?”
“Some of everything.”
She snorted.
“Oh, bullshit, that’s nothing.”
“It’s what you’re getting.”
A couple of the cousins grinned into their paper plates.
Kaitlyn wasn’t done.
“Did you EVER see any action?”
“Some.”
“Ever kill anybody?”
“Kaitlyn,” Sherrie said from her lawn chair.
“What, she’s a grown woman. Ever kill ANYBODY, Yolanda?”
“I’ve been places where I had to shoot.”
“Okay, okay. How about throwing punches?”
She set her beer on the rail and put up both fists like a cartoon boxer.
“Like, real fighting.”
She swung one lazy pretend punch past my ear.
“Bare-knuckle, kung fu, whatever.”
Eliza giggled behind her.
Any other day I’d have laughed it off and asked how the boats were selling.
I’ve always been fine with people thinking I’m smaller than I am.
But five hours of it, in front of Sherrie, in front of that little girl, had worn something down in me.
I stood up.
I put the ginger ale on the rail next to her beer.
“Yes.”
Kaitlyn blinked.
“Wait. For real?”
“Most of my work was close up.”
I shrugged.
“You didn’t get a choice about bare-knuckle work.”
She grinned at the crowd.
“Knives?”
“When we needed them.”
The whole deck laughed, and Kaitlyn loudest of all.
She smacked the rail.
“OH MY GOD, CALLED IT.”
She jabbed a finger about an inch from my nose.
“Okay, so everybody had a call sign. What was yours?”
Her lip curled up before she even got to the end.
“Cupcake?”
People were wiping their eyes.
I didn’t look away from her.
Then I told her, plain, the way you’d tell somebody the time.
“Banshee.”
I’d hardly finished saying it when steel rang on the boards behind her.
The spatula was at Rodney’s feet.
All the color had left his face.
He stared at me like thirty years had just dropped off him at once.
His lips moved, and nothing came out.
He took one step toward me, past the grill, and stopped.
“Sweet Jesus,” he said.
“You’re Banshee.”
The chair by the steps
“Yes,” I said. “That was me.”
He knew the name from my Army years.
He wasn’t mistaking me for somebody else, and I wasn’t going to pretend he was.
I picked up the spatula by its clean end and set it beside the grill.
Rodney lowered his hand.
“Yolanda,” he said, as if putting the two names together required some work.
Kaitlyn looked from him to me.
“Oh, come on. You two know each other?”
“We’ve met,” he said.
That answer pleased her. She could work with met. Met didn’t spoil anything.
“Well, there you go. Small world.”
She reached for her beer, missed it, and got it on the second try.
Rodney started toward me again.
“May I—”
“Not in front of everybody,” I said.
He stopped.
I wanted him to put another burger on.
I wanted my cousin to find somebody else’s sore spot.
Mostly, I wanted Sherrie to have a birthday without having to remember it as the one where Yolanda caused a scene.
That was still what I called it in my own head.
Me causing a scene.
Kaitlyn hooked her foot around my folding chair and dragged it toward the steps.
Its legs scraped the boards where the spatula had landed.
“We need this space anyway. Picture first, then I’ll do the birthday toast.”
She’d lined up chairs beside Sherrie’s, with standing room behind them.
Mine went beyond the end of the row, behind the grill.
“That’s my chair,” I said.
“You can stand. You’ve got all that training.”
A few people laughed again.
Carefully this time, like testing a tap that had run hot.
Rodney looked at the chair, then at Sherrie.
My aunt held up her phone.
“Let’s get everybody together before we lose the light.”
I bent to move the chair back.
Kaitlyn put her hand on its back.
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
Sherrie’s doorway
A little after six that Saturday, I followed Sherrie through her back door while Kaitlyn arranged the others outside.
My aunt’s phone was open to the camera.
She kept wiping the lens with her sleeve.
“Let her get the picture,” she said. “She’s been planning this all week.”
“I moved a chair.”
“I know, honey.”
She didn’t look up.
On the wall beside her was a photograph of Pedro with Rodney, both of them young enough to have hair worth arguing over.
