6. All You Can Eat
All You Can Eat
Three Years Ago | The Duckworth Summer Estate, Everhart Hollow
"Startin' Somethin'" floated through the backyard, Michael doing what he does, and underneath it the whole yard was doing its own thing — my little cousins tearing across wet grass straight from the pool, popsicle stains turning their faces four different colors, the elders slamming dominoes down on a card table, somebody's radio arguing with somebody else's playlist two tables over and both of them losing to the ocean.
I stood at the grill and let it all wash over me for a second before I turned the next burger.
My grandfather bought this place when it was just a little house and a strip of sand nobody wanted yet, before my father expanded it into what it is now. This exact chaos was the whole reason he did it. I could hear him saying it in that Roena County drawl.
"Shit sound bougie as hell," he'd told me once, standing on this same patch of grass before the house behind it was even finished.
"But them Hargrove men keep sayin' one day this little island gon' be something, and it's a good investment, something that's gon' live long after me.
I got us this little house here, so even when I'm up in Heaven, you gon' see to it that it stays used up by our family. We deserve this."
And we were using it. Every summer, Duckworths from every walk of life that name had ever touched came through this yard, right after my week alone, starting July 3rd, so we could celebrate The 4th together.
I flipped a row of burgers and heard my cousin August come up behind me before I saw him.
"I love this little summer break from Oak Hill, I tell you that." He said it stretching his arms out. “Same county but, might as well be a different world.”
"Nigga, what kind of break?" His daddy, my uncle Sly, hollered it from the dominoes table without even looking up. "You ain't even got no job!"
Everybody laughed. Everybody but me, because I'd heard this exact routine every summer since August turned twenty-one and started calling unemployment a lifestyle.
"Told you, you can come work at the restaurant," I said, not looking up from the grill either.
"You know my ass ain't no cook, and all you gon' have me do is mop floors."
"It's a start."
"It's a hell of a drive is what it is."
"So what you gon' do, man? At this point not working is a choice, and a bad one."
August shifted his weight, looked off toward the water like it might have his answer waiting on it.
"Ain't like you, Dill. I ain't know since birth I wanted to own no restaurant." He said it a little defensive.
"That ain't how it went for me either." I flipped another burger, kept my eyes on the grate. "Grand Daddy put me behind that stove whether I wanted to be there or not, more so once I started acting up. Gave me something else to do with my hands besides trouble."
"And now you got folks licking your boots.
" He chuckled, low, and let his eyes drift over toward Aurelia, who was teaching two of the little cousins how to hold their hands for a cartwheel, patient with it, laughing every time one of them face-planted in the grass.
"And a girl you won't put no claim on. Couldn't be me, talking about ‘best friends’. "
"August – "
"My son is in denial," my father said, not even looking up from his own burger, delivered flat like a fact he'd stopped bothering to argue about years ago.
"Dad —"
"You and Aurelia are best friends. I know, I know.
" He held up a hand like he was fending off my own protest before I'd even made it.
"Yet conveniently, every woman you're with ends up leaving because of how close y'all are, how you'll drop whatever's happening with them to go handle whatever Ru needs you for, and then you get to watch somebody else build a whole relationship with Aurelia from the sidelines.
It doesn't make sense, but maybe that’s how you young people do things these days. "
"She's got a man, and she's up here with you every summer anyway. Crazy." August shook his head. "Couldn't be my girl."
"Can't nobody stop Aurelia from coming to this week with me. She looks forward to it." I shrugged, kept my eyes on the grill, because looking up right then felt like it'd give something away I wasn't ready to hand over at a cookout.
"And you go get her every year and hold her like a damn newborn on that ferry the whole way back and forth." My father laughed, shook his head.
"She has a Chronic Migraine Condition, you know that." I defended her and myself to the older version of me, though even as I said it I could hear how thin it sounded next to everything else he was pointing at.
"I know you in love with that damn girl is what I know, and won't do a thing about it."
I felt the heat come up in my ears, and turned the burgers again even though they didn't need it, because my hands wanted a job that wasn't standing there taking that.
