“Pasta.”
“Excellent! Choose from the following list: Linguini Mare, Spaghetti Carbonara…”
His reading falls into a rhythm, and then a bad Italian accent…
“… Cap-pel-lini Pomo-doro, Fettu-ccine Pri-ma-ver-a…”
Now he’s nearly singing the choices. I lean forward and whisper, “Jason…”
“… TOR-tel-LI-ni MAR-i-NAR-a, or some VE-al SAL-tim-BO-cca—”
I giggle at him inserting words to fit the meter of his menu song. I hear how it sounds and cover my mouth to stop and not disturb other people. That plus I feel a little stupid giggling, like Sarah at the mall.
“… and there’s AL-so SCALL-o-PI-ne OR some CHIC-ken PARM-e-SAN… eee.”
I laugh. “Jason!”
“I’m not even halfway down the page yet,” he says. “There’s also AN-gel HAIR with A-i-O-li, RIG-a-TON-I A-bruz-ZI… zi…”
“I don’t even know what half these things are!”
Silence. Or at least as soon as I stop laughing.
“Then may I recommend the Beef Lasagna?” he says, deadpan.
“Too messy,” I say, sneaking in a bit of honesty. “Do they have any gnocchi? With Alfredo sauce?”
“Never heard of it… I don’t see it anywhere…”
“The g is silent. It’s spelled g-n-o-c-c—”
“Oh, here it is. Gnocchi Del Giorno. A delightful platter of potato—”
“I’ll take it. With garlic bread.”
Oh wait, garlic breath—
“Are you ready?” a woman asks. “Oh!”
“It’s okay,” Jason says. “Fine dining is about taste and smell. What it looks like is just distracting.”
“Oh, well,” she says, playing along. “I know Chef would disagree. He definitely believes in presentation—the first bite is with the eyes, he says. But he doesn’t have to know.”
“We’ll both have Gnocchi Del Giorno and garlic bread. What about a drink, Parker?”
“C-6 please.”
“We only have soda, lemonade, cranberry juice, grapefruit—”
“Oh, I mean Coke or Pepsi or whichever, with caffeine and sugar. And a straw. Please.”
“Me too,” Jason says.
When the waitress leaves, Jason says, “What’s C-6?”
I feel funny about this but I’m not sure why. Am I embarrassed? No, that can’t be it. “Cold Carbonated Caffeinated Caramel Colored Cane sugar. I’m sure they’ll only have C-5 here—only a few sodas have cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup, but I was already having trouble communicating and didn’t want to make it worse.”
The waitress is back in record time with garlic bread.
“Have some,” I say, for more honesty, “so I’m not the only one with garlic breath.”
“Okay. I’ve never heard of gnocchi before. It’s potatoes? That doesn’t sound Italian.”
“They definitely are. Not my favorite, exactly, but pretty good.”
“Why didn’t you order your favorite? Were you hurrying to get me to stop singing?”
“No! No, it’s just… well, like the waitress said, some people care what food looks like but I care how easy it is to eat. Gnocchi is easy, but spaghetti? Forget-y… it.”
Jason laughs. “Fair enough.”
I eat a bit of garlic bread and enjoy that the silence feels comfortable, at least to me.
“Hey,” Jason says. “Sorry about the bus ride.”
“No, it’s okay. I get startled when people touch me since I can’t see it coming. It’s… well, sort of a rule about blind people. Next time just say something like Hey, let me put my arm around you, then next time I won’t punch you in the nose or anything.”
Shit, I just said next time twice…
“Oh, okay.”
“Or—and here’s a pro tip—if you just bump into me first, that works too.”
Enough already!
“Okay. I meant the whole bus ride. I don’t want you to think we took the shuttle because I don’t think you can walk a couple hundred yards…”
“Oh, that’s… okay… I didn’t…” I can’t think of what else to say. Maybe in part because my face is heating up since he wasn’t talking about putting his arm around me.
“Are you blushing?” he asks.
“No! Why would I be blushing?”
No answer.
“But if I was, a gentleman wouldn’t notice.”
“Notice what?”
“Exactly,” I say, and I smile. Outwardly.
FIFTEEN
“So where are we going?” I ask.
I haven’t checked the time because I can’t do it without Jason knowing. I can’t imagine we were at Andino’s for much more than an hour, an hour and a half at the most. Then we drove to Ice Cream Explosion to share some dessert—I made him choose, and I’d never had a butterscotch sundae before, but I liked it—and I could eat less since we were sharing. God, between the burrito, most of my gnocchi, and half the garlic bread, even a small portion of sundae had me feeling very roly-poly.