Chapter 24: The Fourth

Dad did the inviting this time, because there was nobody left to do it for him.

The two families had spent the Fourth together my whole life — same as Thanksgiving, same as every holiday since Priya’s mother left, when a cookout for two in that quiet house stopped being worth the lighter fluid and Ravi started bringing Priya to us instead. To Robin’s house, Robin’s yard, year on year. Claire had run all of it while she was here — made the calls, cooked for days, kept the two families stitched across the calendar without anybody having to think about who did the stitching. This was the first of any of it without her. And when the date came around and there was no one to pick up the phone, Dad picked it up himself, three weeks out, awkward on it the way he was with anything that wasn’t a plant or a joist, and did the part Claire had always done — because the only thing worse than making that call was letting the whole tradition go quiet and admitting out loud how few of us were left to keep it.

So Ravi and Priya came, the way they’d come every year of my life. Dad and Ravi went back a long way, from before the circle even, and by now it was just a thing the families did, worn smooth as a doorstep. Dad didn’t know a fraction of what he’d asked back into the yard. He wanted a fire going and an old friend at it and one ordinary day dropped into a year that had had none. So I let him. I didn’t tell him it was the worst table in the county he could have set.

By noon the yard was all lighter fluid and cut grass and the char coming up off the grate, and I was five months along and couldn’t take the smoke, so I kept to the kitchen — the potato salad, the tea, the screen door slapping shut behind me every trip out and back. And every trip out, Dad found his way over to me. Took the heavy bowl out of my hands before I’d cleared the step. Put the back of two fingers to the small of my back, steering me around the hose. Made me sit in the shade with a sweating glass while he did the hauling, the way you’d move a woman five months along if she were yours.

I’d stopped seeing it. You stop seeing the thing you live inside. It took Ravi’s face to show it back to me.

They came up the drive a little after one, Priya carrying a foil-covered dish she’d plainly made herself — she’d been cooking beside her dad since she was old enough to reach the stove, just the two of them in that house. I watched them come from behind the screen. It had been months since I’d been this close to her — since the hallways, since I’d stopped being able to look at her — and she was thinner than I remembered, and she carried the dish up the walk in both hands out in front of her like it was the one thing she was sure what to do with.

The men did the thing men do — the handshake that turns into the shoulder-grab, Dad already three sentences into the grower he’d driven four hours for. And then there was the thing none of them could not-see, standing right there in a sundress out to here. Ravi was the one who took it on, because somebody had to and he was the grown one. He came over and did it kind, the way you’d want a man to — a hand on my shoulder, a good long look at the front of me, “Well, would you look at this,” and “When’s she due?” I said November. He got to telling me about the day Priya was born — how she’d come near three weeks past her due date and near put him in an early grave with the waiting — and he tipped his head at her, grown and standing right there in the yard, handing me the easy way through it. It was the decent thing and he did it decent. Only later did I take in what it must have cost him, to stand in that yard and be warm about a belly he could read better than any man alive.

Priya didn’t say a word about it. She hugged me — quick, both of us gone stiff with all the months between us — and her eyes went to the middle of me and off it again, and she couldn’t do what her father had just done, couldn’t find the bright easy words she’d have had for it a year ago, and we both felt her not-find them and let it go by.

Then Dad crossed the yard to me — I’d got up out of the shade chair and he didn’t like it — and put his hand flat on the top of my belly, right out in the open, gauging the size of me the way he did a dozen times a day now without either of us thinking, and said something low about sitting back down.

I felt Ravi see it.

I’d been watching for Priya and I caught the father instead — caught the second the easy warmth went out of him. It was Dad’s hand that did it. Ravi’s eyes snagged on it, flat and easy on the top of me, and I watched the sad simple story he’d just been so kind about — some boy, some backseat — come apart behind his face and set itself back up as something else, something he knew from the inside of his own skin. Because Ravi was the one man in that yard who knew what a father’s hand looks like when it’s quit being only a father’s. He’d worn that hand. He knew it on sight. His eyes went down into his beer and stayed there a long time, and when they came up they wouldn’t come near me.

He didn’t say anything more about the baby. What was there to say. He drank his beer and burned his mouth on a hot dog and laughed too hard at Dad’s jokes, and I was the only one who saw he’d gone somewhere and not come all the way back.

I went up after the food to get off my feet — five months along and the heat had turned my ankles to bread dough — and Priya came up the stairs behind me the way she had ten thousand times since we were small.

She stopped on the landing.

I knew what she was looking at before I turned around. My old room, the door standing open, the bed made up hospital-tight with nothing of me left in it — a guest room now, a room for nobody, the shelves cleared down to the stuff too dumb to bother moving. And down the hall the other door open, the big one, everything that was actually mine flung around inside it: my hairbrush on my mother’s old dresser, my clothes over the chair, the bed I slept in. Priya had been up these stairs her whole life. She knew which room was mine the way she knew her own. And she stood on the landing and looked at the neat dead bed I didn’t sleep in, and then down the hall at the one I did, and I watched her stop needing any clue past that one.