Rodney had a beard in most of the later pictures.
Without it, he’d looked familiar in the way everybody at a family party looks familiar.
You spend half the day wondering whether you’ve hugged somebody who delivered your refrigerator.
Sherrie pressed the phone into my hand.
“Can you get this off video? She changed something.”
I changed it.
She’d asked Kaitlyn to gather everyone for the picture and say a few words before the candles.
Now Kaitlyn was directing adults by their shoulders.
Through the screen door, she moved her husband, Marlon, six inches left.
Sherrie smiled.
“Your uncle would hate all this fuss.”
“He’d be hiding in the shed.”
“He would.”
For a second we had him there.
Ten days earlier, on that call, she’d said something after the part about counting heads.
“I want a picture with you beside me. You’re always the one taking it.”
I’d said my hair would frighten the other relatives.
“Comb it in the car,” she’d said. “I’m not asking for a parade.”
Now I handed back her phone.
“I came because you asked me.”
“I know you did.”
“I’d like her to stop.”
Sherrie rubbed her thumb along the phone case.
“She’s had too much. You know what she’s like when she gets going.”
“She’s like this sober. It just takes longer.”
My aunt’s mouth twitched, then went flat.
“Please don’t start with her tonight.”
Outside, Kaitlyn called for Rodney. She wanted him beside Sherrie.
Pedro’s oldest friend belonged there; I had no argument with that.
But my aunt’s eyes went to the door before they came back to me.
“Give me this one evening, Yolanda.”
I wanted to ask which part she thought I hadn’t given her already.
Instead, I held the door while she went through.
She stopped on the threshold and touched my wrist.
“And whatever happened with Rodney, leave it alone.”
The grill lid
When I followed her onto the deck, Rodney was lowering the grill lid.
Marlon stood beside him with a plate nobody seemed to want anymore.
Kaitlyn was calling people out of the yard.
I went to my cousin before she could gather another audience.
“Can I talk to you a minute?”
“You’ve been talking.”
“Over here.”
She glanced toward Rodney.
“Is this about him? Because you could’ve just said you knew him.”
“It’s about you putting your hand in my face.”
“Oh, Yol.”
“Don’t do it again.”
She held up both hands.
“Look. They’re away.”
Marlon shifted the plate to his other hand.
“Kaitlyn, just leave it.”
“I’m leaving it. She’s the one who came over.”
I nearly asked him how many times he’d heard that sentence at home.
He was trying, and I didn’t need another person to fight.
“I don’t want an argument,” I said.
“Stop the jokes about my service. Stop swinging at my head.”
“It was a pretend punch.”
“I know.”
“You stood up like you were going to do something.”
“I stood up because you were leaning over me.”
Rodney stayed beside the grill. His right hand rested against the lid handle.
At the handshake earlier, the thumb on that hand hadn’t bent much.
There was something about it I couldn’t place.
He opened his mouth.
I shook my head once.
Kaitlyn followed that little exchange with the interest she usually reserved for somebody reaching for a checkbook.
“So there’s a story.”
“There’s a birthday,” I said.
“Then act like you’re at one.”
Marlon put the plate down.
“She asked you to stop.”
Kaitlyn turned to him.
“And I did. We were done until she came back out here.”
I could have walked away then.
I could have returned to the kitchen and washed the pudding pan, which was a family job nobody ever questioned my qualifications for.
Instead, I said, “You can tell them you were out of line.”
Her face changed.
Only a little. The smile stayed, but she stopped looking for another joke.
“Tell who?”
“The people you were performing for.”
“You want me to announce an apology at my mother’s birthday?”
Sherrie was her mother.
To me she was the aunt who’d kept a bed ready through every visit home, even when the visits were short and the arrivals late.
Kaitlyn called her “my mother” when she wanted to draw the property line.
“I want you to stop making me the entertainment.”
“Fine. You’re not the entertainment. Happy?”
She reached past me for the phone in Sherrie’s hand.
“Everybody, we’re ready.”
Then she turned back.
“You know what would help? If you’d take the picture instead of being in it. You’re good at standing apart.”
