The shoe was the first thing I found in my bag. Pink, size eleven, still warm. Marc must have thrown it in while I was carrying her out, because I didn’t remember it leaving the floor of the steakhouse.
Dad had booked that table back in March and paid the deposit himself. He told us so twice, leaving no room for argument. Saturday evening at a Dayton steakhouse, quarter past seven, five of us: Dad, Mom, Marc, me, and Niamh, who is six and autistic and has had headphones, a soft spoon and a rubber lizard in my purse since her diagnosis two years ago.
For twenty minutes we made it. She ate four fries and lined up the rest like little soldiers. Then she pulled her arm back to throw one at Mom. Marc said no. She tried again. He said no again, and the second no broke something open.
She screamed the way a smoke alarm screams. Her heels went into the table leg. Mom’s water went into the butter.
And my father set his fork down like he’d been waiting for it all night. “You were never like this, Rachelle,” he said. “Take her home.”
Two people at the bar laughed. When I asked him for two minutes, he told me it was his birthday. Then he folded his napkin and said, “If she can’t sit at a table like a person, she stays home.”
Mom said his name. He said hers back, and she stopped. She always stops.
So I carried forty-one pounds of my kicking kid past twelve strangers at the bar, past a man in a golf shirt with that look on his face, past a woman who turned her stool around. In the van it was 7:40. I counted Niamh’s breaths and listened to his voice in my head. The easy kid. She didn’t get it from you.
At 7:52 Mom got in with a to-go box and her ring turned stone-in. “Ask him why we stopped going to the Golden Wok.”
Friday nights on Wilmington Pike
“I’m not asking him anything,” I said. “I’m asking you.”
Mom looked down at the to-go box like it might help her out. It didn’t. It was a box.
Behind us, Niamh hummed to the lizard. Three notes, over and over, the same three she’s hummed since she was two. Mom turned around and watched her a while longer.
“Do you remember it at all?” she said. “The Golden Wok.”
I remembered pieces. A red carpet with gold dragons on it. A fish tank by the register with one big orange fish that looked bored. Fortune cookies. Friday nights.
“We went every Friday,” I said.
“Every Friday until you were six.” She picked at the corner of the box lid. “And then never again.”
“Because they closed.”
“They didn’t close, honey. They’re still there. I drive past it on the way to the pharmacy.”
I didn’t say anything. The heater ticked. Niamh hiccuped and went back to humming.
“You used to scream,” Mom said. “In that restaurant. You screamed like that.” She tipped her head at the back seat without looking. “The fish tank had a bubbler that went on and off, and every time it went on you’d put your hands over your ears and you’d go. Under the table, sometimes. Once you bit a waiter. Not hard. He was very nice about it.”
I laughed, because what else do you do. It came out like a cough.
“Mom. I was the easy one.”
“You were the hardest one,” she said. “You were the hardest one by a mile. Your brother, Greg, God rest that idiot’s report cards, Greg was easy. You couldn’t stand socks with seams. You couldn’t stand the vacuum. You couldn’t eat anything that touched anything else. I cut the crusts off your sandwiches until you were nine.”
My ears were ringing, like when you stand up too fast.
“And Dad?”
She was quiet so long I thought she wasn’t going to answer.
“The first time it happened at the Golden Wok, your father stood up, put a twenty on the table, and walked out to the car,” she said. “He sat in the car with the radio on. I carried you out. You were kicking me in the stomach. A girl who worked there, Trang, she was maybe nineteen, held the door for me and said, ‘It’s okay, ma’am, she’s okay.’ I never forgot her name.”
“The first time,” I said.
“It happened most Fridays that year. Every time, he got up first. Every time, he went and sat in the car. And every time I carried you past every table in that place by myself, with Greg holding on to my coat.”
The van smelled like fries and cold air. I looked at my own hands on the steering wheel.
“After that year, he stopped taking us anywhere,” she said. “Not the Golden Wok. Not Frisch’s. Not the Christmas party at his office. He said you weren’t ready, and then you got older and stopped screaming, and he forgot he ever said it. Started telling everybody you were the easy one. Telling you.” She finally looked at me. “He told it so many times he believes it.”
“You let him.”
