22. The Dry Rub
THE DRY RUB
FOX
The Vidals like a good barbecue. I know this from the ones I’ve attended with Lucy.
Unlike how I feel about my parents—the dead one and the one who is alive, who I haven’t spoken to since she tried to fuck with my wife—Lucy talks about her parents and their hospitality with the warmth she reserves for things that are entirely uncomplicated in their goodness.
These barbecues are parties with a big P.
Loud.
Extended cousins, neighbors, friends, and their kids are all running around.
No one is dressed up.
There are no caterers.
There is no champagne. There is beer. There is sangria made with crappy red wine, which her mother loves.
There is the most amazing barbecued meat known to mankind.
“Isn’t the barbecue tomorrow?” I ask as we get ready for bed. “We’re going, right?”
She looks at me with the slight surprise she still performs, the slight recalibration. She clears her throat. “You want to go?”
I’ve never been the one to ask to go. It was always she who brought it up.
I’m not intentionally trying to trip her up—or maybe I am. Who the fuck knows at this point?
“Of course. Unless your ribs—“
“My ribs are fine,” she says, too quickly, the way she says things these days when she’s protecting the independence of her own body from my concern. “I want to go.” A pause, the performance layering back in. “I’d like to see them with you.”
She knows exactly how they are with me.
Still, I nod and play along.
I give her something to watch.
The Vidal house in Antioch is a two-bedroom, two-bath with a backyard where there’s a fig tree, peonies, and wisteria, all planted by Lucy’s mother.
Their house is very different from the one I grew up in at Belle Meade.
Lucy told me once, laughing at my mother’s use of the term the house, “My parents have a house, too; they call it the same thing, just without Margaret’s reverb.”
I’ve been here a few times now, but not nearly enough to be comfortable. I’m still navigating the delicate territory of a son-in-law being assessed, and it’s not yet clear whether I’m passing.
I have not always made sufficient effort with the Vidals, which I should have since Lucy tried so hard to make it work with my dysfunctional and, honestly, unbearable family.
This is part of the accounting I have been doing, the long list of things I didn’t do, and this is on the list.
Robert is in the driveway when we pull up. He is a compact, unhurried man with Lucy’s eyes and Lucy’s quality of taking time before he speaks. He watches me help Lucy out of the car with an expression that could be positive or...not?
I shake his hand. “Robert.”
“Fox.” He looks at Lucy. “Baby girl, you look better.”
“I’m almost human.” She lets her father hug her carefully, his big hands gentle around her, as if he knows exactly where it hurts.
He looks at me over her shoulder. “She good?”
“She’s getting there.”
“So, my saying it is not enough, you need Fox to confirm?” Lucy protests.
Robert grins and leads his daughter into the house. “Fox, you eat yet?” he asks over his shoulder.
“Not since this morning.”
He nods, satisfied. “Good. We have enough to feed two armies.”
The backyard is full and loud, smelling of charcoal and the dry rub with cumin coming off the grill, with the authority of a recipe refined over decades.
Kids are running with the energy of kids who have a yard, an afternoon, and no particular instruction.
Milo is at the grill with the proprietary concentration of a man who takes his role as grill master seriously. His wife, Tess, is making sure everyone has a drink and the kids do not pull out the freshly planted bulbs.
Dina is at the table in the shade. She catches my eye when I come through the back gate and gives me a look that contains a full paragraph of questions.
You here? You with her? She good? You taking good care of her? She is smiling. Is that because you haven’t screwed up?
I nod. Yes, to all of the above.
I find a place where I can be useful, which is the first strategy. Don’t stand around waiting to be talked to; find something to carry, fill, or move.
Robert notices this without comment, which I take as its own form of approval.
Lucy settles in a chair in the shade next to Dina that Tess has arranged with the preemptive care of a woman who has been told about the ribs, not the ones we’re eating, but the ones inside Lucy that got banged up.
She talks to her mother, who fusses over her in the loving, relentless way of a woman who has been frightened and is expressing it through proximity and food.
I watch Lucy receive it—no deflecting, no managing, no I’m fine, don’t worry, here let me get you something instead. She just lets her mother fuss.
She’s letting people take care of her.
This is new behavior.
It started after the accident.
