Chapter 22.
22.
Outback Steakhouse (restaurant name)
a popular casual dining restaurant chain known for its Australian-themed atmosphere and Bloomin’ Onion appetizer
restaurant of choice for the California State court system
W e cross the parking lot to our next destination at twilight. As we step in, I’m pleased to note that Outback Steakhouse sounds like sizzle and smells like butter. It’s almost embarrassingly exciting to continue our outing with a meal that may include more flavor than too much salt and stale pepper. As a kid we ate out a lot, but mostly fast food or take-out pizza—an emphasis on quick, easy, and cheap. In response, I taught myself to cook a rotation of basic meals early on.
Cam bumps my elbow and points to the TVs hitched to the bar ceiling. There are four in total facing our direction, all set to various ESPN channels. The thrill is short-lived, though, as the hostess leads us to a private back room where four tables of four are set up, no TVs. There’s a spark of disappointment that we don’t get to sit out with the masses where I can take in new faces. I rebound quickly, though, the high of this day out still rippling through me.
Almost robotically, Tamra, Cam, Damon, and I take over the table in the room’s far corner. Damon sits beside me as he always does. Cam is to my right, and Tamra takes the seat across the table.
“I’m ordering a big-ass steak,” Cam declares, tossing his menu to the center of the table.
“What are you getting?” Damon asks, perusing his menu.
“Not sure,” I say, attempting to stave off the feeling inside me that is declaring to my gut that this is a date. It’s not, of course. It couldn’t be further from a date. But my gut isn’t listening, as it fires flares of excitement.
“What’s the most opposite thing from a turkey sandwich?” he asks, then flexes his jaw.
I evaluate the options. “A big-ass steak?”
Damon sets down his menu. “Yep. That’s what I want.”
“Actually, same,” I say, placing my menu neatly atop his.
After our orders are taken and drinks arrive (there was an eruptive cheer when George announced we could order more alcoholic beverages), Cam and Tamra dive into a discussion of their respective zodiac signs. I take a sip of my cabernet and shimmy my shoulders up and down in delight.
“Did you just do a happy dance?” Damon asks. He leans in, cupping the top of his pint glass. I imagine the inevitably bitter taste of his mouth after he sips that beer.
Heat spreads in all directions from my gut. “I did.”
“I like it,” he says, chin dimple twitching.
He’s known me to do food happy dances since I was a kid. He used to join in occasionally, usually on pizza nights and with a hysterically bad robot.
“Do you remember that ugly hamster statue thing we used to hide back and forth?” I ask. It’s nice to reminisce about the joyful points of our history, rather than what ended our friendship. I feel foolish now for having blocked all the good out for so long. Our years of good should not be erased because of a disappointing end, I decide.
He bites at the inside of his cheek. “Yeah.”
“I can’t remember who hid it last.”
He leans back in his chair. “It was you. You put it in my underwear drawer.”
I snort, nearly choking on my sip of wine.
“I almost broke my ankle after seeing that thing staring at me when I pulled out the drawer.”
I press my hand to my chest as I shake with laughter. “I wish I could have seen that,” I say, wiping a tear from the outer corner of my eye. He watches me closely as my laughter calms. I observe Damon’s attentiveness, his fingers still curled around his glass. He’s always done this, watched me laugh rather than participate himself.
At fourteen, Damon and I found a hamster statue on a table of ceramic knickknacks marked for fifty cents each at a neighbor’s estate sale. Though I still don’t particularly know the difference between an estate sale and a standard garage sale, this event was most certainly the latter, with tables full of folded holiday sweaters and washed-thin tees, scraped-up toys and tattered paperbacks. Damon picked up the statue and tapped me on the shoulder with it, and when I turned to find it staring at me, I screamed—an embarrassingly loud reaction that caused Damon to bend forward, hands on his knees, laughing. He bought the hamster (gave the woman manning the till a dollar and told her to keep the change), then proceeded to torture me with it for the next two years. We often debated whether it was a hamster, gerbil, or guinea pig and the minimal differences between the three. Ultimately, we settled on hamster, though we couldn’t be sure. It became a thing between us, hiding the hamster/gerbil/guinea pig where the other would unsuspectingly find it.
