6. All You Can Eat #2
"Burgers," I answered and reached for the plate I'd already set aside for her.
I picked one up and held it out, and she leaned in and took a bite straight off my hand without even reaching for it herself, like her hands had better things to do than hold her own food when mine were already right there.
Everybody at that grill watched us do it. Nobody said a word this time, which was somehow louder than all the teasing that came before it.
"This is so good," Aurelia said, mouth still half full, already reaching for a second bite before she'd finished the first.
Some sauce caught at the corner of her mouth, and I wiped it off with my thumb before I thought twice about it, licked off and went back to the grill.
"Short rib in the blend," I said, like that explained the silence sitting over the whole yard instead of deepening it. "Little smoked gouda. Regular burger wasn't ever gon' cut it for you."
She hopped up onto the low stone ledge next to the grill, barefoot, feet swinging a little as she settled in with her plate balanced on her knees, and kept eating.
"Dilly Duck," she said, around a mouthful of burger, pointing at me with what was left of it, "you gotta teach me how to make this. I've tried the gouda thing at home and it just gets all stringy and weird."
"You're throwing it in cold." I leaned against the counter behind the grill, arms crossed, watching her chew like it was the most interesting thing happening in a yard full of forty relatives. "Gotta bring it up to room temp first or it seizes on you. Basic stuff, Ru."
"Ain't nothing basic 'bout this burger."
I chuckled. "You drinking enough water running round with these kids? It's hot as hell out here."
She rolled her eyes, but she reached for the cup sitting next to her on the ledge anyway and took a sip without being asked twice.
"Like I said." My father mumbled it low, not even trying that hard to keep it between him and August, and my mother nudged him with her elbow, telling him to hush without actually meaning it. "A newborn."
"Dad," I said, not even turning around.
He held both hands up, all innocence, and went back to his plate, and my mother caught my eye over his shoulder and gave me a look of amusement.
Aurelia hopped down off the ledge, plate empty, and bumped my shoulder again on her way past. "I'm gonna go check on the kids before someone breaks an arm trying to do a flip. Save me another burger."
"Always do."
She ran off.
"Man's out here fully pussy whipped and ain't even collected on nothing yet," August said, shaking his head, grinning around his own burger.
"Watch your mouth," my mother warned with a finger.
"My bad, Auntie."
I didn't say anything. Just flipped the last two burgers, pulled them off the grill, and stacked them on the platter next to the rest, because there wasn't a version of that comment worth arguing with, not when half of me knew he wasn't entirely wrong and the other half of me wasn't ready to sit with that in the middle of a cookout.
The Present
This wasn't real.
I pressed the bourbon glass against my forehead, cold biting into my skin. I held it there, counted to five then took it away.
The shower was still running down the hall. Her bag was still on the floor every time I peeked in her room. Her wet footprints trailing from the front door. She was here.
I poured another two fingers and didn't sit down.
I kept moving through my own kitchen like a man looking for something, opening a cabinet, closing it, wiping a counter that was already clean.
The storm pressed against the windows. Upstairs, the floor creaked once and went quiet, and I stood there with the rag in my hand staring at the ceiling like I could see through it.
Madeline up there. Aurelia down here. Me in the middle, cleaning.
I huffed a laugh, one ugly note, alone in the dark. This had my grandfather's fingerprints all over it. Old man somewhere up there with the whole board in front of him, moving storms, moving ferries, moving women, playing me like a Sim. I raised my glass at the ceiling.
"You could've just sent a plague of locusts," I muttered, and drank.
I don't know what number bourbon I was on when the bedroom door opened down the hall. Heard her feet on the heart pine, bare feet that knew this house. My hand tightened around the glass.
She came into the kitchen in a nightgown, hair wrapped in a towel. I took a drink as she pulled out the stool on the far side of the counter, her stool, sat down and folded her hands like we had an appointment.
"Are you calmer now?" She asked like she hadn't blown up my whole week with one doorbell. "Can we talk?"
"Calm." The laugh came out with nothing in it.
I set the glass down harder than I meant to and the sound cracked through the kitchen.