There is a small, incremental shift in how she moves through a room—a new willingness to ask, to accept, to occupy space without apologizing.
I don’t know what produced it.
But I have watched it happen like watching the garden in early spring, the almost imperceptible daily progress of growth.
Milo comes over to talk to me at some point.
He is built like the work he does—solid, with hands that have fixed things—and he looks at me the way he looked at me at the courthouse wedding, like a car he’s not yet sure about.
“How’s she doing?” he asks.
Subtext: What are you doing for her?
“Better every day,” I say.
Subtext: Everything I can.
He nods. He looks at his sister in the chair, laughing at something her mother said.
“She’s tough.” His tone carries the pride of a sibling who has watched someone be tough and knows the cost. “She doesn’t let people see when things are hard.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” He looks at me directly.
I meet his eyes and give him honesty. “I’m learning to. I should have learned sooner.”
Milo gives me a measured look and then, as if coming to a decision, nods. “You want a beer?”
“Yes.”
He goes and gets two, and then we talk, like men do, about baseball.
I sit next to Lucy, and she leans into me as we watch her family and friends around us.
It’s the long golden hour—the one I have come to associate with the best moments of the last several weeks—and the yard has gone to its slower register, the kids running about, people in their chairs with the easeful quality of a good afternoon completing itself.
Something with horns and a low, swaying rhythm, cumbia or something close to it, starts to play on the Bluetooth speaker.
Her father pulls her mother up from her chair, and they move together in the grass with the ease of two people who have been dancing together for forty years and have long since stopped needing to think about it.
I look at Lucy.
She is watching her parents with an unguarded expression. She’s full of love for these people, for this yard, for this loud and warm and easy thing that she grew up inside of and that I have been, I understand now, a poor replacement for.
“Dance with me.”
She looks at me. “I’m sore.”
“I know.” I stand up and offer my hand. “I’ll carry you.”
She gives me a mischievous smile. “I’ve been sitting on my ass for weeks now, putting on weight. You sure you’re man enough to carry me?”
“Baby”—I look into her eyes, let her see my hunger, my need to hold her—“I’m man enough for anything you want.”
She flushes and, after a moment, takes my hand.
I lift her gently and hold her close, taking most of her weight so her ribs don’t have to bear it.
I put one hand at her waist and one hand holding hers, and we move—slowly, barely moving, more swaying than dancing—in the grass of her parents’ backyard in Antioch while her father dances with her mother. Milo pretends not to watch, and Dina absolutely watches and doesn’t pretend otherwise.
She is close enough that I can speak quietly, just to her.
“Your brother likes me.”
“My brother is tolerating you,” she teases.
“He gave me a beer.”
“He gives everyone a beer. It’s a barbecue.”
“He told me you were tough,” I add. “He said you don’t let people see when things are hard.”
She is quiet for a moment.
“He’s not wrong.”
“No, he’s not.” I turn us slowly. “I should have seen it before. I should have—looked harder.” I feel her hand shift in mine.
“Why didn’t you?”
“I was too busy not looking to see what was right in front of me.”
She pulls back just enough to look at my face.
“You say things like that,” she whispers. “And I don’t know what to do with them.”
“You don’t have to do anything with them.” I kiss her lips. “They’re just true.”
We sway in the grass.
“Fox,” Lucy murmurs, her head on my shoulder.
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“I need to tell you something.”
My pulse accelerates.
Here it is. Here she comes.
But then the song changes and one of Milo’s kids cannons into us from the left, pursued by two others, and the moment breaks, and Lucy laughs—surprised, delighted, the full laugh, the one that I know is joy—and I catch her before the impact reaches the ribs and the kid bounces off apologetically and runs on.
“You okay?”
“Yes.” She is still laughing, and her hand is on my chest, where she steadied herself, and she looks up at me.
Tell me. Right here. I’m not going anywhere.
Tell me, and let me tell you back, and let us be done with the performance and start the real.
She sighs. “Later.”
I swallow. “Whenever you’re ready.”
I keep my arm around her.
She leans her weight into me.
So, I hold her, in her parents’ backyard, in the gold light, with the smell of cumin and charcoal and the approaching evening.
And I think: I’ve got you.
I’ve got you this time.
And I’m not letting go.