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“Please,” Margo reminds her youngest.
“Peas,” my niece echoes, her face starting to turn red.
“Please, what?” Sandra says in a way that implies this isn’t the first time they’ve done this routine.
She throws her weight back and whines, “Peas, put down now.” Once she’s placed back on her feet, she runs full speed at her mom and tugs on her jeans. “Mommy, I gotta poop.”
The “Luckiest Big Sister” picks up her child around the waist and holds her like a football. “Ah, motherhood,” she laments with a chuckle and then carries her past me to the hallway bathroom.
Despite a strong urge to follow my niece’s advice of going up to my room to have some big feelings and take a nap, I put on my happy face. Rubbing my belly, I ask with exaggerated excitement, “So where’s the food?”
Sandra laughs, wiping away some of her tears. “Boys and their hollow legs.”
“Come on, son,” Steven says, gesturing for me to follow him. “I’m going to teach you how to grill.”
“I have to cook my own birthday lunch?” I complain, but it’s delivered like I’m doing a skit for the audience.
“Every man should know how to grill their own food,” states a man who looks like an older version of Steven. His tag says, “Jack (Uncle).” He gets up from the couch with a soda in his hand, wraps an arm around my shoulders, and commences to share the ins and outs of how to grill a proper steak while walking us out into the backyard.
The house is modest, but a lot of work has clearly been done to the backyard. An outdoor kitchen with a massive grill sits to one side of the concrete patio covered by a wooden pergola. The other side has a full set of patio furniture surrounding a built-in brick fire pit. Out in the grass beyond is a netted batting cage with a target/rebound trainer. A rack of bats, gloves, helmets, and a bucket full of baseballs is nearby. Now that the heartfelt opening to the celebrations are over, the music is turned back up, and everyone returns to hanging out. To the shock of no one, some of the team members beeline for the batting cage.
It’s late June, and the sky is a clear, vibrant blue. It’s a perfect day for a birthday BBQ, and part of me wonders if it was Callie or just Mother Nature who made it possible. There’s a huge spread of food laid out on a plastic table that guests already dug into before I got here. A bug repellent candle burns away, doing its part to ward off insects that would like their own nibble. A cooler full of water and soft drinks sits off to the side. Ever since the accident, no alcohol is allowed in the house, and part of the terms of releasing me from being grounded was that I wouldn’t touch the stuff until I turned twenty-one. Not a hard ask for me since the idea of drinking and partying pales in comparison to staying home and playing video games—just another thing James and I differ on.
Under the careful tutelage of Dad and Uncle, I grill the hotdogs and burgers. It’s not exactly difficult, and I realize its real purpose is to have me in a single spot for people to find me.
When the first burgers are ready, Dave and “Loves Pickles” comes over. I point to Pickles’s nametag, and ask, “What’s that all about?”
He glances down, as if he forgot what he wrote, and then laughs. “When we won our first game freshman year, Coach took us to Rocky’s. That’s a sub sandwich place.”
“Yeah, it’s on the corner of 12th and Main,” I comment, placing one of the burgers with cheese onto a bun.
“It’s so weird what you remember,” Pickles comments, which earns a hard elbow from Dave. “What? It is.”
“I’ve, uh, been there recently,” I lie, handing him the plate. “Not like there are a lot of sub shops in Twin Cedar Pass.”
“That’s true,” Pickles acknowledges, stepping over to the counter where the toppings are set up on different paper plates. “Anyway, they always put in a whole pickle with every order. You said you hated anything pickled, but you also hated wasting food. I said that I would take it, but before you would give it to me, I had to promise that I could eat all of my food too.” He starts putting toppings on his burger, skipping the raw onions. “I did, so from then on out, any time there were pickles with your food, you gave them to me.” He shrugs. “Sorry, it’s not super exciting, but it was all I could think of besides we play baseball together, which you already know.” After putting a moderate amount of pickles on his burger, he pops the other half of the bun on top and looks back at me. “Do you still hate pickles?”
“Indifferent to them now,” I answer, placing another cheeseburger on a bun.
“Oh.” He looks disappointed for a moment before shrugging again. “Well, if you decide you don’t like them after all, I’ll still take them.”
“Thanks, man,” I reply, feeling awkward and wishing I lied. Who knew pickle sharing could be so important?
When I try to hand the next cheeseburger over to Dave, he looks apologetic. “I’m lactose intolerant.”
“Crap, sorry.” I quickly grab a new plate with a new bun, only to realize all the burgers have cheese on them. “I can make you a new one.”
“It’s not a big deal,” he insists.
Pickles snorts. “As long as you don’t mind explosive farts. Remember that summer when we did that overnight training camp, and you nearly gassed us out of the cabin? If it wasn’t for James strong-arming all of the windows open, we might have died.”
Dave’s lightly tanned skin turns brilliant shades of red. “I didn’t know then.”
“That’s not how I remember it,” I counter with a quirk of my lips.
“You remember?” Pickles’s eyes grow round with shock.
I shake my head and laugh. “No. I don’t remember anything about my life, but that means, anything in the past is possible, so now, in my version of events, it never happened.”
