Free If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now by Claire LaZebnik

doctor had convinced her she’d feel better if she stopped eating bread. A little difference between
     that and my son’s chronic autoimmune disease, but I wasn’t going to get into it with her.
    Melanie intervened. “Here!” she said, handing over a circular, foil-wrapped package. “I cut the top off—that’s where all the
     sesame seeds were. Ketchup’s over there.”
    “I’ll see if he’s okay with this.” The woman snatched it and walked away.
    “You’re welcome!” I called after her.
    “Shh,” Melanie said, hitting my arm. “Go help those people.” She pointed to a big family that had just come up. It took a
     while to get them all outfitted with hamburgers and hot dogs, but it gave me a chance to figure out how the system worked.
     There were several grills set up on a separate lawn about twenty feet away. For some undoubtedly sexist reason, only men seemed
     to be doing the actual grilling, but Carol Lynn Donahue was working as a runner, carrying the platters of cooked meat over
     the grass to us. It was our job to put the dogs and burgers on buns, wrap them in tin foil, and exchange them for the tickets
     people had bought at a separate booth. Six tickets for a burger, five for a hot dog.
    “I went to college for this?” I said to Melanie after twenty minutes of fairly frantic burger-wrapping and hot-dog distributing.
    She raised her eyebrows. “You only went to college for a year.”
    “Good point,” I said. “
You
went to college for this?”
    Before she could answer, there was a cry of “Mom! Mom!” and Cameron and Nicole came running up to the booth.
    Cameron was a gorgeous little boy, tall and thin like his mother, but with his father’s light brown curly hair. Right now
     he was literally jumping with excitement. “Mom, Dad’s here! With Sherri! He said he’d come say hi but Sherri had to go pee
     first.”
    “Really?” Melanie’s voice was suddenly unusually high. “Your father’s here? He didn’t tell me he was coming.”
    “We asked him to,” Cameron said.
    “You’re not mad, are you?” Nicole asked, peering up at her mother’s face. She looked a lot like her dad, with a round face
     and gorgeous huge brown eyes that didn’t miss a thing.
    “Of course not,” Melanie said with a strained smile. “It’s fine.”
    Someone came up and asked me for a hamburger. As I handed it over, I whispered to Melanie, “You want to go hide somewhere?
     I can run interference for you.”
    “Too late.” She gestured toward the field. Gabriel was striding across the grass toward us.
    “There you are!” he said as he bore down on us. “The kids told me you’d be here.”
    “Yes, I’m working here,” Melanie said a little too brightly. “It’s so nice to be able to help out.”
    He reached over the tray of hot dogs to give me a warm hug. “Rickie! I’ve missed you! How are you, darling?”
    “Good,” I said. “I’m good.” I couldn’t help smiling at him. That was the thing about Gabriel: he always seemed so genuinely
     happy to see you that it was impossible not to respond in kind.
    He turned toward Melanie. “Hi, Mel,” he said more softly. He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek—softly, but you could
     see his lips really connect with the skin there. It wasn’t an air-kiss. His eyes, so much like Nicole’s, were keen as he stepped
     back to study her face. “You okay?”
    “Never better,” she said, flushing dark red, which was moderately better than the pale greenish-white she had been a few seconds
     earlier.
    Nicole was looking back and forth between her parents anxiously, but Cameron was grinning ear to ear. “It’s nice all of us
     being here, isn’t it?” he said eagerly.
    “Very nice!” Gabriel said. He scooped up Cameron and swung him up high before clutching him against his chest. “I love the
     Autumn Festival! I’ve been dreaming about these hot dogs for days. I’m going to eat like I’ve never eaten before.”
    “You always