The Party At My Own Grill

He looked at the balloons and the cars and then at me. “I didn’t think it was my business,” he said. “But I wondered.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m not here to make a scene.”

“I know you’re not,” he said. “You never were the type.” He patted my shoulder twice and sat back down.

That was when I went through the side gate and smelled Kyle’s grill.

So there I was, at the beginning of all this. Twenty people at folding tables. Red and black balloons on stakes in the grass. A stranger at the grill fighting a flare-up.

And Tracie, in her black sundress at the edge of the patio, frozen like somebody had hit pause on her.

I want to tell you what I felt. It was not anger, though I had been angry for a year and a half. It was a kind of tiredness, and under that, something like homesickness, even though I was home.

I walked across the grass to the grill. The man there was about sixty, in a ball cap and a golf shirt, and he looked relieved to see anyone who might know what they were doing.

“Afternoon,” I said. “Could I borrow that?”

He handed me the spatula without asking why. I turned the left burner down to low, slid the four burgers that were burning over to the right side, and closed the lid for a minute to kill the flame.

“Left burner runs hot,” I said. “It always has. My husband keeps meaning to fix the regulator.”

“Your husband?” the man said.

“Kyle,” I said. “This is his grill. I’m Lindsey.”

He shook my hand. “Jim,” he said. “Jim Ostrander. My wife and I moved into the blue house there last spring.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Jim,” I said, and I meant it.

A woman at the nearest table, his wife, I guessed, leaned toward me with a friendly smile. “Are you a friend of Tracie’s?”

“I’m her sister-in-law,” I said. “Kyle’s wife. Kyle and I own the house.”

I did not say it loud. I did not say it with any edge. I just said it the way you’d tell someone what time it is.

She looked at me, and then she looked over at Tracie. Tracie was looking at the grass.

The table went a little quiet. Then the next one did, the way it goes at a party when something has changed and nobody knows yet what.

I could have said a lot of things right then. I could have told all twenty of them about the $16,200 and the two payments and the mortgage coming out on the fifth.

I didn’t. That was not what I had flown home for. Dylan was coming around the corner of the house with two of his friends, still in his red gown, a plate of chips in his hand.

So I lifted the lid, flipped the burgers, and turned to the tables.

“Hi, everybody,” I said. “I’m Lindsey. My husband Kyle is Dylan’s uncle. He’s in Germany with the Army and couldn’t be here, but he watched Dylan walk this morning on my phone.”

A few people said “Aw.” Somebody at the back table said, “Thank him for his service.”