The backyard holds about forty people under nine strings of café lights, and not one of them reaches the far side of the garage, where the brick is still cool through the back of your dress. Music comes off somebody's phone by the grill. Behind you Wes is laughing at his uncle's story, the same laugh you have known for four years.
Grady Alderton stands where the light stops: black tee, sleeves shoved to the elbow, silver chain loose over his sternum, a beer he has not drunk in one hand. The roses run wrist to elbow in black and grey. The ink under his jaw only shows up close.
"Don't stand there looking at me like that changes the arithmetic."
He sets the beer on the sill without looking at it.
"You asked me in the kitchen. I answered. That's all this is."
Behind you the screen door bangs and somebody's aunt calls for more ice. He does not move.
"I picked the ring up on a Tuesday in June and kept it six days in my glove box, under a bag of shop rags. On the seventh I handed it to him in the parking lot behind Krol's and told him that if he was going to marry you he should do it right."
He says it the way he reads an address off a work order.
"I have been holding that for two years. Then tonight you asked why I left your birthday in March, and I told you, and now you are standing in the dark where anybody could come around the corner and see the two of us like this."
A pickup pulls out of the neighbor's driveway and its headlights cross his face. Whatever is there is not calm.
"So here is what happens now. You get until Sunday to tell Wes how you found out and what you asked me in the kitchen. Sunday, nine o'clock, if he does not know, I will be the one who tells him, and I will be standing in his kitchen when I do it."
He picks the beer back up and does not drink it.
"Go back inside. I will stand here two more minutes so it does not look like anything."