Dinner at Reyes
My father’s way of saying I love you and I accept you and you are welcome here is to cook for three hours and then act like it was nothing.
Carmen || Jamie || Dinner || Family
Dad invited Jamie for dinner on the Friday after state, and the invitation was delivered with the specific gravity that Carmen Reyes gave to things he considered important. He texted me at the restaurant: Invite the debate partner. Friday, 7pm. I’m making the lamb. The lamb was the thing he made for occasions — slow-roasted, with chilies and herbs, a recipe from his mother that had taken him fifteen years to perfect. The lamb was Carmen’s way of saying that something mattered. I texted Jamie: My dad wants to have you for dinner. He’s making the lamb. You should understand that the lamb is significant. Jamie replied: The lamb sounds significant. I’ll be there. Then: Is this okay? Are you ready for this? And then, before I could answer: Forget I asked. I can see from here that you’re ready. I’ll be there at seven.
Abuela Elena was also at dinner, which made the table complete in the way that felt appropriate — all the people who knew the full true version of the story, plus my dad who was learning it, plus Jamie who was the most important part of the current chapter. Dad had spent all day at the restaurant and then come home at four and started cooking, which was how you knew it was real. He cooked the lamb with the focused attention he brought to things he cared about, and the house filled with the smell that was my entire childhood — slow-roasted and complex and warm. I set the table with the good plates. Abuela Elena made rice in the way that only she did, with a method she refused to describe because describing it would have required her to measure things she did by feel.
Jamie arrived at six-fifty-eight, which I noted. They were wearing the shirt they’d worn to the state championship, which I also noted. They brought flowers — actual flowers, not supermarket flowers, specific ones from a florist near their apartment — which they gave to Abuela Elena, who received them with the expression of someone being given a gift they had not expected and were entirely pleased by. Dad came out of the kitchen to shake Jamie’s hand with the formality he reserved for people he was taking seriously, and I watched the two of them in the handshake and thought: my dad is shaking hands with the person I love. And then I thought: love. That is the word. I just used it. Dinner was the best of the things that Carmen Reyes could produce — which was saying something, because Carmen Reyes produced extraordinary things — and the conversation was the best kind, the kind that moved between serious and funny without effort, that had room for all the people at the table to be themselves. Jamie and Dad talked about the restaurant, about cooking, about Oaxaca, about food as language and care. Abuela Elena told a story about the market where she had worked as a young woman that was both funny and somehow relevant to the conversation, as Abuela Elena’s stories always were. I sat at my own kitchen table with the people I loved most and felt, fully, the specific warmth of a life that was being lived rather than managed. After dinner, when Abuela Elena had retired and Dad was washing up with the particular rhythm of a man ending a day that had gone well, Jamie and I sat on the back porch in the February cold, close enough that the warmth was shared. “I like your family,” Jamie said. “They like you,” I said. “Your dad was watching us all through dinner,” Jamie said. “Checking that I was — I don’t know. Worthy of the lamb, maybe.” I smiled. “Were you nervous?” “A little,” they said. “In a good way.” “A good way?” “The nervous that comes from caring,” they said. “Yes,” I said. We sat in the February cold. The city made its usual sounds. “Hey,” Jamie said. “Yes,” I said. They turned toward me. “Can I—” “Yes,” I said. They kissed me. Not dramatically — gently, and then completely. On the back porch of my father’s house in the February cold, with the smell of lamb still in the air and the city going about its Saturday business and the whole year behind us and everything ahead. I thought: this is the answer to every question that’s been asked since September. We sat for a long time after that, not talking, not needing to, in the specific silence of two people who have arrived somewhere they were always going to arrive. The city hummed. The stars were out — a Portland February rarity. I thought about the index cards. I thought about the river. I thought: I am exactly where I am supposed to be, being exactly who I am, with exactly the right person beside me. That was the whole thing. That was everything.