Every year my grandpa buys half of a cow from his friend Kevin Dougas. It comes in hundreds of packages and spends the year in the freezer in the garage. A half cow is a lot of ground beef. When my siblings and cousins come to visit and swim in the lake, the lunchtime routine:
“Chee-burger, chee-burger, Pepsi no Coke!” My grandpa, still reciting Saturday Night Live from 1978. “Who wants burgers, who wants dogs? How many? How many dogs?”
No matter who raises their hands, he always miscounts. Because he doesn’t buy burgers from the grocery store like my parents, he forms the patties by hand. Each one is the size of a meatball at an expensive Italian restaurant.
Because the patties are the size and shape of grapefruits when they hit the grill, the middle is always raw. “Grandpa, there’s too much blood,” my sister says, red liquid pooling on her plate after the first bite.
“It’s not blood, it’s juice!” he shouts. Even after I muscled through 2 of the bloody burgers, there’s a whole platter of them left, like a rack of brown billiard balls. Grandpa keeps encouraging us to eat more, oblivious to the fact that he cooked at least double the number of cheeseburgers requested.
“I guess we’re not having cheeseburgers ever again,” Nana says. She’s been drinking vodka from a tall glass all morning.