"You pop up in a storm with no notice, during my solo week, after four months of silence so loud I called Miss Lorna twice just to hear that you were still alive, and you want me calm. "
"Apparently it's not solo week anymore." Her eyes were moving over my face like she was reading a ticket. "You have someone here and you still won't tell me who."
"What difference does it make?"
"Your blood family can't come during solo week, not even your own mother." Her voice was level. "Dillion, I never even asked you to make an exception for me, because I understood, this week is the one thing on this earth that's only yours."
She leaned in and the towel on her head tilted.
"So whoever is upstairs is past all of us. Past family. Past me." She concluded.
The storm threw a fistful of rain at the window behind me.
"So it makes a difference. I need to know what has gotten into you before I say what I got on that ferry to say."
The glass was empty. I looked at it like it had betrayed me, because for a man who was technically single, I was having entirely too many woman problems in one night for it to make any kind of sense.
Thunder rolled through the house, low, taking its time, and I let it finish before I spoke. And when I spoke, I didn't answer her question. I put mine on the counter instead, the one that had been sitting in my chest for four months like a swallowed bone.
"You went back to that man?"
Her eyes went wide. Then narrow, slits, her head shaking slow, and when she spoke her voice had blood in it.
"The man whose wrists you broke in front of me? Then beat to a pulp in a parking lot? Then had thrown in jail for weeks with two phone calls?" She laughed, one note, no humor anywhere near it. "That man?"
"Yeah." I didn't blink. "Him."
Because I had to hear it. Four months of not knowing. Four months of imagining her back in that apartment, back in that bed, nursing him, holding the wrists I broke like they were something I did to her.
"No, Dillion. I didn't go back." She looked away. "I had Carter and Cartier move my stuff out while he was, recovering. Locked up. I don't even know which. I didn't ask. I've been at my mama's since. Figuring out what's next."
I knew she was at Miss Lorna's. Me and that woman had spoken every few weeks since February, two people who loved the same girl trading proof of life like prisoners of different wars.
She's eating. She's sleeping. She asked about you once and I didn't say nothing.
So I knew she was safe. What I didn't know, what Miss Lorna couldn't tell me and I couldn't ask without my whole hand showing, was whether she'd been sneaking back to him.
"That night was crazy, Dillion." She was looking off to the side now, at the dark window, at the rain, at anything that wasn't me.
And there it was. My opening, or my wound, they were the same thing.
"You looked at me like I was an animal." It came out of me like something pulled through skin. "For protecting you."
Her head snapped back around.
"You broke both his wrists, Dillion." Her voice climbed.
"I watched you do it. I watched your face while you did it.
You weren't there. Whoever that was, calm, snapping bones like he was portioning chicken, that wasn't the man I—" She caught it.
Swallowed it. Rebuilt the sentence with her hands shaking.
"You told me to go so I wouldn't see 'what happens next.
' Do you know what that sounds like? Do you know what it's like to run across a parking lot away from your best friend because his voice told your body to run? "
"He was going to hit you."
"I know—"
"His hand was up, Aurelia." I came off the counter now, my voice rising to meet hers, years of frustration all pushing up my throat at once.
"I watched that man disrespect you for years.
Watched you cry in my restaurant, my car, my kitchen, over and over, and I swallowed it, every time, because you asked me to.
And the one night, the one night he raises his hand at you in my parking lot, I handle it, and you look at me like I'm the thing to be scared of? "
The thunder cracked and I talked through it.
"I've been that thing my whole life, Ru. I buried it for you people. Paris, Milan, the whites, the star, all of it built on top of a hole where I keep him buried. And the one time I let him up, the one time, it was for you"
"I wasn't running from you!"
"Then what do you call it? You didn't come the next day, or the day after, or any day, Aurelia, I told you where I'd be—"
"I was running from what I felt!"
It ripped out of her, both hands coming off the counter, the towel sliding off her hair and hitting the floor and neither of us looked at it.
"I watched you break a man in half without breathing hard. And Dillion, God help me, some part of me. Some part of me liked it. Somebody finally fought for me. And that scared me more than you ever could. That's what I couldn't look at. Not you. Me."