Central Places by Delia Cai

Author:Delia Cai [Cai, Delia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

⬤

In honor of Christmas Eve—and Ben’s last night in Hickory Grove—my dad announces with a distressing amount of flourish that we’re going out for dinner after all. I consider mentioning the new downtown trattoria I found on Yelp while I was at the gym this morning, but I’d checked the menu online and hated the idea of my parents having to puzzle over how to pronounce cacio e pepe to some tired server. The local Applebee’s has been out of the question ever since the time my dad tried to order fajitas and totally butchered the pronunciation. It would have been easy to overlook the server’s derision had she not taken it a step further and cloyingly assured my dad that no, the fajeetas were not velly spicy. This was in middle school, and all I could think about was how angry I was that my dad hadn’t stuck to his usual grilled chicken, because then we wouldn’t even be in a situation where he was getting mocked by a waiter for what, not knowing a third language? But thankfully, my dad has already made up his mind on tonight’s spot. To give Ben enough time to drive up to O’Hare and make his flight, we decide to arrive at the Hickory Grove Olive Garden at five.

The promise of a change in scenery perks me up. Going out to a restaurant feels like what regular families are supposed to do after an afternoon of high-quality bonding, instead of what we’d all really done, tucked away in our respective office cubicles/Eastwoods Bible studies/parts of the house watching the various TVs and, on my part, scrolling through old Journal Star articles about Alex Bentley’s death on my phone. I notice that my mother even dresses up for the dinner; she is wearing the same cardigan she wore to the church Christmas show, and my dad has shaved for the event. I decide to put the Sullivan’s/church wrap dress back on and add a thick cable knit sweater over it to head off any comments from my mother on the neckline.

I know I should cringe the moment we set foot inside Olive Garden. If the plastic grapevines tacked up overhead aren’t cheesy enough, the knockoff Jules Chéret prints framed by the doorway make me avert my eyes while we wait at the host stand and I shift in my boots, wondering if anyone else in here knows or cares that those posters are actually French. Ben notices them immediately, and I can tell it bothers him more than the prospect of limp calamari and breadsticks. It’s funny how he doesn’t even try to disguise his disdain, I realize, and this dampens whatever genial feeling I had about him from this morning and our apartment hunting, which was probably a waste of time anyway. In the back of my mind, I already know Ben has his heart set on the place we saw on Hancock, and I’ll be lucky if he even humors me with a few more open houses to tour once we get back to New York.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.