Then
‘Do me a favor and hand me the tongs, will you?’
Ethan’s father was insisting on a final barbeque to see out the summer season, despite the fact that it was now well into October and there was frost on the ground most mornings. ‘Never too late for a little fire,’ he’d said earlier as he was rubbing a rack of ribs with a dry marinade. ‘Good for the soul.’
It was his only night off that week. Charlie was taking Piper to the ballet in Boston – something that Ethan had delighted in harassing him about – and he couldn’t face going down to Billy Jack’s alone and sitting at the bar with the rest of the townies. When his dad had suggested a barbeque followed by a screening of Rio Bravo, he’d happily agreed, if for no other reason than it would take his mind off Ruby for a while.
‘You got the hot sauce?’ his father asked, poking at the coals. He didn’t own one of the behemoth gas grills that hunched imposingly on decks throughout the rest of the neighborhood, replete with pizza stones and bun warmers. He was still using the same coal barbeque he’d bought when Ethan was a kid, despite the fact that the grid was caked with the charred remains of countless past kills. ‘Adds flavor,’ his father would say. He claimed he could taste the gasoline on the newer, fancier models, but really he just liked the primal thrill of piling up the round nuggets of coal and watching the whole thing go up in a massive whoosh of flame. Nothing better than cooking with fire, he’d say, a slightly maniacal glint in his eye.
‘I made a salad,’ Ethan said, placing a bowl of greens, cheese and thin slices of grocery store salami on the table.
‘Candy ass,’ he said, glancing over at it in disgust. ‘Who needs salad when you’ve got meat?’
‘Your colon, for one.’
‘You sound like Cheryl.’ His father had been dating Cheryl, a receptionist at a local swimming-pool installation company, for the past few months, during which she’d made it her personal mission to turn him into a vegetable-eating, hair-product using, bona-fide metrosexual modern man. Her efforts had been soundly rebuffed, and he would have ended things a long time ago if it hadn’t been for the fact that she was a decade younger than him and held more than a passing resemblance to Christie Brinkley. ‘She’s the closest I’ll ever come to being Billy Joel,’ he’d said when he told Ethan about the vegan restaurant she’d dragged him to. ‘Sometimes, a man has to make sacrifices to make his dreams a reality.’
Ethan sat down on the low brick wall that hugged the small, crabgrass-plagued backyard, and watched his father prod the ribs with the tongs until they flipped onto their side. It was cold out, colder than either would admit, and Ethan had pulled a moth-eaten sweater out of the hall closet on his way out. There were big tears along the seam of each cuff, one for each thumb. He suddenly remembered Ruby wearing it one chilly night back in August, her knees folded into her chest and the long hem pulled down over her legs, creating a woolly cocoon for herself in the middle of Memorial Park. She’d looked up at the night sky, hair curling under her ears, her eyes bright in the moonlight. She had looked so beautiful in that moment that it had taken his breath away. When she’d looked back towards him and asked if he wanted another beer, he hadn’t been able to answer, just nod dumbly. He slipped his thumbs through the two holes now, hoping to hold onto the memory for a little longer.
‘What are you looking so moon-eyed about?’ his father asked, nudging him with a sneakered foot.
‘Nothing. Just the stars.’
‘First the salad, now you’re gazing up at the stars? Jesus, give me strength – how the hell did I end up with such an arty-farty son?’
‘The town water must have been contaminated.’
‘Yeah, I should sue. Come on, Picasso, get up – dinner’s ready.’
They ate at the white plastic picnic table, both of them shivering and trying not to show it. The dull hum of next door’s television could be heard in the background, punctuated by the sharp sound of studio-audience laughter. Stella had lived beside them for over twenty years, but had never warmed into something that could accurately be described as ‘neighborly’. Ethan had been terrified of her as a kid, mainly because once, when he and Charlie had been playing catch too close to her rose bushes, she’d come onto her front porch and wordlessly turned the hose on them. Most nights, they could hear the sound of her foghorn voice as she yelled at another goodfuhnuthin’ son down the phone. Ethan occasionally wondered why they still bothered to call, knowing what was in store for them, but he knew enough about the thorny vines of familial entanglement not to question it for too long.
‘So, you see the Sox game last night?’ his father asked through a mesquite-smeared mouth.
‘Yeah, I had it on at the bar. Sucked.’
‘Tell me about it. Bunch of jack-offs.’
They nodded in commiseration and ate on in silence for a few minutes.
His father stripped the meat from a rib in a few sharp bites and dropped the gleaming bone onto the plate before reaching over and helping himself to another. ‘You and Ruby still doing okay?’
Ethan picked a forkful of cheese and salami straight from the salad bowl and stabbed it into his mouth. He chewed until it was a fine mush, stalling for time. In truth, he had no idea how he and Ruby were doing. They talked most days, and she always said she missed him, but there was something in her voice, a slight catch of hesitance, that made him wonder if she really did. Sometimes, she sounded so remote, as if she were calling from a Russian space station silently gliding in orbit rather than a city a few hundred miles away. It made him feel deeply uneasy, but no matter how many times he asked her if she was okay, her response was always the same tinny ‘I’m fine’.
Of course, he didn’t admit any of this to his father. Instead, he shrugged and said, ‘I guess,’ before tearing a chunk of meat out of a rib with his teeth.
Next door, the studio audience roared with laughter.
‘You need to go and see her.’ His father didn’t look at him when he said this. His entire concentration was still focused on stripping the last bit of meat from a bone, but it was clear from his tone that he felt what he was saying was important. In the resulting silence, he tossed another bone onto the pile on his plate and reached for another rib.
Ethan exhaled. ‘I don’t have the cash to spend a weekend in New York.’
‘What the fuck are you gonna do, stay at the Four Seasons? You go to the bus station, you buy a ticket, you get on a bus. How hard is it?’
‘Billy will never give me the time off. We’re short-staffed as it is, and it’s Columbus Day weekend coming up, which means the pissheads will be out in full force. He’ll kill me if I ask for time off.’
Ethan’s father set down his half-eaten rib and fixed his son with the kind of world-weary, disappointed look he usually reserved for Jetta drivers. ‘Son, you say you love this girl. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘But you’re telling me that you don’t want to risk pissing off some dickhead owner of a shithole bar so that you can see her?’ He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. The leather was scuffed and cracked from years of overstuffing, and when he opened it slips of paper and receipts spilled out before he shoved them back into captivity. He thumbed out a few bills and handed them to Ethan. ‘Here’s a couple of bucks. Go see your girl. If Billy gives you any crap, tell him he still owes me for the new carburettor and I’ll be over with my baseball bat to collect.’
Ethan sighed. ‘Dad, I can’t accept this.’
‘Of course you can.’ He pushed back from the table and placed a gentle hand on his stomach. ‘Jesus, I can feel the agita coming on already. I gotta get some Tums.’ And with that, he got up and went inside, leaving Ethan with a pile of slightly congealed ribs and a mostly uneaten salad. He looked down at the bills, now crumpled and slightly sweaty in his hand, and smiled. Yes, he thought. I’ll go to New York. I’ll go get my girl.