4/27/04

there’s barbeque sauce on my fingertips, and i’m thinking i’m too old, too much of an adult to lick it off. across the table, he sees me looking at my hands. he runs his tongue across his index finger, and smiles. his eyes say go ahead. i do.

i ask him what this makes him remember, and he tells a story about a cousin who died years ago, a barbeque every year held in his memory. i have to beg him for these details. this is grief turning into something that makes you remember what family is about, and i’m thinking about how my family can’t even come together for christmas anymore. he doesn’t ask me what it makes me remember, and i don’t tell him, but the rest of the night, the cayenne honey hints lingering in my mouth, there are these ghosts on my mind.

six years old, seven years old, eight years old. the years when things were going wrong, but we weren’t talking about it yet. my mother and her best friends would meet at the cafe, sit outside with a lemonade or a plastic cup of beer. my cousins would be there, and we’d run around the maze of sidewalks, over the bridges. the pond had ducks, and we’d search for their nests, beg the waiters for pieces of bread to feed them. there was a plate of barbeque chicken wings on the table, and piles of carrot and celery sticks. we’d run up, open our mouths for a bite, looking so much like baby birds. our mothers would feed us, their eyes still on one another, their mouths still filling with words that we didn’t want to hear.

i spent that summer in south carolina, my body remembering the heat like i’d never left. i met her. it wasn’t love, but it was a sweet girlcrush, and when we took the boat out for a week, i missed her- her eyes, her mouth, her tanned shoulders, and this shared secret. on the second night, my dad taught me how to make his barbeque chicken. i didn’t eat meat, but something in his offer of a lesson caught my heart in one of the spots always left open for him. standing beside him at the grill, smelling the smoke of the hickory chips nestled in with the coals, i knew that if i paid attention, this moment could be more important than anything else that summer- even her.

and then there’s an arizona hotel room, rain outside so we stayed in, playing scrabble and watching movies, making love every two hours, the way you can when bodies and hearts become starved for one another, when distance is suddenly gone and it’s just skin against skin . . . we ordered chicken wings. i remember licking barbeque sauce off his fingers, remember him licking it off mine. i couldn’t stop watching him, hands and face messy, looking like the most beautiful thing i’d ever seen.

these ghosts come like polaroid photographs, dark until figures and details and colors remember themselves, emerging slowly. these ghosts. my memories. these ghosts. mine.