The Party At My Own Grill

But mostly I felt sorry. I knew exactly why Tracie had told people that. She had lost her own house in the divorce. She had lost her car in my driveway with the whole street watching. She wanted, for once, to be the woman with the pretty yard.

I understood it. I just could not pay for it anymore.

For about an hour, I worked the grill. Burgers, then hot dogs, then the bratwurst somebody’s husband had brought in a cooler from a locker plant in Abilene.

People kept coming up. Some of them had known all along. Dale came over from across the street and stood by the grill with a paper plate and told me about the hailstorm that took out half the shingles on the block last summer.

“Your roof held,” he said. “Kyle put a good roof on.”

“Kyle reads the manual,” I said.

“That he does,” Dale said.

A man from Tracie’s church came up and introduced himself and said, very carefully, that he hoped everything was all right. I said I hoped so too.

Tracie never came near the grill. Every time I looked up, she was somewhere else in the yard. Refilling the chip bowls. Talking with her back to me. Once she was just standing by the redbud tree in the corner, looking at nothing.

At four o’clock, Kyle texted me. It was eleven at night for him.

“How is it?”

“Dylan hugged me so hard I almost dropped your spatula,” I wrote. “He took a picture with me at the grill for you. Check your phone.”

A minute later: “Got it. That’s the best thing I’ve seen all year. How’s Trace?”

I looked over at her. She was standing at the edge of the patio again, in the same spot as when I came in, with her arms folded across her black sundress.

“I don’t know yet,” I wrote.

“Be kind,” Kyle wrote. “But don’t be a doormat. You know the line.”

I did know the line. I just hadn’t figured out where it was yet.

Around half past four, two of the women from the deli carried a big sheet cake out of the kitchen. My kitchen. They set it on the middle folding table, near the balloons.

It was white frosting with red and black trim and a little plastic graduation cap on top. Somebody started looking for a knife. Somebody else called for Dylan.

And Tracie walked straight across the grass to me.

She stopped at the edge of the patio, about six feet from the grill. Close enough that everyone at the near tables could see her face, and her face was red.

“Before we cut the cake,” she said, and her voice came out louder than I think she meant it to, “I need to say something about the rent.”

The yard went quiet. Even the boys by the fence stopped talking. Jim Ostrander, at the near table, set his fork down.

I turned off the burners. I did not want anything else burning while she talked.

“Lindsey and Kyle let me rent this house,” Tracie said. “Nine hundred a month. That was the deal, at Thanksgiving, a year and a half ago.”

She swallowed. She was looking at me, not at them.