Despite her assertion that the barbecue was to be ‘nothing fancy,’ Carlene spent the morning cleaning the kitchen and preparing salads and dips while Reuben hosed the patio and degreased the barbecue.
He’d lied when he said he didn’t mind her family coming. Not a week went by when he and Carlene didn’t visit her family or were visited by them, usually for dinner or a barbecue. At first, he thought it a quaint, cosy custom – as a child, there were just him and his mother. According to his mother, Reuben’s father, an occasional lover with itchy feet and a shady past, had vanished into thin air after she broke the news of her pregnancy and she’d never heard from him again. Reuben had yearned to be part of a big, close-knit family like The Brady Bunch or The Waltons.
As he grew up, he’d come
