Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley by Ann Pancake

lifting bumps on her upper arms. Each time Uncle Bobby opened the door, the humidity bulged in like a man-sized blister.
    â€œIt’s gonna pour, huh, Janie? I hope he gets those steaks done before it pours, don’t you, Janie?” She and Uncle Bobby had spent most of the day together, and the tag questions— I am here, Tell me so —were starting to get on her nerves. Janie poured herself another rum and Coke. Uncle Bobby wandered outside to “huh” Nathan awhile. Janie ripped the lettuce into a bowl.
    Through the window, she watched Nathan’s self-important fussing over the steaks. She felt the pressure of his groin against hers, and she was suddenly so angry her hands shook. She snapped the last leaf into the bowl and swallowed the second half of the rum and Coke. But it wasn’t working. Like those tequila sunrises at Ramella’s had not worked, the alcohol was plateauing. She looked at Nathan again, and again, her hands shook, her teeth clenched. But shot through that, complicating, confusing: the normalcy, the domesticity, of standing at this sink preparing food. That Nathan had invited them upstairs, invited them for a dinner he at least thought he was preparing, and he’d asked Uncle Bobby, too. For Nathan, there was nothing strange about having Uncle Bobby, too. And it dawned on her that this was the only event she or Uncle Bobby had been invited to all summer with the exception of church functions, and this flooded her with such embarrassment and desolation her fist went to her chest.
    Shrieked giggles bugled from the patio, Uncle Bobby’s high apparently escalating in inverse proportion to hers falling. Through the glass door she saw him doubled over, clenched hands pounding his shorts, his face forced purple, and she knew it was because he’d rememberedher grandmother was right across the street and might hear. Janie knew he was trying to gulp down the laughter, flatten it into pressurized shrieks. And finally they were sitting down at the dining room table, famished and agitated, Nathan not having understood how long potatoes took to bake. Janie put her napkin in her lap and surveyed the room.
    Its casual fineness made her small. The polished wood of the furniture, the paintings on the wall, the Oriental rugs under her feet, the dark gleaming bookcases evenly rowed with hardback books. Other things she didn’t even have a name for, only knew that they were expensive. All of it, Janie understood, exactly what her grandparents’ house wanted to grow up into. But almost certainly would not have time. And then Nathan at the head of the table in greasy cut-offs, bare feet, and a Johnny’s T-shirt with its collar frayed, and two months ago Janie would have marveled at how hard it was to reconcile him with his house and that would have made her want him even more. Now she understood that his subversion was deliberate. The air-conditioning churned, the storm still had not broken, and Uncle Bobby commented three or four times how lucky they were the steaks had gotten done before the rain. They’d only eaten a few bites when the phone rang. Nathan sauntered into the kitchen and lifted it from the wall.
    Janie strained to hear past Uncle Bobby—“And I told him, you should keep your dog tied up, German shepherds are mean dogs. And I was right, wasn’t I, Janie? Wasn’t I?”—but she could tell only that the exchange was muffled, sharp, and short. The clobber of receiver back on the wall. And the second she glimpsed Nathan’s face again at the table, Janie winced in the base of her throat. It had something to do with Melissa.
    Nathan pulled his plate right under his chin, wrapped one arm around it, and began spearing into his mouth bits of steak he’d alreadycut up. Every sane impulse in Janie screamed “stay quiet,” but the part of her that had asked “What time?” on the phone instead of no, she heard that part