Trapped in Forever

63 ~ Debbie Beatle

The sweet aroma of sugary icing swirled on the rounded surface of multicolored cupcakes with golden and black wrappers, probably still warm to the touch, and white sprinkles freckling the variegated mounds of icing, and the scent of frying oil and freshly baked bread greeted us as my father gripped his hand around the somewhat rusted door handle that creaked as he turned it, and the balminess of the restaurant warmed our chilled cheeks and fingertips, and the clamor of conversations, forks scraping against the golden and black plates, and the clinking of dishes being stacked together in the black tubs that the busboys carried on their carts, and it felt a part of a symphony that I had the privilege of listening to several times before, either perched in a plastic chair in the kitchen while arguing about soundtracks with Orion or occasionally dining here with Reese, Kara, and Veronica, and now it felt somewhat violated as I wandered in Mo’s, with my mother and Mikayla squirming to get past me and into the warmth of the restaurant’s dining area.

This had felt like a place of my own, where I escaped to from them whenever their words or expressions irritated so deeply that I needed the business and the volume of a bustling restaurant to forget that I was annoyed with the fact that no one seemed to understand anymore, if they ever had. And now that they were here, listening to the soundtrack that I had reveled in and glimpsing the blurs of the waitresses who wiggled their fingers in my direction over their scribbled notepad, lines crossing out a couple of the spelling mistakes, and it all seemed . . . normal to them. As if there were nothing special about the flickering light in the back of the restaurant that could give you a headache if you stared at the light bulbs long enough or that Sarah-Anne was stifling an aggravated grimace as she tried to take a businessman’s order while he simultaneously talked on his cellphone. That almost irritated me as much as their presence.

My mother had insisted on having a “family dinner night” and promptly told us all that just because Mikayla had moved out, that didn’t make us any less of a family with a determined edge slicing her words as she jabbed the words into the telephone’s microphone as she presented the idea to Mikayla while my dad just smiled at me, a faint awkwardness tugging at the corners of his thin lips, and told me that a family dinner night would be good for us to reconnect. The way he had said that word, the way he looked at me, almost beseechingly, as he said it, and the silence—sans Mom on the phone in the kitchen as she tried to convince Mikayla that taking one night away from her band wasn’t going to corrupt her musical talents—that followed afterward made me wonder if he had started to believe Mom that something about me had reformed, and just like her, he was irked about it too, and hoped that one meal in a restaurant could restore our family to what he had been before Mikayla reached puberty and Roxanne died.

“Do we have to have to be seated or . . . ?” my father glanced around the room, taking in the multicolored, cheap crayons that had slipped from a chubby toddler’s fist and fell onto the floor, and the scribbled names written in different methods of loopy cursive or box-like handwriting that adorned a couple of the golden walls with dark chestnut panels that reached one third of the wall, and the gold blur of a waitress speedily walking past us, one of them nearly bumping into him as she carried an empty, circular tray by her side, and she called out an energetic apology as she continued to spring past him, just as he jerked back, and smiled at her, giving a slight wave. There was a faint blush coloring his pale cheeks when she called him sugar, as if she were the older one and he was the twenty-something year old.

I tried to resist the urge to roll my eyes at the natural rouge that warmed his cheeks as he just shook his head, his self-confidence brewing faintly since, in his mind, he was probably agreeing to the fact that he didn’t look that bad for a guy nearing fifty. “No,” I told him, and as I guided them toward a vacant booth beside a window where yellow rays emitting from the headlights of passing cars onto the paved streets as if the illumination were melted butter instead, and a portion of the parking lot was visible, I glanced casually over my shoulder and toward the swinging door that led into the kitchen. I was pretty certain that beyond that door was Orion, bejeweled in his hairnet and greased stained apron and white T-shirt that fell loosely over his biceps—“I get why some people like wearing those tight shirts,” he had said once when I mentioned that one of his shirts looked a size too big for him, “but I don’t. It’s basically a wedgie for your armpits.”—and he might have been smoothing the icing over the top of one the dozens of cupcakes he baked a day or flipping a burger or scrambling to remember who wanted extra mayonnaise or no tomatoes, and a little part of me wished that I could sneak away somehow without them noticing that I was directed toward the kitchen and tried to correct me that the bathroom was on the other side of the restaurant.