Ethan and I sat at a cozy two-person table, with a vase of fresh lilies sitting on top of the pristine white tablecloth and elegant silverware nestled inside burgundy cloth napkins. The shiny silver utensils looked as if they were tucked into a tiny bed together.
When he chose this classy Italian restaurant for dinner, my stomach had started doing nervous somersaults. We had been here a few times as a family, and I couldn’t afford it.
My budget shed tears as I looked at the prices, and no matter how many times I scanned the menu, they didn’t change. My abilities to manipulate reality, to make things less expensive, were nonexistent. But since this was his birthday dinner, I didn’t dare tell him that eating here would drain my pitiful bank account.
“What are you going to order, mom?” He asked me as he scanned his own menu thoughtfully.
“I’m ordering the spaghetti,” I said with decisiveness.
“That’s a little basic, isn’t it?”
Yes, it was, but it was also the cheapest entree the menu had.
“Basic things can also be delicious. Besides,” I said as I closed the elegant book of a menu, “their tomato sauce here is divine. I need to figure out how to replicate it. What are you going to order?”
“I am going to get the carbonara, I think.”
I crinkled my nose in disapproval, “Ethan, you know that whenever you order carbonara you are always disappointed. Are you sure that’s what you want to get?”
He sighed, knowing my statement was correct, “I know, I know. I always complain that your carbonara is better and end up regretting the choice, but—”
I lifted my eyebrows and nodded my head, to encourage him to continue.
“—But Jessie’s favorite meal is carbonara and I had thought about maybe bringing her here on a date.”
Stop. It. Right. Now.
My heart.
“This is a pretty fancy place for a date,” I said, a grin like the grinch plastered across my face.
“Well, prom is coming up. I want to ask Jessie to go with me.”
My son was ordering a birthday meal that he knew he would be disappointed with, so that he could research if it was good enough for the girl he liked.
“Maybe you should make her carbonara instead,” I said, reaching for my water to take a sip, “I could teach you how to make mine.”
He smiled nervously, “I don’t know. She loves it so much because her dad makes it incredibly well.”
I choked on my water.
“Mom?” Ethan said with concern, putting his menu down to reach for me.
“I’m fine,” I said, coughing my lungs free of their surprise water shower.
Why do the men in my life always say stuff that catches me off guard when I’m taking a drink?
“Well,” collecting myself from my coughing fit and sitting tall, “I think my carbonara would kick his carbonaras ass. Maybe that’s how you can win him over.”
“Win him over by outclassing him with his daughter’s favorite meal?” Ethan said, giving me a skeptical eyebrow. “Why does that seem like it will backfire?”
“Maybe it won’t win him over, but maybe it will win her over.”
That dopey grin re-appeared on his face, “You think you can teach me to make carbonara as good as his? You think it will impress Jessie?”
I confidently nodded my head and smiled knowingly.
Jessie would love Ethan’s carbonara because it would be exactly the same as Joseph’s. Since I was the one who taught him how to cook it.
On a fortuitous weekend that summer, when all my roommates were gone, Joseph came over and I showed him how to make it. He learned things from me in the kitchen, and then I learned things from him in the bedroom. We had waited a long time for the opportunity of a full night of privacy.
I shook my head to keep my mind from wandering as the waiter came to take our order. I did not want to let myself lapse into inappropriate fantasies about a man with a family at home he loved.
“I’ll have the spaghetti, please,” I said, handing my menu to the suited-up server.
“I’ll have the lasagna, please,” Ethan said, a silent confirmation that we were going to have a cooking lesson in our future.
“Wine, miss?” the server queried.
“Yeah, mom,” Ethan interjected, “I’m driving so you can get a whole bottle if you want.”
My smile was frozen, trying to calculate how odd Ethan would find it to turn down his suggestion. Once Nyx was old enough to drive, and eager to do it, Robert and I got in the habit of having a drink with dinner every time we went out with the boys.
“With your dinner, I would recommend this Pinot Noir,” the server said, pointing it out on the menu.
It was twenty dollars a glass. Almost the price of my entrée.
“Would it be possible to have a sample taste before ordering?” I asked. I could try it and decline it, then it would hopefully seem less suspicious to Ethan.
“Absolutely,” he said, and took the menus and disappeared from the table.
After Robert’s first big promotion, I never had to take the cost of things into consideration. We just bought what we wanted, and it was always fine. I had underestimated the amount of stress that every little transaction would cause as I attempted to navigate my life without his money. The worry had me chewing on my lower lip.
“What’s wrong, mom?” Ethan said, apparently noticing my anxious demeanor.
“Oh, nothing,” I shifted into a tone of mock casualness, “just wondering how long my son has been simping for this girl I had no idea existed.”
“It hasn’t been long, it was—wait, did you just call me a simp? You don’t even know what that means!”
I laughed at his delayed reaction, and he glared at me.
“Nyx said the same thing,” he grumbled as he crossed his arms.
