Taking Back the Feast

The child seat clicked into place. Lily sat with her knees pulled to her chest, her small fingers curled into the hem of her sunflower shorts, watching the driver’s side mirror.

Jenna shut the rear door and turned toward the detached garage.

Her plastic security badge from the downtown biomedical firm swung against her ribs as she walked. Inside the open concrete bay, two seventy-quart wheeled coolers sat under the fluorescent tube. Jenna pulled a roll of fifty-gallon contractor bags from the metal shelf, snapped two loose at the perforations, and shook them open with a snap of her wrists.

The thick black plastic smelled of machine oil and chemical resin.

She flipped the latches on the first cooler. Twelve vacuum-sealed packs of bone-in ribeyes lay packed in crushed ice, flanked by six trays of strip loins and twenty pounds of trimmed chicken breasts. She had signed the butcher shop slip on Friday morning: eight hundred forty dollars for the beef alone, plus another six hundred forty-six dollars and thirty-two cents at the warehouse club for charcoal, briquettes, buns, and side salads.

Jenna grabbed the beef four packs at a time and dropped them into the first bag. Freezing brine dripped onto the toe of her sneakers.

“Jenna, what on earth are you doing?”

Diane hurried across the crushed-stone driveway, her flowered tunic flapping around her knees. Both hands gripped a bunched paper napkin, wringing the bleached fibers into a gray knot.

“Pack up your lawn chair,” Jenna said, knotting the top of the first sack. “We’re leaving.”

“Robert just lit the briquettes,” Diane said, her voice rising to a thin squeak. “There are thirty people out back. What do we feed them?”

“The hostess can figure that out.”

“Brooke doesn’t have that kind of cash, and you know it.”

Jenna hoisted the forty-pound sack by its plastic neck. “She has enough to take my daughter’s plate.”

Robert came around the brick corner of the house, his steps short and stiff. The elastic webbing of his lumbar brace showed beneath the untucked hem of his polo shirt. Smoke clung to his skin, and his forehead shone with grill grease.

“Put those sacks back in the ice, Jenna,” Robert said. “Right now.”

Jenna swung the first bag over the bumper of her crossover. It landed on the rubber cargo mat with a dull, wet thud.

“I paid for every pound of this,” Jenna said.

“It’s for the family,” Robert said, stepping within two feet of the tailgate. “You don’t ruin Sunday dinner over a hamburger.”

Jenna hauled the second contractor bag out of the ice water, turned, and dumped it beside the beef. She pressed her lips flat against her teeth and locked her gaze on her father’s face, refusing to blink.

“You let her snatch food from a six-year-old,” Jenna said. “Both of you stood there.”

“She was teasing,” Diane pleaded, reaching toward Jenna’s elbow. “She was just teasing the girl.”

Jenna pulled her arm back before her mother’s fingers could make contact. She reached up and hit the black rubber button on the liftgate trim. The electric motor groaned, pulling the hatch down toward the latch.

“Jenna Marie!” Robert lunged forward, planting his hand against the descending metal. “Don’t you dare drive away from this house!”

Jenna moved past his shoulder without a word, slid into the driver’s seat, and hit the master lock. Through the windshield, Robert’s face went dark red as his fist hammered the driver’s window glass.

She put the transmission into reverse. The tires ground through the gravel, swinging the nose away from the brick ranch house and leaving Robert standing alone in the exhaust haze.

In the backseat, Lily watched her through the rearview mirror. “Mommy, are we going home?”

“We are,” Jenna said, checking her mirrors before pulling onto the asphalt. “And I’m making you a real dinner.”