Sherrie was close enough to hear every word.
She held out the phone to me.
The empty place
I didn’t take it.
Sherrie’s hand stayed between us.
“You promised we’d have one together,” I said.
“We will, honey. Just take this first.”
Kaitlyn pulled a chair closer to her mother’s.
“Come on. People are waiting.”
Nobody had said they were waiting.
Two cousins were still talking by the fence.
Somebody in the yard was trying to get orange popsicle off a sleeve.
But once Kaitlyn said it, every face came my way.
Sherrie lowered the phone.
“I don’t want a fuss over a photograph.”
“Neither do I.”
“Then please.”
There are words you can withstand from a cousin because you’ve known her since she ate paste.
The same words from the woman who kept your bed made get in differently.
I took the phone.
Kaitlyn sat beside Sherrie, exactly where my aunt had asked me to sit.
Eliza stood between her mother’s knees. Marlon moved behind them.
Rodney stayed by the grill.
“Rodney,” Kaitlyn said. “We saved you a place.”
“I’m all right here.”
“Oh, don’t you start too.”
Sherrie patted the empty chair on her other side.
“Please.”
He came over, but he didn’t sit.
Through the phone, I could see the whole family packed together.
Kaitlyn leaned her cheek toward her mother’s.
Eliza held her hands in front of her because they were still sticky.
I lifted the phone.
“Everybody in?”
It came out automatically. I’d said it at enough birthdays.
Kaitlyn pointed at the screen.
“Turn it sideways. You’ll get more of us.”
I turned it sideways.
A cousin at the back made a joke about needing that extra width. People laughed.
The normal kind this time, relieved to have something they were allowed to laugh at.
My thumb rested on the button.
“Get one with everybody looking,” Sherrie said.
Everybody.
I took the picture.
Then another, because somebody blinked.
Then one more because Kaitlyn wanted to see whether Eliza was smiling.
She got up before I lowered the phone.
“Let me check.”
I held it where she could see.
“That’s good,” she said. “Send that one to me, Mom.”
Sherrie reached for it.
I kept my fingers around the case.
“Can we do ours now?”
Kaitlyn looked over her shoulder. People were already moving out of the row.
“In a minute. We need to get the toast done.”
“You can wait a minute.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
Her voice carried to the fence again.
“We’re doing a birthday, Yolanda. Not a tribute to your career. Nobody’s saying you didn’t serve.”
“I asked for a picture with my aunt.”
“And you’re going to get one.”
Sherrie stood up.
“Girls.”
I hated that word right then. I was forty-three. Kaitlyn was thirty-seven.
Only one of us had spent the afternoon swinging imaginary punches.
“She asked me to sit beside her,” I said.
Kaitlyn put a hand on her mother’s shoulder.
“And you can. After. Why does everything have to stop because you want something?”
Rodney took one step out of the row.
“That’s enough.”
Kaitlyn laughed.
“Oh, now you’ve got him doing it.”
Sherrie’s eyes filled.
That should have stopped us. All of us.
Instead, Kaitlyn pointed at her mother’s face.
“Look. This is what I’m talking about.”
I put the phone in Sherrie’s hand.
“I didn’t do that.”
My aunt looked down at the photograph I’d just taken.
“Maybe go inside until you can settle down.”
Nobody moved toward the space beside her.
The gate latch
I went inside, but I went for my purse.
It was on the bench by the back door, where I’d left it five hours earlier.
I got my keys out and missed the pocket twice putting my phone away.
That irritated me more than it should have.
I could manage two and a half hours of highway.
Apparently a zipper was beyond me.
Sherrie followed.
“You’re not leaving.”
“I’m not sitting in your kitchen until I’m allowed back out.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
She opened her mouth, then looked toward the deck.
Kaitlyn was telling people to hold their places.
The toast would only take a minute.
“I don’t want to lose this evening,” Sherrie said.
“I know.”
“I don’t have your uncle here. I asked for one nice day.”
I wanted to put down my purse and hug her.