"You've been missing out on some prime prospects too," my father went on..
"Had a whole line of good women through that restaurant this year alone.
That Simmons girl, the one whose daddy owns half the marina.
That anchorwoman from Shiloh Springs. And you let every single one of 'em walk right on by while you sit there worrying about whether Ru's seasick, whether she took her medicine, if she ate that day, if she got gas in her car, whether she remembered her own umbrella for a rainstorm she coulda checked the weather for herself. "
"It ain't just the migraines," I said, and I heard myself say it before I decided whether I wanted to.
"She forgets to eat when she's stressed.
Forgets to charge her phone half the time, so if something happens I got no way of reaching her.
Man pisses her off real bad on a bad night and she'll sit in a parking lot for an hour before she calls me 'cause she don't want to be a bother.
" I shook my head, flipped the burger one more time for nothing.
"Somebody's gotta keep track of all that. "
"Mm." My father looked at me a long second. "Sound like a lot of tracking for a woman that ain't yours to keep."
I didn't answer that fast enough, and he took my silence as an invitation.
"You know her schedule better than she probably know it herself.
You call her every night at nine like it's a job you clock into.
Last month she had that flat tire out on Route 9, who she call?
Not her man. She called you, and you got up out that bed and drove forty-five minutes past midnight like it was nothing.
Son, you buy that woman's Christmas gifts better than you buy your own girlfriends'. You remember her uncle’s death anniversary every year and you ain't never missed sending flowers.
That's not friendship. That's a man tending to a wife he ain't married yet.”
August spit his drink halfway across the lawn. "Man, what the hell she got a man for when she got you? This is crazy! I'll call Saint, tell him meet me at the docks. Tell him I need somebody to disappear."
"What I need Saint for?" I chuckled. "All that ain't necessary anyway. She's all caught up in it right now, but she'll leave him soon enough. Not for me, but because she'll see this Asher guy ain't worth the air she's breathing."
I'd been telling her that for two years now, in one form or another.
Told her the night she showed up at my penthouse at eleven o'clock with her makeup half cried off because he'd forgotten her birthday, sat her down with a plate of food she barely touched and told her plain, you deserve better than a man who forgets you exist. Told her again six months later when he canceled on meeting her mother for the third time, some excuse about work that both of us knew was a lie the second it left his mouth.
Told her again after the anniversary he spent watching football instead of taking her anywhere, after she'd bought a dress for a dinner that never happened and hung it back up still tagged.
Every single time, she cried it out on my couch or my shoulder or over the phone at two in the morning, and every single time she went back, and every single time I told myself the next time would be the one that stuck.
Watching a woman I loved talk herself into believing crumbs were a meal, and two years of me standing right there handing her a real plate every time he starved her, never once asking her to notice the difference between the two.
"Long as you don’t run the kitchen the way you run your friendship, I’ll mind my Black business." My father chuckled and shook his head.
"Dillion, leave your son alone." My mother's voice came from somewhere behind us, and I hadn't even heard her walk up, hadn't heard the screen door or her sandals on the grass, just her voice arriving the way it always did, right when a conversation needed cutting off at the knee. "They're friends."
"Mmhmm." My father wasn't buying it, and he didn't bother pretending to for her benefit either, just went back to his own plate.
"What y'all over here talking about?"
Aurelia's voice cut through, and I turned to find her jogging up from the grass, hair coming loose from wherever she'd tied it back for the cartwheel lesson, cheeks flushed from the sun and from laughing, a popsicle stick still hanging out one side of her mouth like she'd stolen it off one of the kids.
She looked between me, my father and August, read the room the way she always did, landing on the general shape of it even without the details.
"Y'all giving Dillion a hard time again?"
"Every chance we get," August said, grinning.
"Good." She came around the grill and bumped her shoulder against mine, the way she did about forty times a day without either one of us thinking anything of it. "Somebody's gotta keep him humble. What's for lunch, Chef? I'm starving."