ATE like sloths. At every meal, each bite was carefully cut, poked, chewed, swallowed. Pauses were taken for sips of water or wine, and there was far too much conversation. In contrast, Sam and I shoveled our food in our faces, and then sat, waiting—staring while Luther and Nana nattered on, oblivious to our brain-melting boredom. Meals—particularly lunch—were becoming a drag, and neither Sam nor I had any patience for sitting for two hours in the middle of the day.
Plus, afterward, Nana always ordered coffee, but then had to sit and wait for it to cool to room temperature before she could drink it. At lunch, just twenty-four hours after we had sex—it was all I could think about—I looked at Sam, who, as soon as Nana lifted her hand to get the waiter’s attention to order coffee, was already looking at me with Get me the hell out of here written all over his face.
Finally, I broke: “Nana, can we go outside and walk around?”
She gave her order, and then looked over at me, concerned. “ ‘Walk around’?”
“I mean,” I amended, “just sit outside and people-watch?” I winced apologetically. “It’s hot in here, and I am super bored.”
This was enough teenage attitude to earn a lecture later, but if she let us out into the fresh air, it would have been worth it. With a tiny flick of her wrist, we were dismissed.
We didn’t wait for confirmation: both Sam and I were up and bolting from the dark, subdued restaurant before either she or Luther could change their minds.
There was a bocce court in the back garden of the restaurant, and a few small tables with chessboards. The bocce court was occupied, but Sam pointed to a chess table and I followed him over, hoping my rusty skills would return quickly.
I sat in front of the white pieces; he sat in front of the black, looming over the table. With a tiny tilt of his chin, Sam smiled over at me. “You start.”
I moved my king’s pawn two spaces and opened my mouth to speak, but stopped when I heard Luther’s voice just on the other side of the window. All of that internal flailing over our boredom, and we’d only managed to move three feet away.
Sam laughed quietly, shoulders pulled up to his ears, and he was so adorable I wanted to stretch across the table and put my mouth on his. The day before was still a fresh, singing echo in my thoughts and all over my skin.
I think he could see the memory in my eyes, too, because his attention dropped to my lips and he rumbled a quiet, “We could go make out in the bushes.”
My reply that making out would be way more fun than chess but also way more punishable by grandmother-inflicted death was cut off when Nana’s voice filtered out to us: “No, actually. My husband died when I was thirty-five.”
Across from me, Sam’s flirty smile seemed to dissolve.
“On the one hand,” Nana said, “I had a six-year-old daughter to raise alone. But on the other hand, I was no longer being yelled at for not keeping the house clean enough.” I heard her pause and imagined her lifting her cup, inhaling the coffee before deciding it was still too warm and putting it down again. “I have the restaurant, and it makes enough to support us. So, no, I never wanted to marry again.”
My chest pinched in, and every thought seemed to slow in my head. Nana never liked to talk about anything longer ago than the previous weekend. Said it did us no good to live in the past. I always knew Mom was raised without her father, same as me, but it didn’t seem to sink in until that moment that Nana didn’t seem bothered by it in the slightest.
“That’s how my Roberta was,” Luther told her. “Didn’t want to marry again. Even with a young son, she was stubborn as all get out to do it all on her own. I put on the hard sell. Told her nobody was telling her she needed a man, but if she wanted one, I was throwing my hat in the ring.”
I looked across the table at Sam and could tell he was listening just as intently as I was, and it made me wonder how much he could know about their past. I imagined Luther was in his late sixties; if he and Roberta met years before Sam was born,