That landed. I watched it land and I didn’t take it back.
“I let him,” she said. “He was proud of you. I thought, what’s the harm. Let him be proud.” She turned her ring all the way around and back again. “Then he stood in that hospital hallway two years ago and said she didn’t get it from you. Like it was good news. And I let that go too. I’ve been letting it go for two years.”
Niamh dropped the lizard. I reached back without looking and found it on the floor and put it back in her hand. Her fingers closed on it. She went back to the three notes.
“Why are you telling me now?” I said.
Mom looked at the steakhouse across the lot. You could see the bar through the front window, all gold light and a ball game.
“Because he said ‘like a person,'” she said. “About my granddaughter. In front of all those people. And because I sat there and said ‘Please,’ and he said ‘Don’t, Anna,’ and I stopped.” She set the to-go box on the dashboard. “I’m sixty-seven years old. I’m tired of stopping.”
She opened her door.
“Where are you going?”
“Back in,” she said. “He’s ordering dessert. He can have it with company.”
“Mom.”
“Bring her if she’s ready. Leave her with Marc if she’s not.” She got out, and the cold came in, and she buttoned her coat right this time, every button, before she shut the door. “But I’d like you there.”
Then she walked across the parking lot in her good shoes, straight at the front door, faster than I’d seen her walk in ten years.
Table nine, the second time
Marc was coming out as Mom went in. They passed under the awning and she didn’t stop, and he turned and watched her go, and then he jogged the rest of the way to the van with his tie flapping.
“Your mom just told the hostess she’d like her seat back,” he said through my window. “What happened?”
“Can you sit with Niamh?”
“Rach. What happened?”
“I’ll tell you after,” I said. “I have to hear something first.”
He looked at me, then at the back seat. Niamh had her headphones on now and the lizard pressed to her chin. She was calm the way a kettle is calm after you take it off the stove.
“Go,” he said, and climbed in the back next to her.
I put the pink shoe in my coat pocket. I don’t know why. My hands wanted something to hold.
Inside, the noise came at me the way it must come at her. The game, the forks, a blender at the bar. The golf shirt was still on his stool. The woman at the end had her stool turned back around now that the show was over. A waiter was setting a slice of cake with a candle in it in front of my father.
Mom was standing behind her chair. Not sitting. Standing, with her hands on the back of it.
“Anna, sit down,” Dad said. “You’re making a scene.”
“I’m not making anything,” she said. “I’m standing up.”
He saw me then, over by the hostess stand. His face changed a little. “Good,” he said. “She’s settled. Sit down, both of you, and let’s have the cake.”
“She’s in the van with Marc,” I said.
“Then what are you doing in here?”
“Wallace,” Mom said, “tell her about the Golden Wok.”
I watched the name hit him. He picked up his fork. He put it down again. The candle on his cake was burning down into the frosting and nobody blew it out.
“What about it,” he said.
“Tell her what you did on Fridays.”
“I took my family to dinner,” he said. “That’s what I did on Fridays. I worked fifty hours a week and I took my family to dinner.” He looked around, at the next table, at the bar, like he was asking them to back him up. “Is this really for tonight? On my seventieth?”
“You said it was your birthday,” Mom said. “So everybody would know. I want everybody to know.”
The table next to ours had gone quiet. A man there had his fork halfway up.
“Fine,” Mom said, when he didn’t answer. “I’ll tell it.”
And she did. Loud enough. Not a shout. Just loud enough for the bar.
“When Rachelle was six, she screamed in restaurants. Like Niamh. Worse than Niamh. And every single time, he stood up, put a twenty on the table, and went and sat in the car with the radio on. And I carried her out. Every Friday. Past everybody. With our son hanging off my coat. And he never once came back in to help me.” She took a breath. “Then he decided we weren’t going anywhere anymore. And when she got better, he started telling her she was always easy. Telling everybody. Telling himself.”
“That’s not how it was,” Dad said.
“Then how was it?”
“I was,” he said, and stopped, and started again. “I was working. I was tired. You were better with her.”
“I was alone with her.”
“You were her mother.”
“And you were her father,” Mom said. “You were her father in the car.”
He pushed his chair back. The legs scraped the floor. “I’m not doing this in a restaurant.”
