UNCLE ROGER'S BIGGEST SECRET

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Nora's backyard had been strung with string lights even though it was barely six in the evening and still bright out, the kind of optimistic decorating that assumed the party would run long enough to need them. I stood on the back porch for a second, balancing a container of the pasta salad I'd made, my one contribution, and watched the yard fill in with people I half recognized from the dinner and some I'd never seen before.

"You made it." Zed appeared at my elbow, kissing my temple before relieving me of the pasta salad. "Mom's going to lose her mind, she loves when people actually bring something."

"I panicked and made pasta salad. It's not fancy."

"It's food. That's the whole bar." He steered me down the porch steps into the yard, where a grill was already going, smoke curling up into the early evening light, Nora barking good natured instructions at whoever was manning it. "Come on, I'll introduce you to people."

The next twenty minutes passed in a blur of names I tried and mostly failed to hold onto, a cousin here, a family friend there, someone's husband who worked in insurance and wanted to talk about it at length. I nodded and smiled and said the right things, the specific social choreography of a party where you know one person well and are meeting everyone else through the lens of him, and I was starting to feel the pleasant, wine assisted looseness of a good backyard party when I spotted Roger across the yard.

He was standing near the fence with a beer he wasn't really drinking, talking to a woman I didn't recognize, tall, put together, laughing at something he'd said with the specific brightness of someone who wanted him to know she thought he was funny. Roger's expression was doing the thing I remembered from dinner, polite and a little distant, present in the conversation without being fully in it.

"Who's that with your uncle?" I asked Zed, mostly out of idle curiosity, the kind of question you ask at a party about anyone you don't recognize.

"Ashley. Family friend, sort of. My mom's been not so subtly trying to set them up for like a year now." Zed grinned, glancing over. "She's nice. Works in marketing, I think. My mom thinks she's exactly what Roger needs."

"And what does Roger think?"

"Roger thinks my mom should mind her own business, which he says approximately every time she brings it up, and then shows up to these things anyway, so." He shrugged. "Who knows. Maybe he likes her and just doesn't want to give my mom the satisfaction of being right."

I laughed, and we drifted toward the food table, and I mostly forgot about Ashley and Roger for a while, caught up in a conversation with Sofia, who'd commandeered me the second she spotted me, eager to show me something on her phone, a video essay she was apparently obsessed with about some celebrity feud I only vaguely understood the stakes of.

"You have to watch this part," she said, thrusting the phone at me. "This is where he completely destroys her."

"I have no idea who either of these people are."

"Doesn't matter. It's still satisfying."

We sat on the porch steps together while she narrated fifteen minutes of internet drama I had no context for, and I found myself genuinely charmed by her, the specific intensity teenagers brought to things that felt enormous to them and would probably feel small in five years, and I thought, watching her animated face, that I really did like this family. That whatever nervousness I'd carried into that first dinner had been entirely unwarranted.

"Sofia, let the poor girl eat something," Nora called from near the grill, and Sofia rolled her eyes with the particular put upon expression of a teenager being managed by her mother, but got up anyway, pocketing her phone.

"Duty calls," she said. "But seriously, watch the rest later. It gets better."

I got up too, my legs a little stiff from sitting on the step, and wandered toward the food table to build myself a plate, and that was where Roger found himself standing next to me, having apparently extracted himself from Ashley at some point, reaching for tongs to serve himself from the same tray of grilled vegetables I was reaching for.

"Sorry," he said, stepping back to let me go first.

"You're fine, there's plenty."

He served himself a modest portion, quiet in the specific way I remembered from dinner, and I was aware, standing next to him, of a kind of self consciousness I couldn't fully explain, an awareness of exactly how close his shoulder was to mine, which was a strange thing to be aware of about your boyfriend's uncle at a family barbecue, and I pushed the thought away as soon as I noticed it, embarrassed by it in some vague, formless way.

"You said you wanted to finish a conversation," I said, before I could stop myself, the tongs still in my hand. "In your text."

Something flickered across his face, brief surprise, like he hadn't expected me to bring it up directly. "I did say that."

"So finish it."

He set his plate down on the table, giving me his full attention in a way that made the noise of the party around us recede slightly. "Zed says you're studying communications," he said, not quite looking at me, focused on the food in front of him.

"Yeah. Junior year."

"What do you do with that. After, I mean." It wasn't rude, the way he asked it, just direct, the kind of question that assumed you'd actually thought about the answer rather than making conversation for its own sake.

"Honestly, still figuring that out. PR, maybe. Or something in nonprofit communications. I like the idea of helping organize how people understand something complicated." I heard myself say it and felt a small flush of embarrassment, the sentence sounding more idealistic out loud than it had in my head. "That probably sounds naive."

"It doesn't." He glanced at me then, actually looked at me, and there was something steady in it, no trace of the polite distance from dinner. "Most people your age don't have an answer beyond a paycheck. That's not naive. That's just having a reason."

"What was your reason? For construction, I mean."

