Dad’s Restaurant
My dad puts everything he loves into his food. I wonder sometimes if that’s why he has nothing left to put into conversations.
Carmen || Family || Restaurant || Home
Tuesday nights I worked the dinner service at Reyes. Not because Dad made me — he had never once told me I had to, had always said school was my job and the restaurant was his — but because the restaurant was where I understood him best. At home, Dad moved through rooms like he was apologizing for taking up space. At the restaurant he was entirely himself: efficient, warm, authoritative in a way that was never aggressive, directing his kitchen staff with the specific grace of someone who had built something from nothing and knew every inch of it. He came to Portland from Oaxaca at nineteen with four hundred dollars and a recipe for mole negro from his mother that he had memorized but never written down because writing it down would have meant accepting that he might someday not remember it. He was forty-three now. He had calluses on his hands and laugh lines around his eyes and he loved me in the uncomplicated, exhausted way of a parent who has done everything alone and is proud of the result but sometimes too tired to say so.
I was busing tables in the back section when Priya came in, which was not unusual because Priya came to the restaurant approximately three times a week, less for the food than for the free-refill horchata policy I had negotiated on her behalf sophomore year. She slid into a booth, waved at me, and pulled out her phone. I dropped off a water and a horchata without being asked. “You look stressed,” she said, which was Priya’s version of hello. “I’m always stressed,” I said, which was my version of you’re right. “New stressed,” she said. “Like something specific happened. Is it the debate assignment? Is it Jamie Okafor?” I looked at her. “How do you know about Jamie Okafor?” “Alex. I’m your best friend. I know everything about you, including the things you don’t tell me.” She sipped her horchata with the serene expression of someone who held all the cards and was comfortable with that arrangement. Priya Sharma and I had been best friends since freshman orientation when we ended up at the same table at the activities fair and discovered simultaneously that we were both there for debate and both wearing the same brand of noise-cancelling headphones. Our friendship had the specific quality of two people who had recognized, immediately and without ceremony, that the other was their person.
I sat across from her. Through the kitchen pass-through I could see my dad moving between the stove and the prep counter, his back to me, doing three things at once with the focused efficiency of someone who had learned long ago that the only way to keep a restaurant alive was to give it everything, every night, without reserve. “It’s fine,” I said. “Jamie is — they’re smart. Really smart.” “And?” “And nothing.” “Alex.” She looked at me over the horchata with the specific patience of someone who had been waiting for a conversation for two years and was prepared to continue waiting indefinitely, with periodic check-ins. “I’m not doing this tonight,” I said. “You’re not doing what?” “Whatever this is.” She looked at me a moment longer. Then she looked at her phone. “Fine,” she said. “Then tell me about the debate topic.” I told her about the debate topic. She listened. She ate half my tamale. She said: “Do you actually believe the resolution?” And I thought: that’s two people today who have asked me that question. And I thought: maybe the universe is trying to tell me something in capital letters. I didn’t say any of this. I went back to busing tables.
At the end of the service my dad came and sat across from me in the booth where Priya had been and drank a glass of water and looked at me with the tired, loving eyes of someone who had been on his feet for ten hours. “¿Cómo estuvo?” he said. How was it? He meant school. He always meant school. “Fine,” I said. “Good.” He nodded. We sat in the silence of a father and son who loved each other thoroughly and talked mostly about safe things. Then he said: “Your abuela called.” I went still. “What did she say?” “She’s coming,” he said, with the expression of a man who had complex feelings about this. “Next month. For three weeks.” He looked at me. “She asked specifically about you. Asked if you were — she used a word I had to look up.” He frowned, trying to remember. “She asked if you were auténtico.” Authentic. I stared at my father across the table of a restaurant that smelled like everything he loved. “What did you tell her?” I asked. He picked up his water glass. “I told her you were the most organized person I knew,” he said. “She didn’t seem satisfied with that answer.” He finished his water. He went to close the kitchen. I sat in the empty booth and thought about my grandmother calling from Mexico to ask whether her grandson was authentic, and I thought about the index card, and I thought about Jamie Okafor’s question, and I thought: something is coming, and I am not as prepared for it as I thought I was.