I wanted it so badly that I put the strap over my shoulder to keep my hands occupied.
“Tell her to stop.”
“I did.”
“You said her name once.”
“Yolanda.”
“There. That’s twice for mine.”
Sherrie wiped under one eye with her finger.
I hated that I could still make a joke.
It felt like a bad habit at a funeral.
She reached for my arm, and I let her hold it.
“Stay for the candles.”
“And then what?”
“Then we’ll take your picture.”
“With everybody waiting for me to finish being difficult?”
She let go.
Outside, Kaitlyn tapped her beer can against the rail.
“Come on, Mom. We’re ready.”
Sherrie looked at the door again.
I stepped around her.
Kaitlyn stood at the head of the chairs with Sherrie’s phone.
She had notes on it for the birthday toast.
A whole speech prepared, after spending five hours finding words for me without any preparation at all.
My cousin could sell a pontoon boat in a drought.
She was going to explain this evening before my engine cooled.
I reached the steps.
Rodney stood near the bottom.
“Yolanda. A minute.”
“Not now.”
“Please.”
Kaitlyn came to the rail.
“See, this is exactly what I said. We can’t even finish Mom’s party.”
I kept walking.
At the gate, the latch stuck against the post.
Pedro used to lift the gate with one knee.
I did it the same way, purse sliding down my arm.
Behind me, Kaitlyn said, “Nobody made you leave.”
My hand stopped on the latch.
She had the photograph. She had Sherrie standing behind her.
By morning, she’d have the version where I’d stormed out because nobody wanted to hear my Army stories.
I turned around.
“Tell them what I asked you for.”
“What?”
“By the grill. What did I ask you for?”
Kaitlyn spread her hands.
“An apology. There. You wanted everybody to stop a seventy-eight-year-old woman’s birthday so I could apologize.”
“For what?”
“For joking. For trying to get you to join in.”
Marlon put his hand over his mouth. Rodney looked down.
Sherrie didn’t say anything.
The gate stayed open against my knee.
I could leave and never sit in that yard again.
Right then, that was the only way out I could see.
Then Rodney lifted his right hand.
The thumb stayed straight.
The grip at the introduction. His face without the beard.
The way he’d asked permission to speak.
I let the gate close.
“Rodney. Keep your hand up.”
Rodney’s right hand
He kept it up.
“That thumb still trouble you?” I said.
“Sometimes.”
“You used to tuck it inside your fist.”
“Until you broke me of it.”
Kaitlyn leaned on the rail.
“What are you two doing?”
Rodney looked at me.
“May I tell them?”
“Tell them your part.”
He lowered his hand.
“She taught me.”
Nobody spoke.
Kaitlyn looked almost pleased.
“Well, sure. Everybody teaches everybody something.”
“Close-contact work,” Rodney said.
“She was one of the instructors on a joint course. I was there for a refresher.”
I remembered him on the mat now. The beard. The thumb.
The man who’d looked past me when I gave the first instruction.
He’d asked where the instructor was.
I was standing in front of him.
He told that part himself.
Then he told them he’d asked for somebody bigger to demonstrate with.
Somebody who could give him a proper test.
“I said it in front of the room,” he said. “Got a laugh.”
Kaitlyn’s hand came off the rail.
“What happened?”
“She put me down.”
A cousin made a noise through his nose. Rodney looked straight at him.
“I wasn’t laughing.”
I stayed beside the gate.
Rodney turned back to Kaitlyn.
“Afterward, I told her she was good. Thought that fixed it. She told me to say what I’d said before.”
I could remember the exact place he’d been standing when I’d handed his words back to him.
He’d wanted to do it in the hallway.
I hadn’t let him.
“In front of the room,” Rodney said.
“I had to tell them why I’d asked for another instructor.”
“Did you?” Marlon said.
“Yes.”
Rodney looked at me.
“You’d have remembered me sooner if I’d kept the beard.”
“I’d have remembered you sooner if you’d kept your thumb out.”
He laughed once. It didn’t get very far.
Kaitlyn looked toward me.
“So that’s why you wanted an apology.”
I came up the steps.
