Three months later
Monday, February 16, 2009
San Diego, California
5:46 p.m.
I stared at the array of silverware surrounding my plate. “I can never remember which fork to use for the salad.”
My stepdaughter Tessa pointed. “The outside one, Patrick. You start there and work your way in.”
“You sure?”
She picked up my forks one at a time, a family of leather bracelets riding up and down her wrist, over the four rubber bands she wore beneath them. “Salad, main dish, then dessert.”
As she set down my dessert fork, I realized how much we both stuck out at this restaurant. Everyone else wore a dinner jacket or an evening gown; we both had on Tshirts-mine, a faded athletic shirt from Marquette University, hers, a black, long-sleeve DeathNail 13 tee with the band’s logo of an eyeball with a nail stuck through it.
Beside the picture she wore a small pin: Save Darfur. Now.
Tessa had chosen light pink lipstick tonight, but black fingernail polish and black eye shadow to match her raven-black hair. I hadn’t been too thrilled about the eyebrow ring and pierced nose she’d gotten last month without my permission, but I had to admit they were cute. And with her three-quarter-length black tights under a crinkly fabric skirt, she looked slightly Goth, a little edgy and dark, yet still girlish and innocent at seventeen.
“So, how do you know so much about table settings?” I asked.
“I worked at La Saritas, remember? Before Mom died.”
Her comment blindsided me, took me back to Christie’s funeral. I glanced out the window. The wind had been kicking up all afternoon, and now, just after dusk, the ocean looked ragged and gray. The remaining sunlight drained slowly into the sea as a few gulls meandered beneath the clouds, occasionally diving to retrieve a fish that had wandered too close to the water’s rough, leathery surface. “Yeah, sorry,” I said. “I guess I forgot. How long did you work there again?”
“Two days. The manager said I didn’t have a ‘team-oriented attitude.’” She took a sip of her ice water. “Jerk.”
I’d chosen a table in the back of the restaurant, my back to the wall. Force of habit. For a moment I watched the servers maneuver through the maze of tables, observing the routes they took, the choices they made. Habit again.
A few minutes earlier, the girl who’d seated us had placed a platter of crusty bread in front of me. She’d set a bowl of some kind of oil next to it, and the people at the tables all around us were dipping their bread into the sour-yellow lubricant and then eating it. I decided to pass.
Our server, a slim-boned man with a beak for a nose, arrived to take our order. “Sir,” he said. Then he faced Tessa. “Mademoiselle.
Would you like to hear the specials? Tonight we are offering a lovely pork tenderloin finished off with a mango and pineapple reduction-”
Tessa gave him an iron stare. “Do you have any idea what kind of conditions those pigs are forced to live in before being shipped to the slaughterhouses? Wire cages. Tiny wire cages-”
“Tessa,” I said.
“Where they’re force-fed, drugged with growth hormones until they’re too fat to stand-”
“Tessa Bernice Ellis.”
“I’m just saying-”
I gave her my best, be-quiet-right-now-or-we’re-going-to-Burger-King look. Our eyes wrestled for a moment, and at last she gave in. “OK, OK. I want a house salad.” She pointed to the menu. “And no apple-wood smoked bacon.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He turned to me, tilted his head, offered a fabricated smile. He might have been a robot. “And you, sir?”
I noticed Tessa glaring at me. “I guess I’ll have a salad too,” I said. “But I’m hungry though. Make it a double.”
“A double, sir? I’m afraid our dinner salad only comes in one size, but I assure you it’s a most generous portion.”
I’d seen some of those “generous portions” when Tessa and I had walked to our booth. “Well, I’ll take two of those, then. Just dump them into one great big bowl. That’ll work.”
He scribbled something on his notepad, although I didn’t think our order had been all that complex. Tessa cleared her throat.
“Patrick, seriously, you can order the pork tenderloin if you want, and I promise I won’t say anything about how the pigs are crammed into feces-ridden crates where they can’t even turn around, taken to a slaughterhouse where they’re hit with a stun gun that leaves them alive and squealing and bleeding to death while they’re dropped alive into the scalding water that’s supposed to remove their hair and soften up the meat so that restaurants like this can glaze them with mangos and serve them to their patrons. I promise not to say a word.”
The woman at the table beside us slowly lowered her main-dish fork to the table.
“How thoughtful of you, Tessa,” I said. Slaughterhouses. Great.
Just the thing I need to be thinking about right now.
I noticed that our server’s face had turned pasty white. “Just bring me those two salads in one big bowl and a cup of coffee-wait. What kind of coffee do you have?”
He tried to compose himself. “We serve a variety of fine espressos and cappuccinos as well as both regular and decaffeinated-”
“No, no, no. I mean like a Ruiru 11 blend from Kenya, or Costa Rican La Magnolia, or something from the Cerrado region of Brazil.
What kind of coffee? What country is it from?”
“I believe we buy it here in America-”
Oh boy. “When you get the coffee from the store, does it come in a great big metal can?”
He beamed. “Absolutely.”
That was all I needed to hear. “Tea. A cup of tea.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I glanced at the bowl of oil. “And some butter too.”
“Tea…” He mouthed the words as he wrote them on his pad.
“And butter.” Then he turned hesitantly toward Tessa. “And your drink, ma’am?”
“Root beer. And don’t put any cheese in my salad, anything like that.”
He gave her a small nod.
“Or ranch dressing. Ranch is disgusting.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Or eggs.”
One more brisk nod, and then he disappeared.
“Well,” I said. “Nothing like visiting a fancy restaurant. We should do this more often.”
“Yup,” she said, dipping a piece of bread into the oil and holding it up to the light. Globs of vomit-colored oil plopped onto her plate. “Nothing like it.”
I tried to relax and just enjoy the next few minutes. Tried to engage in a coherent conversation, tried to listen to her talk about a club she’d heard about that she wanted to visit but that I would never let her go to anyway, tried to think of clever things to say about the birdlike Tried to, but couldn’t. The image of a slaughterhouse had landed in my mind and refused to leave.
I could hear squealing coming from the inside. Sharp desperate cries. But neither this slaughterhouse nor the squealing had anything to do with pigs.