“You told your brother and didn’t tell me?” My offense was genuine now.
“I didn’t tell Nyx,” he said quickly. “He just noticed, the way he does, you know? He called me out about it, and I had to tell him.”
Ethan was my school smart, obviously athletic son. Nyx was my street smart, surprisingly athletic son. Nyx brooded and watched the world, and he noticed things. I was slightly grateful he was away at school while I was developing new secrets in my life. The distance would help me fly under the radar until I got back on my feet.
“Well,” I coerced Ethan, “tell me about her. When did this all start?”
He unfolded his arms, the moment of defensiveness gone, and started to play with the cloth napkin on the table as he spoke.
“It started the day after Valentine’s, when dad brought the divorce papers home and put the house up for sale.”
Wow, that was not where I expected this to begin.
The timeline fit his level of infatuation since Valentine’s Day was six weeks ago. I put my elbow on the table and placed my chin on my palm, waiting for him to continue.
“We had a debate club meeting that Saturday—she’s in debate with me, oh and we have French and calculus together—anyway,” he took a moment to collect himself after the tangential information came out, “I was there early because I didn’t want to be at home, and she saw me sitting alone. She came over and asked if I got dumped on Valentine’s Day because I looked sad, which was unlike me.”
Oh, dear. What an entrance.
“I think maybe because it was so fresh, or because she was the first person to ask me if I was okay, or maybe because I wished it was just a silly high school romance break up, but I—” he sighed and his face flushed, “I started to cry.”
Dear lord. I was going to cry.
My poor baby boy, seeking refuge from his home problems by hiding at school, only to break down in front of his classmate made my heart ache. I wanted to reach across the table and wrap him in a hug.
“Anyway,” he continued with a slight smile, “she was shocked at my response and immediately gave me a hug. She asked what happened. So, I told her that I found out my parents were getting divorced and that I had to move. She was mortified about her question, and I, in turn, reassured her that she didn’t need to be embarrassed.”
He stopped talking and looked up at me, his blue eyes had a bit of a twinkle to them.
“She told me that she would be sad if I had to change schools. That she would miss me if I left.”
“Did you know her before this?” I asked in confusion. I had never heard him mention her and had never seen her with Ethan’s friends.
“Sort of,” he said, “we had so many overlapping classes that we knew each other. But we had only talked in groups, never one-on-one.”
I smiled at his story. It was tragically cute. A pair of young kids coexisting together, then the pretty girl approaches the cute boy for a solo conversation for the first time and he cries.
“After that, we started talking a lot. She’s the only person that would ask me about the divorce or how I was handling it. I guess I didn’t really want other people to ask me about it, but she was different. It’s easy talking to her, even about hard things.”
My throat constricted a bit, a slight panic building in my heart. I wanted to tell him to be careful, that having someone you love to talk to is beautiful—until they disappear and then you can never find that connection ever again. My gut reaction was to protect him from the despair I felt when I lost that person. The person who happened to be the father of the girl he was pining over.
But I stopped myself.
Jessica, or Jessie as he called her, was not Joseph. My bias from my own pain should not stop Ethan from seeking something that brings him joy in his life.
No matter how much it scares me.
The waiter came by with our food and I was surprised by the massive size of Ethan’s lasagna. The portion was bigger than my face. Despite its gargantuan size, he ate it in five bites.
Boys are bottomless.
After wiping his face with the cloth napkin, he announced that he was heading to the restroom. I chuckled, knowing I could be alone at the table for a long time.
Boys.
I brought my phone out and began to casually check notifications as I chewed on my delicious pasta. My email had various junk items to clear out, and I almost deleted a weekly summary from OnlyStans.
I had loaded three purchase options onto the account earlier this week but had not logged back in. The move had taken up all of my attention and I had nearly forgotten about it.
OnlyStans Weekly Summary:
CONGRATULATIONS! YOUR ACCOUNT IS TRENDING!
Sitewide Rank: 98
Messages: 2 unread client requests
Activity: 43 new purchases
While Ethan was still in the bathroom, I proceeded to log into the account,
curious as to what the revenue was. The three packages I loaded had vastly
different prices.
The first package was a $5.00 sample sheet of the cabinet project. The second was a $100.00 monthly package which had seventy-five images in it. The third was a $500.00 package that covered all six months of project releases. Even if all forty-three purchases were the smallest package, that was still over two hundred bucks.
My eyes went wide as I saw the balance.
Total Revenue: $6,800
Holy shit.
I had hoped to earn a little money, but this was enough to get the guest house started. Joyful butterflies bloomed in my stomach. I could do this. I was doing this.
Ethan returned from the bathroom, and I nervously shoved my phone back into my purse. The waiter came to take his empty plate and check on us.
“Anything else I can do for you?”
“Actually,” I said with a smile, “I think I changed my mind. Can I get that glass of wine after all?”
As my son had reminded me earlier this evening, celebrating small victories was important.
And now I could afford a glass of wine to do so.
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