Something shifted in his face, not quite a smile but something adjacent to it, a loosening around his eyes. "I liked that you could see it. At the end of the day, you'd built something that wasn't there in the morning. Everything else I've done in my life felt like it evaporated the second I stopped looking at it. Buildings don't do that."

It was the most he'd said to me at once, both times I'd met him, and there was something in the specificity of it, the honesty of it, that caught me off guard, made me want to ask a dozen follow up questions I didn't have the social permission to ask a man I'd met twice.

"That's a good reason," I said instead.

"It's the only one I've got." He said it lightly, but there was something underneath it, and before I could examine what, Grant Ellison appeared at his elbow, a stocky, easygoing man I hadn't been introduced to yet, clapping Roger on the shoulder.

"There you are. Nora's asking if you're staying for the fire pit later or sneaking out early like always."

"Depends how long Gigi keeps telling the Italy story."

Grant laughed, a big, easy sound. "God, not the Italy story again." He turned to me, sticking out a hand. "Grant. I run the business with this one, or try to, he doesn't make it easy."

"Genie. Zed's girlfriend."

"Ah, the girlfriend. Heard good things." Grant's eyes flicked briefly between me and Roger, some unreadable calculation passing behind them, gone as quickly as it appeared. "Well, welcome to the circus."

The two of them drifted off toward the grill, deep in some conversation about a permit issue that meant nothing to me, and I stood there for a second longer than I needed to, my plate of food mostly forgotten in my hand, turning over the strange, small intimacy of the conversation I'd just had, buildings don't evaporate, said like it mattered, like he'd thought about it more than the offhand delivery suggested.

"There you are." Zed found me a moment later, sliding an arm around my waist, easy and familiar. "Sofia trap you again?"

"A little. She showed me a very intense video essay."

"God, I'm sorry. That girl and her internet dramas." He kissed the side of my head, and I leaned into it, grateful for the solidness of him, the uncomplicated warmth. "You having fun?"

"Yeah," I said, and meant it. "Your family's great."

We ate together on a blanket someone had spread near the fire pit as the sky started to dim toward evening, Zed's hand finding mine between bites, the string lights finally earning their keep as the light faded. Across the yard I could see Roger again, back with Ashley, who was laughing at something, her hand briefly on his arm.

Later, when the fire had burned down to something manageable and most of the older relatives had said their goodbyes, Mia showed up with her on-and-off situationship of the month, a guy named Theo who worked at the campus bookstore and had a habit of narrating things that didn't need narrating, and I abandoned my blanket to go greet her, glad for the reinforcement.

"This yard is stupidly nice," Mia said, taking in the string lights, the fire pit, the neat rows of Nora's flower beds along the fence. "I feel like I should be paying admission."

"Don't let Nora hear you say that, she'll adopt you into the family on the spot."

"Adopt me in. I could use a family with a yard like this." She linked her arm through mine, steering me a few steps away from the fire, lowering her voice to the register she used for actual gossip rather than performance. "Okay but for real. How's it going. You've been weirdly cagey about this whole meeting-the-family thing considering how well it's apparently going."

"I'm not being cagey."

"You texted me a full paragraph about the lasagna and then nothing about anything else. That's cagey."

"There's nothing else to tell. It's good. They're nice. I like them." I glanced back toward the fire pit, where Zed was laughing at something Devon had said, easy and unguarded, and felt a genuine warmth spread through my chest at the sight of him. "I really like them, Mia."

"Okay, okay, I believe you." She softened, bumping her shoulder against mine. "I'm happy for you. I mean it. You deserve the easy version for once."

"The easy version?"

"You know. Not the guys who take four days to text back and make you feel like you're auditioning for something. The guy with the mom who makes lasagna for two days and a whole yard full of people who already like you before you've even done anything to earn it." She said it lightly, but there was real affection underneath it, the specific tenderness of a best friend who'd watched you go through worse and wanted better for you. "This is the good stuff, Genie. Don't overthink it."

"I'm not overthinking it."

"You get a face when you're overthinking something. You had the face for like half a second just now."

I laughed, mostly to cover the small flicker of something I didn't want to examine too closely, and shook my head. "I promise, no face. I'm just tired. Long week."

She let it go, the way good friends know when to let things go, and we drifted back toward the fire together, toward Theo's ongoing narration of a squirrel that had gotten too close to the food table, toward Zed's outstretched hand pulling me down onto the blanket beside him.

I'd just settled against his shoulder when the side gate banged open and a woman walked into the yard like she owned it, dark hair, expensive coat, a confidence that made three separate conversations stop mid-sentence. Nora went pale near the grill. Sofia's mouth actually fell open.

Zed sat up straight beside me. "Oh, hell."

"Who is that?"

He didn't answer right away, his eyes on Roger, who had gone very still by the fence, beer forgotten in his hand, watching the woman cross the yard toward him like she'd never once considered she might not be welcome.

"That," Zed said finally, low, "is Claire. Roger's ex-wife."