He leans forward. “D’you remember—”
“The bucket,” we say in unison.
“I think I actually peed my pants on that one,” I confess. It’s vividly still in my mind, Damon texting me to come outside. When I opened the front door, I was met with the orange ceramic hamster statue—one leg broken off from when it fell from Damon’s back fence (my placement)—swinging from a turned bucket above the doorframe, string tied to it so it fell to dangle in front of me, face-to-face.
Damon rolled in the grass, cackling until his stomach ached.
In this moment, this memory, we are our younger selves again. Hopeful and staunchly resilient. Mercifully unaware.
My laughter calms, and we both go quiet.
“I still have it,” he says.
I lean in. “You still have Prince Hamsterdinck?”
“I had forgotten his name,” he admits.
“How could you forget? Kara named him,” I say. We got her hooked on The Princess Bride early, always fast-forwarding through the gory fight scene at the end.
He crosses his arms and runs a hand down the side of his face. “That’s right,” he says thoughtfully.
Cam and Tamra across the table burst into laughter and it draws our attention. It reminds me where we are. That, should someone overhear our exchange, they’d learn that our history runs far deeper than we’ve let on.
“Did you ever want to do something besides being a mediator?” he asks, as if he can sense the anxiety brewing within me and needs to defuse it.
I try to think of my childhood dreams, what I might have shared with him when we were younger. I lean forward. “Well, no young adult says, I want to be a mediator when I grow up ,” I say.
“Same for transportation engineer,” he muses.
“Right?”
He flexes his jaw, seemingly deciding whether to voice a thought his tongue is wrestling with.
“Did you? Have something you wanted to be?” I recall him having an ever-changing list when we were young, everything from firefighter to veterinarian to professional motocross racer.
He rubs at his jaw. “For a while I thought I might teach. History.”
I think of a teenage Damon sprawled on my living room floor, reading nonfiction—comparative studies on the pyramids in Egypt or logistics and supply chain strategies from World War I—wondering how he could find these types of books enjoyable. Then I picture him in front of a classroom, dress shirt rolled to his elbows, wide stance, slapping a yardstick against his open palm. I shift in my seat.
“Why didn’t you go that route?” I ask.
“After Kara, it just didn’t seem to fit anymore.”
I’m immediately hit with a pang of embarrassment for turning his onetime dream into the start of a sexual fantasy.
“I thought I’d travel, maybe end up living in another country.”
“Why didn’t you?” I ask, but intuitively, I know. He couldn’t leave his parents. I don’t make him say it. Instead, I ask, “Do you ever think about blowing it all up and starting over? About starting a teaching career?”
He shakes his head, once. “No. I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
“I am, too,” I say, reflecting on my life, my career in particular, in these terms for perhaps the first time. “It’s disheartening at times, seeing people reach a point of so much hurt they can’t imagine arriving at any common ground. But helping them find it, proving that you can come back from a seemingly unsalvageable situation, there’s a high I feel each time.”
“You make it sound like a divorce proceeding.”
“It’s similar, I suppose. People who feel slighted. Real, fractured human emotions. People blinded by hurt.” There was no saving my parents’ marriage. I thought there was no saving Damon and me. But seeing relationships mended, in part with my help, gives me hope.
Both of us have shifted our chairs to face each other, and just like in the courtroom, when our knees bump, I don’t particularly mind. “Why haven’t you had a serious relationship?” he asks.
I sip my wine for some time. “I just haven’t met anyone that... fits.” I think back to Dominic, the guy I met two years ago in line at the CVS pharmacy as we both awaited antibiotics for similar bouts of strep throat. We expressed our disdain for the woman in front of us who was demanding the pharmacist fill her prescription immediately despite the line. Grumpy and throats inflamed, we bonded over our deep disapproval of people in public, generally.
Dominic and I messaged over the course of the next three days, comparing symptoms and TV binging choices. On the fourth day, we met at a mom-and-pop coffee shop equidistant from our respective apartments and ordered an array of all the carb-heavy items on the menu.
