The Party At My Own Grill

“I know you are,” I said, because Kyle had said it first, and because I wanted to believe it, and because that is the only way anyone ever does make anything right. Somebody has to believe them first.

After the cake, the party did not end. That is the thing about graduation Saturday in a small town. Kids go from party to party all afternoon and into the evening, and their parents follow them, and everybody eats at every house.

By six o’clock, the first twenty guests had turned over twice. Pickups pulled in and out of the cul-de-sac. A whole carload of the boys from the welding class showed up with their girlfriends.

Somebody’s grandpa from out on a farm south of town told me about a combine he’d bought at auction in 1981 for less than my plane ticket. A lady from the deli brought out more potato salad.

Jim Ostrander came back to the grill with two more packages of burgers from his own freezer. “Least I can do,” he said. “I’ve been eating at your house for an hour and a half.”

Dale Novak brought a lawn chair across the street, set it up by the patio, and stayed until the streetlights came on.

The two young mothers came back and asked when we were moving home, and whether Kyle knew anything about fixing a fence gate, and I said Kyle knows something about fixing everything, and they laughed.

I never did sit down. I didn’t want to.

Every time somebody new came through the side gate, they saw a woman they had never met at the grill, and they asked who I was. And every time, I told them the same thing.

“I’m Lindsey,” I said. “Kyle’s wife. This is our house. Thank you so much for coming.”

Some of them already knew by then. News moves fast on a cul-de-sac. But they shook my hand anyway, and a couple of them hugged me, and one older woman held my wrist for a second and said, “Good for you, honey. You did that right.”

I don’t know if I did it right. I know I did it the only way I could live with.

At eight o’clock, the sun went down behind the redbud, and somebody plugged in the string of lights over the patio. Dylan came out of the house in a T-shirt, his red gown folded over his arm, and set his phone on the grill shelf next to me.

Kyle was still on it. It was three in the morning for him, and he was still on it.

“Hey, Linds,” he said. “How many have you fed?”

I looked out at the yard. The folding tables were full again. The red and black balloons had started to sag, and somebody’s little girl was chasing the loose ones across the grass.

“I lost count,” I said. “Forty, maybe.”

“How many of them do you know?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

“Almost none of them,” I said. “Go to sleep, Kyle.”

He didn’t. He stayed on the phone, propped against the bottle of hot sauce, while I flipped burgers in my own backyard for forty people I had just met, and told every one of them how glad I was they came.