The Party At My Own Grill

“I’ll tell him,” I said. “I just want to say thank you all for coming. Kyle and I are so glad our house could host Dylan’s day.”

There was a beat. Then somebody started clapping, and then everybody did, because that is what you do at a graduation party in Kansas. You clap.

Tracie did not clap. She stood at the edge of the patio with her hands at her sides.

Dylan had stopped halfway across the yard. He was staring at me with his mouth a little open.

“Aunt Lindsey?” he said. “You came from Germany?”

“I came from Germany,” I said.

He set his chips down on the nearest table, right on top of somebody else’s plate, and came across the patio in three long steps. He hugged me so hard that the spatula ended up somewhere over his shoulder.

He smelled like the gym and somebody’s cologne he had borrowed. He was taller than Kyle now. When did that happen?

“Uncle Kyle saw?” he said into my hair.

“He saw the whole thing. He said, ‘That’s my boy.'”

Dylan pulled back and looked at me, and his chin did the thing Kyle’s chin does.

“Will you take a picture with me?” he said. “At the grill? Uncle Kyle always does the grill. I want to send it to him.”

So that is the picture. If you ever see it, that is what it is. Me in my white blouse with my hair in a ponytail, holding a spatula at Kyle’s black gas grill, smiling. Dylan in his red gown beside me.

Jim Ostrander took it with Dylan’s phone. He took about six of them, because Dylan’s friends kept making faces behind us.

I did not know until later that Tracie was in the edge of every one of them, standing at the edge of the patio in her black sundress, not moving.

After the picture, Dylan went back to his friends, and I went back to the burgers. Somebody brought me a lemonade in a red plastic cup.

Two women came up to the grill together. They were younger than me, maybe thirty, with babies on their hips.

“We’re the Hendersons and the Kellers,” one said. “Both houses on that side. We moved in last summer.”

“Welcome to the street,” I said.

The other one leaned in. “I’m sorry if this is weird,” she said quietly, “but Tracie told us this was her place. She said she bought it after her divorce.”

I flipped a burger.

“We bought it nine years ago,” I said. “We’re stationed in Germany. We’ll be back in about eighteen months.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” I said. “You came to a graduation party. That’s a nice thing to do.”

They went back to their table. I saw them lean in and talk to the women next to them. I saw heads turn toward Tracie and then away again.

I am not going to pretend I did not notice that. I am not going to pretend part of me didn’t feel something hard and satisfied in my chest when I saw it.