“No.”
She stepped back to let me pass.
Rodney began to say something else. I put my hand up.
“She’s my cousin. I shouldn’t need you for this.”
Then I faced Kaitlyn.
“Say it again. Without the audience laughing.”
Kaitlyn’s five hours
Kaitlyn looked around the deck.
“Seriously?”
“Start with what you said when I got here.”
“I don’t remember every word.”
“I do.”
“Oh, I’m sure you do. Apparently you’ve been keeping score all day while the rest of us thought we were having a good time.”
Nobody helped her.
She turned to Rodney.
“You understand joking around. You people do it constantly.”
“She asked you to stop.”
“And I stopped.”
Marlon moved away from the rail.
“Then you told her to take the picture.”
“Because somebody had to take it.”
“I offered when we were setting up.”
“You were getting the kids together.”
“I offered.”
Kaitlyn pressed her lips together.
I could have let the two of them argue.
That would’ve given her somewhere else to go.
“What did you call me?” I said.
“G.I. Jane. Is that so terrible?”
“What did you tell Eliza to do?”
“Salute. It’s a salute, Yolanda.”
Eliza stood beside her father. He put his hand on her shoulder.
I kept my eyes on Kaitlyn.
“Tell her why.”
My cousin shook her head.
“Don’t drag my daughter into this.”
“You put her in it.”
Sherrie sat down.
The chair made a small scraping sound.
Kaitlyn turned toward her as if she’d been called.
“Mom, are you really going to let her do this?”
My aunt held out her hand.
“My phone.”
“I’ve got the toast on it.”
“Give it to me.”
Kaitlyn handed it over.
Sherrie set it in her lap.
“Go on,” she said.
My cousin’s face went red above her collar.
“I’ve done everything for this party. I called people. I got the chairs over here. I made sure Rodney knew when to come. She brings one pan of pudding, and now I’m standing here getting treated like I ruined the whole day.”
“You were asked to stop,” Sherrie said.
“Because she’s suddenly some kind of expert and we’re all supposed to know that.”
I said nothing.
Kaitlyn pointed toward Rodney.
“He didn’t even recognize her.”
“No,” Rodney said. “I didn’t.”
“Exactly.”
“I still heard you.”
She stared at him.
He pulled a chair out and sat down.
He wasn’t going to stand behind me like a medal somebody could pin on.
Kaitlyn turned back.
“I thought you were exaggerating. All that knives and fighting stuff. You never told us anything. You show up, you answer with one word, and we have to drag every little thing out of you.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re your family.”
“Then ask about my drive.”
Her eyes filled.
I almost took it back.
I had spent so much of my life at these parties preventing the next bad feeling that the sight of one on somebody else’s face still felt like work I’d neglected.
Kaitlyn rubbed her nose with the back of her hand.
“I didn’t know you were his instructor.”
I waited.
“I didn’t know any of that.”
Still, I waited.
She looked at the chairs, at people who’d laughed with her.
One of the aunts dropped her eyes.
A cousin put his plate on the rail.
Kaitlyn faced me again.
“I thought you were making yourself sound important.”
“What made you think that?”
“You just… You never said anything before.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
She pulled at the edge of her sleeve.
“I didn’t think you’d done much.”
There it was.
Sherrie covered her mouth.
Kaitlyn’s eyes moved to Rodney again, but he stayed in his chair.
“And if I hadn’t?” I said.
She started to answer. Stopped.
I didn’t fill it in for her.
Eliza leaned against Marlon.
He bent his head toward her and said something I couldn’t hear. She nodded.
Kaitlyn looked at them.
“I was making fun of her,” she said.
The words came out toward the yard.
I stayed where I was.
She turned to her daughter.
“When I told you to salute. I was making fun of Yolanda.”
Eliza looked at me.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, baby,” I said.
Kaitlyn wiped her face.
“I was trying to make everybody laugh. I kept going after you asked me to stop.”
She looked at me then.
“I’m sorry.”
I nodded once.
She waited for me to hug her.
Her arms came a little away from her sides.
Mine stayed down.
