Page 24 of Somewhere in the Sunset

“Do you need help with anything, Dad?”

“Nope. You just relax,” he says, dismissing me with a lazy wave as he heads inside the house. The fold-up table in the middle of the drive has a spread of salad bowls, burger buns,so many toppings,an ice cooler full of beer, and a pile of disposable plates and forks. Everything was already set up before I got here, so now I feel useless.

I take a swig of my cold beer and look out over the bay. It’s clear blue skies and the sunlight glistens over the water. Normally Charlotte would be here with me, but I told Dad she couldn’t make it due to work commitments. I need to tell him the truth, that we broke up and there’s no salvaging the relationship, but I’m embarrassed to admit it. He’ll be disappointed: he often dropped subtle hints to me about proposing. I disregarded the idea every single time.

Dad emerges from the front door with a tray of fresh beef patties, which are always seasoned to perfection. He’s wearing his chef’s apron now too, the one my sister got him for Thanksgiving one year, personalized to say, “Mark owns the grill.”

“I think I hear them,” he says, pausing to listen.

And I hear it too, the growing purr of a car engine approaching in the distance. The BMW SUV rolls down the street a few moments later, parking up at the foot of the driveway behind my beat-up Honda, which is overdue its oil change. I really, really need a bigger apartment and a new set of wheels. Keaton has things together way more than I do.

“Hey, hey!” Keaton says cheerfully as he steps out of the car. They couldn’t make last month’s get-together, so it’s been a while since I last saw my brother and he’s grown a god-awful mustache in that time.

“What isthat?” I point my bottle of beer at his face.

“You don’t like it?”

“You look like Dad,” I say. But Keaton has always looked more like Dad, regardless. They share the same soft, rounded features, whereas Peyton and I took after our mom and share her sharper, bold features.

“Which means he looks handsome as hell!” Dad chimes in, stroking the wisps of hair above his upper lip. He walks down the drive with open arms to hug Keaton and pat his back hard, the way only fathers do.

Keaton’s wife, Lily, hops out of the car and helps their daughter, Sophia, out of the backseat. Lily’s blouse stretches tight over her rounded stomach. Their baby boy is due to make his arrival next month, and I can’twaitto have a nephew. No offense to Sophia, but I’m clueless when it comes to roleplaying with her dolls. I still give it my best shot.

“Lily, you look great!” I say as I pull myself out of the camping chair and join them. Dad takes Sophia up into his arms and twirls her around, her childish giggles pumping serotonin into the air.

“Aw, thanks, Weston, but my feet are starting to swell and, trust me, it’s not a good look. Hence these,” she says, lifting her foot to show off her Crocs. She quickly scans the driveway and asks, “Where’s Charlotte?”

“She couldn’t make it,” I say. The lie leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I hastily turn to Dad and pluck Sophia out of his grasp, lifting her high into the air above my head. She gets bigger every time I see her, and I still remember how fragile she seemed when I first held her as a newborn three years ago. Now I toss her around like she’s unbreakable. “Hey, cutie!”

“Uncle Wes,” she says, and I glower playfully at her.

“Weston,” I correct. I fucking hate having my name shortened to Wes. It makes me sound a hundred years old.

“Weston,” Sophia repeats, and I lower her down to my chest so I can hug her.

“Can I start grilling the burgers now?” Dad asks, clasping his hands together with impatience, and we all give him the thumbs-up to get started.

I set Sophia down and Lily takes her inside the house to retrieve some toys to play with in the yard. Meanwhile Dad tosses burger patties onto the grill, and Keaton cracks open an ice-cold beer.

“It’s good to see you,” he says, tapping his beer against mine. “How’s the field training going?”

Fucking terrible,I think.I hate it. And I’m useless. And I never wanted to be a cop to begin with.

“Good,” I lie. I settle back into my chair and chug my beer to fill the silence. “Life on base still treating you well?”

Keaton drags another chair next to mine and collapses into it, but his eyes remain set on the front door of the house as Lily and Sophia reappear with a toy box. “Never better,” he says, then sighs heavily. “But I’m dreading the day I get deployed again. Things are different now. I don’t know if I can leave them.”

Keaton works in cyber within the Air Force, and he and Lily live and work on base at Beale. He hasn’t been overseas in years, not since before Sophia was born, and works a comfortable schedule. Any day, however, he could be sent out to only God knows where. There’s more to lose now, what with a wife and daughter and a son on the way.

“Yeah. Have you heard from Peyton lately?” I muse, picking at the label of my beer bottle. “I wonder how she’s doing.”

“Nah. I think she called Dad a few weeks ago, though. She’s fine, but homesick,” Keaton says, and we pause for a moment to let ourselves process our worry.

It’s inevitable, worrying about Peyton. To Keaton, she’s his little sister. To me, she’s my big sister. That makes us both protective, yet we are rendered useless when she’s stationed thousands of miles away in Kuwait. But she’s also the most badass person I know, and I have no doubt in her ability to take care of herself out there. It’s in our blood to put ourselves in physically demanding careers, after all.

I blame Dad. Before he retired, he was the deputy chief of field operations at San Francisco PD. He lived and breathed work. A great cop. Always balanced and fair, always fearless. Even got shot in the arm once when I was a little kid, and he couldn’twaitto get the go-ahead from his doctor to get back to working the beat. Although he never explicitly said it, there was a certain pressure for us kids to be just as resilient.

Keaton, being the eldest, was of course the first to prove his worth. He applied for the Air Force straight out of high school, was deployed several times to Japan, then worked his way into cyber. Peyton had to do one better. She enlisted in the army, knocked her aptitude test out of the park, and bagged herself her dream career as an explosive ordnance disposal specialist. It doesn’t get more dangerous than that, so she trumps both Keaton and me when it comes to being the toughest sibling.

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