“Let ’em,” Benny said. “My old man’s been dead ten years. I’m tired of being a ghost in my own town.”
Around four, old man Hargrove appeared at the top of the quarry path. He was eighty-two, white as chalk, and had a shotgun broken over his arm. He stared down at the scene: fifty people, every shade from coffee to cream, oiled up and splashing, sharing beers, passing a joint, slow-dancing to a bootleg R&B mix on Marcus’s speakers.
By two o’clock, the sun was a hammer. The water was still cold, so nobody stayed in long. Instead, they lay on towels and inflatable rafts, slicking themselves with oil until they gleamed like wet seals. Lee’s brown skin turned to polished mahogany. Benny’s olive shoulders caught the light like hammered copper. Tisha oiled Gina’s back, and Paulie oiled Darnell’s, and nobody flinched. The Pit, which had held nothing but silence and bad memories for thirty years, began to fill with laughter.
For a long moment, nobody breathed. Then Hargrove looked down at the party again. At Marcus teaching Gina’s husband the electric slide. At Darnell grilling hot links next to Paulie. At the water, which for the first time in anyone’s memory, looked less like a grave and more like a mirror.
So they planned it for the solstice. The hottest day of the year. Lee brought her cousins from Detroit—Darnell and his wife Tisha, plus their cousin Marcus, who DJ’d on the side. Benny brought his sister Gina and her husband Paulie, plus a dozen guys from the shop: Vietnamese, Mexican, Irish, all grease-stained and grinning. Someone hauled a grill. Someone else brought a cooler full of Negro Modelo and cheap rosé.
“Yes, sir.”
Lee smiled. “We saved you a cup.”
“They’ll talk,” she said one night, dangling her feet over the quarry’s edge. The water below was black as coffee, deep and cold.
“Your father would roll over.”
Hargrove grunted. His eyes moved to Lee, who had climbed up behind Benny. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t cover up. She just stood there, oiled and beautiful, and said, “You want a beer, Mr. Hargrove? It’s hot as hell.”
Lee had inherited her grandmother’s house on the ridge overlooking The Pit. Benny ran the auto shop on the main drag. They’d met when she brought in a rusted-out ‘72 Cutlass, and he’d spent three hours lying under it, not because the transmission needed fixing, but because he couldn’t stop watching the way she chewed her thumbnail while reading the estimate.
He took the shotgun off his arm. Leaned it against a tree.
Benny saw him first. He stood up, naked-chested and dripping with coconut oil, and walked to the ladder. “Mr. Hargrove.”
The invitation said nothing more than “The Pit. Summers. Oil it up.”