“I really am,” she said.
“I heard you.”
“Can we please just finish Mom’s birthday now?”
Sherrie stood.
“We can. You won’t be giving the toast.”
Kaitlyn’s head came around.
“Mom.”
“I don’t want it.”
“But I wrote—”
“I heard enough of your words tonight.”
Marlon reached for the beer on the rail and set it beside the cooler.
“We’re going home after the candles,” he said. “I’m driving.”
Kaitlyn looked at the place where her can had been.
Then at me.
“I hope this was worth making everybody uncomfortable.”
“You were comfortable.”
I picked up my chair.
The second photograph
I carried the chair back into the row.
Nobody told me to stand.
Sherrie came over before I could sit.
She put both hands on my arms.
“I asked you to leave,” she said.
“You asked me to go inside.”
“I knew you’d get your purse.”
Her mouth folded in, and she pressed it flat again.
“I’m sorry, honey.”
I wanted the apology and hated needing it.
Both things fit in the space between her hands.
She tried to pull me closer.
I let her.
My purse strap got trapped between us, and she pushed it off my shoulder with the irritation she’d give any object that interfered with a hug.
“You came all that way,” she said.
I put my face against her hair.
For once, nobody filled the pause.
When she let go, she held up her phone.
The picture I’d taken was still on it.
“That one isn’t going anywhere.”
She deleted it.
Kaitlyn stood near the cooler, arms folded over herself.
She didn’t ask for a copy again.
Sherrie handed the phone to Marlon.
“Will you take it?”
“Of course.”
He had offered before. Nobody had trouble hearing him this time.
Rodney stood behind Sherrie’s chair.
The cousins came back from the fence, less lively about arranging themselves.
One aunt touched my shoulder.
“I shouldn’t have laughed.”
“No,” I said.
She nodded and took her place.
Kaitlyn started toward the chair next to her mother.
Sherrie put her hand on its back.
“Yolanda’s sitting here.”
My cousin stopped.
There was room for her behind us, beside Rodney.
She went there without moving anybody.
I sat down. Sherrie took my hand where the camera would get it.
Marlon raised the phone.
“Everybody ready?”
“Wait,” I said.
I took my purse off my lap and put it under the chair.
The place beside Sherrie
By the time the candles were out, the deck lights were on.
Sherrie didn’t ask anybody for a speech.
She thanked people herself, standing beside her chair with one hand still on my shoulder.
Kaitlyn kept her word about leaving with Marlon.
At the steps, she came back to me.
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Not tomorrow.”
She looked down, then nodded.
“All right.”
She didn’t try to hug me that time.
Rodney brought the spatula out after washing it.
He held it toward me by the handle.
“I think I owe you a burger that isn’t cold.”
“I’m full.”
“Coffee?”
“You’re getting close.”
He smiled.
Then he looked toward the steps where Kaitlyn had gone.
“I should’ve said something before I knew.”
“Yes.”
He accepted that about as gracefully as he’d accepted getting off the mat years before.
A little pause. A nod. No argument.
He set the spatula down without a sound.
Sherrie pulled my chair closer to hers.
“You’re not driving home tonight.”
“I’ve got clothes in the car.”
“I know. You’ve always got clothes in the car.”
She said it with such ordinary certainty that my eyes started burning again.
I bent to pick up my purse.
Mostly to have somewhere to put my face.
Eliza came back up the steps while Marlon waited at the gate.
“Can I say goodbye?”
“Of course, baby.”
She stood in front of me, considering it.
Then her hand began to rise toward her forehead.
She stopped halfway.
“Do I do that?”
“No,” I said. “You can hug me.”
She stepped between my knees and put both arms around my neck.
If this one got to you, send it to someone who’s always been asked to laugh along.
Family can make the sharpest cuts, whether it’s a tense dinner like “My Son Put My Call On Speakerphone” or a daughter’s house key sliding across the table in “My Son-In-Law Slid My Daughter’s House Key Across The Table”. And when old ties turn into a power play, “My Ex Kept My Name On His Expense Approvals” is another story worth a look.
