On the drive home, Tyler asked if he could spend the summer in Tucson. Daniel had found him a job as an aide in a STEM camp for middle schoolers, and Rosa had a spare room, and he wanted, he said, to really know them, not just in weekends.
Eric drove for a long time without answering. In the rearview mirror he could see Melissa watching him, and Lily asleep against Carol's shoulder.
"Yeah," he said finally. "I think that's a good idea."
It was the hardest yes of his life. He said it anyway. And that summer, the first summer in seventeen years that his son did not live under his roof, Eric replaced the F-150's radiator properly, with the right brackets, and drove down to Tucson every other Sunday to have lunch, and called on Wednesdays, and did not call too much, and once, in July, sat in the bleachers of a sweltering gym watching Tyler teach a dozen eleven-year-olds to build solar ovens out of pizza boxes, and had to go out to the parking lot for a while.
* * *
A year after the first barbecue, almost to the day, the Dawson backyard was full again.
The heat was the same. The mountains were the same, the pool throwing back the same orange of the sky, the same folding tables with their plastic cloths, Dana's seven-layer dip that nobody admitted to liking. Carol sat in the cushioned chair with her feet in her tub of ice water, telling the story about the clothes iron and the curtains to a new neighbor. Mark argued with someone about the Cardinals. Lily, ten now, and tall for it, was teaching Mark's twins to do underwater handstands, and her legs, she insisted, were completely straight.