Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
Tyler had the gate propped so people could walk straight back without knocking. A year ago there hadn’t been anything back here worth walking straight back to.
Luke came through first, then Meg, then Lindsey.
Tyler watched all three of them doing roughly the same double take in roughly the same order—gate, patio, fountain, ocean—and something settled in his chest that he wasn’t going to examine closely, on the grounds that examining things closely wasn’t really his sport.
“Tyler,” Meg said, taking it in. “There’s a fountain.”
“Yes, there is.”
“You built a fountain?”
“Stella built a fountain. I bought a fountain and stood near it while she installed it correctly.” Tyler had a spatula in each hand for no reason that made sense even to him. “I supervised.”
“He supervised,” Luke said, deadpan, dropping into a patio chair and reaching into the ice chest for a beer.
Meg turned in a slow circle, taking in the bougainvillea cut back to something with shape, the poured pad under the grill, the sightline to the water that hadn’t existed a year ago. “This is unrecognizable. I used to sit right there and lose entire afternoons to email.”
“I remember,” Tyler said, and did.
He’d decided, weeks ago, that he understood grills. He had ideas now—real ones, about heat zones and resting times—that he hadn’t had a month prior.
“I think I understand grilling now. At least I want to,” he told Luke, who’d wandered over to critique. “I’ve been practicing.”
“You understand a grill the way I understand knitting. Meaning you watched something once.”
“I’ve read.” Tyler flipped nothing, on principle, to prove a point. “There’s a technique.”
“There’s a technique to everything, Tyler. You’ve discovered cooking.”
Luke reached past him and nudged a burger two inches with his own tongs, unasked. Tyler nudged it back. Neither man looked at the grill itself for a good ninety seconds, both of them too busy being right at each other. More or less the whole friendship in miniature.
The flame caught while Tyler was mid-sentence about the resting time. He hadn’t looked at the grill. He’d looked at Luke, making a point.
Lindsey was up and past him before he’d finished the sentence—lid down, spray bottle in hand, the burgers moved to the cool side—and back in her chair with an ear of corn before he’d landed his conclusion.
“—which is why the resting time matters,” Tyler said, to a grill that had briefly tried to end his evening and been talked down without him catching it.
“Wise,” Luke said, not looking up.
Someone needed ice, and someone needed buns, and Tyler and Meg went in together, because that was easier than deciding who went alone. It always had been, between the two of them, since she’d moved back to town.
The kitchen was quieter than the yard by about the amount you’d expect. Meg got the buns off the counter. Tyler opened the freezer and stood there a second too long, because the fridge door did what it always did. It stopped him.
The wall of photographs. Bigger than the last time he’d actually looked at it instead of just walking past. Bea mid-laugh. Bernie over the crossword. Margo’s profile against the window. A hundred ordinary mornings nobody but Stella had thought to keep.
“Oh my gosh.” Meg had stopped next to him, looking at one down in the corner, half under a newer one. “I don’t remember that person at all.”
Tyler looked. Meg on the porch, the first summer, buried in folders, hair coming loose, looking up at whoever had said her name. Smiling, actually smiling, in a way that didn’t match how she talked about that summer whenever it came up.
“You look happy,” he said.
“I was drowning.”
“You look happy drowning.”
Meg looked at the photo a second longer.
Up near the top, half-hidden behind a CalArts postcard, was one of him.
Early. He knew it was early because of the haircut, and because of the look on his own face—a man standing in his own kitchen, one hand half up like he could still stop the shutter, like the picture was a question he didn’t have an answer to yet.
The week she’d first arrived, before either of them knew what to do with the other.
“That’s a good look for you,” Meg said, following his eyes. “Man Facing His Entire Life.”
“I was terrified.”
“You looked terrified for a long time.”
“I was terrified for a long time.” He said it plainly. “Turns out that’s normal. Nobody tells you that going in.”
She looked at him and smiled. “You don’t look terrified anymore, Tyler.”
“Thank you for saying that, Meg.” He pulled her in for a one-armed hug, the spatula still in his other hand. “Don’t tell Luke.”
They got the ice and the buns and went back out. Luke had moved on to defending his corn-grilling method against an audience that hadn’t asked for one.
“You heard about the party,” Luke said, to Tyler, mid-argument with nobody. “The quince thing.”
“I did. Sounds rough,” Tyler said.
“Kids got a little over their skis,” Meg said, setting the buns down.
“Wanted to do right by everybody at once. Ran the numbers wrong.” She said it plainly, no edge to it—an assessment, not a complaint.
“It happens. It happened to me too, once, with a much bigger budget and no excuse of being eighteen.”
There wasn’t anything to add that wouldn’t have been bragging on someone else’s behalf, and he’d learned, this year, when to let something stand on its own.
“Stella worked really hard on that project of hers,” Tyler said, mostly to the grill. “I don’t think she expected it would be as big as it turned out to be.”
“I think you’re right. And it turned out to be big for all of us.” Meg turned the buns cut-side down so they wouldn’t dry out. “I’ve still got the walnut card on my counter. I keep walking past it and not making it.”
“Why not?”
“I want to get it right the first time.”
Tyler turned a burger and was pleased it didn’t crumble. “She got Margo talking that night. Things I’d never heard. I keep coming back to that part.”
“Bernie too. I don’t think I’d ever seen his face do that.”
“No.” Tyler looked around at the yard—the fountain, the sightline, the whole thing built out of a rusted mess nobody thought was worth saving.
“She’s been doing that to the rest of us too, if you think about it.
Same as the trunk. Found what was sitting around half-forgotten and made something out of it. ”
Meg looked at him for a second, the look she’d been giving him more often lately, and shook her head.
“Look at you,” she said. “All grown up. Finally.”
“I’m a grown man.”
“I said what I said.”
Luke came over to the grill with a plate, set it down, and, apropos of not much, put a hand on Tyler’s shoulder.
“Watching you with her this year has been really something. If we’re ever lucky enough—” He didn’t finish it the way you’d expect a man to finish it, all the way out loud. He just left it there a second. “I’d take half of what you’ve figured out. That’d be plenty.”
Tyler didn’t have a joke ready. That happened rarely enough to catch his own attention.
“You’ll figure out your own version,” he said, finally. “Everybody does. Badly, first. Then not as badly.”
Luke nodded like that was exactly the answer he’d wanted, and went back to the table where Lindsey was laying out everything to go with the burgers.
Meg had gone faintly pink over the corn she was tending on the grill. Tyler said nothing, because some things you let a person have in private, even out loud, in a yard, in front of everyone. He had learned a few things in the last year, after all.
The gate opened before anyone answered anything else, and it was Stella first, then Joey, then Bea, all three of them running late in the particular way that meant they’d been doing something they weren’t ready to talk about yet.
“Sorry,” Stella said. “We got held up.”
“You’re fine,” Tyler said. “Your yard’s ready. I mean our yard. Which you built.”
Stella looked around at it, quick and satisfied, checking her own work, and lifted the camera without seeming to decide to.
Tyler didn’t know what was actually on that camera these days.
Didn’t know this year’s rolls from last year’s.
He just knew his daughter had shown up on a plane a year ago with nothing but a bag she wouldn’t unpack, and now she stood in a yard she’d built with her own hands, keeping a record of everybody in it.
Including him. Including the terrified version of him, still hanging on that fridge.