“Food is amazing,” he said, eyes as glazed as the doughnut before him after four days of limited intake.
“Carbs good,” I grunted through a bite of chocolate croissant.
We saw each other two to three times a week for nearly six months after that, though neither of us sought to define the relationship. For me, it was because I wanted to match his aloofness. For him, I found out later, it was because he had several casual relationships he’d been juggling at once, a few of which had even been double-booked with me on the same days, I came to learn.
Dominic was the closest thing I’ve had to a relationship. I don’t even know that I particularly liked him.
“Why do you think that is? That you haven’t found anyone?” He leans back and crosses his left ankle over his right knee, and I’m distracted by the sheer spread of him. I resist the urge to volley the question immediately back to him.
“Like I just said, I guess it’s because I haven’t met the right person.”
He squints his peacock-feather-colored eyes at me. “That feels like a cop-out.”
I raise an eyebrow at him. “Does it?”
“Yeah.” He rubs his thumb along his bottom lip absentmindedly, and it’s the epitome of distracting.
“Okay, real talk?”
He places both feet on the ground and leans forward, hands clasped ahead of him. “Always.”
“My parents’ marriage, it was borderline abusive. D’you remember how many times I showed up at your place around dinnertime just to escape it?”
He nods.
“I can’t imagine hating someone that much. I don’t ever want to hate someone that much.”
“It was abusive, Syd. Things don’t have to be physically violent to be abusive.” He swallows.
I know this, of course. But putting that label on things somehow makes it all less sweep-able under my ten-year-old rug.
“You’re not them,” he says, then takes a sip of his beer. Intellectually, I of course know I’m not them. But they are my DNA.
“What about you?” I ask, keen to turn the spotlight.
“I had that girlfriend in college,” he says. “But things didn’t work out. She was great. Really great, actually. But I just never got to the point of wanting to take the next step. She wanted to move in. I wasn’t ready. She left, found someone who was ready, got engaged and married all within the next year.” He spins his pint glass in little circles atop the table, spreading new arms of the glass’s watery ring. “I told myself I didn’t care about her enough to give her what she wanted. But sometimes, I think maybe I cared too much. So much that I was terrified.”
“Of what?”
“Of losing her. Once you lose someone, loss is this thing that is sort of... waiting. It felt like a ticking time bomb. Like if she stayed with me, she’d eventually die.” The tips of his ears are red. “I know how that sounds.”
“How does it sound?” I ask, my throat tight with recognition.
“Paranoid. Morbid.”
I shake my head, cross my arms against the table. “I think it sounds honest.”
We stare at each other, and I can practically feel the heat of his face spreading to mine.
Tamra taps her knife gently against her glass, forcing our attention. “I have a toast,” she says, cheeks bright pink and eyes glassy. It appears Tamra is a bit tipsy after half a glass of pinot noir. She stands, raises her wineglass, and looks down at the three of us. “I’d just like to say,” she begins, then presses her eyes shut in deep concentration, or perhaps contemplation. “That of course this situation is less than ideal. I know we all miss our loved ones, would rather be with them than on this jury.” Her eyes grow full. “But I just want to thank you”—she makes eye contact with each of us at the table—“for giving me some semblance of a little family while we are here. Friendship is the wine of life, as they say! To new friends!” She raises her glass emphatically and sloshes a raindrop-sized dollop of wine onto the center of the table.
“One drink and she’s Maya Angelou,” Cam muses, then pats her on the back, seemingly more entertained by half-glass-of-wine Tamra than touched by her toast. “To new friends,” he says merrily, lifting his beer and clanging it against Tamra’s glass. Somehow, Xavier has made his way to our table, wanting in on our little lovefest. He taps his soda glass against Tamra’s.
We all join in, Damon and me toasting last.
“To new friends,” Damon says, tilting the top of his pint to meet the lip of my wineglass.
“To new friends,” I echo, surprised by my sudden breathlessness.
Damon’s stare lingers. I don’t move away when his knee once again gently bumps mine.