“You did it in a restaurant,” I said. It was the first thing I’d said since I came in. “An hour ago. You did all of it in a restaurant.”
He turned to me. I’ll never forget his face. He looked like he wanted me to be six again so he could leave.
“Rachelle. I was trying to help you. You don’t see it because you’re in it. That child needs structure, and you let her…”
“Like a person,” I said. “You said if she can’t sit at a table like a person.”
“I didn’t mean…”
“You did,” Mom said. “You meant it about Rachelle, too, thirty-six years ago. You just didn’t say it out loud back then. You went to the car.”
The golf shirt at the bar had turned on his stool again. He wasn’t smiling now. The woman at the end of the bar had her chin in her hand and was looking straight at my father the way you look at a stain.
Dad saw them. That’s what got him. Not me. Not even Mom. The bar.
“I paid for this dinner,” he said, to nobody, to everybody.
“I know you did,” Mom said. “You told us.”
She took her purse off the back of the chair and put it over her shoulder.
“I’m going home with Rachelle tonight,” she said. “You can have your cake. You can drive yourself. And when you’re ready to tell your daughter the truth, she’ll be in the van, because that’s where you always left her.”
She turned around and walked to the door. She didn’t look back. I held it open for her with my hip, the way I’d held it for Niamh, and I thought about a nineteen-year-old named Trang holding it for my mother thirty-six years ago.
Behind us, the candle went out on its own.
The lizard song
It was 8:31 by the dashboard clock when he came out.
Mom was in the passenger seat with the to-go box on her knees again. Marc was still in the back with Niamh, who had fallen asleep against his arm with her headphones crooked. I was in the driver’s seat with the engine running for the heat and absolutely no idea where I was going to drive.
We watched him come across the lot. He walked like an old man. I’d never seen him walk like an old man. He’d left his coat inside, and he had his arms crossed against the cold, and he was holding nothing. No cake. No check folder. Just his own elbows.
“Lock the door,” Mom said.
“Mom.”
“I’m kidding.” She didn’t sound like she was kidding. She didn’t lock it either.
He stopped by my window. I didn’t roll it down. He stood there for a second like he didn’t know how windows worked. Then he went around to the sliding door on the side and stood there instead.
Marc looked at me in the rearview mirror. I nodded. He leaned over and slid the door open.
Dad didn’t get in right away. He looked at Niamh asleep in her car seat, with the lizard in her fist and one foot bare, a pink sock pulled half off.
“Can I sit with her,” he said. Not to me. To Marc.
Marc got out without a word and stood in the cold with his hands in his pockets. My father, who is seventy and has bad knees and complains about them at Thanksgiving every year, climbed into the back of my van and folded himself down onto the bench next to my daughter’s car seat. It took him a while. He did it carefully, so he wouldn’t wake her.
Nobody said anything for a minute. The heater ticked.
“I sat in the car,” he said finally. He was looking at Niamh, not at me. “Your mother’s right. I sat in the car with the radio on. Ball games, usually. I told myself I was giving you two room.”
I didn’t help him. I’d spent my whole life helping him. I sat there with my hands on the wheel.
“I didn’t know what to do with you,” he said. “You’d scream and everybody would look and I felt like they were looking at me. Like I was the reason. So I left.” His voice went funny on the last word. “And then you got older and you stopped, and I thought, well, she grew out of it. And it was easier to think you’d always been fine than to think about your mother carrying you past all those tables by herself.”
“You said she didn’t get it from me,” I said. “In the hospital.”
He shut his eyes.
“I said that,” he said. “I thought I was being kind.”
“You were being the guy in the car.”
“Yes.”
That was it. Just yes. No but. My father has never in my life said a sentence without a but.
“I’m sorry, Rachelle,” he said. “For the Golden Wok. For tonight. For what I said about her.” He swallowed. “For like a person. I’m sorry.”
Mom made a sound in the passenger seat and put her hand over her mouth. I looked out the windshield at the steakhouse, at the bar window, at the golf shirt paying his tab.
I wanted to tell him it was okay. That’s the reflex. Thirty-six years of being the easy one. It came up my throat like a hiccup and I swallowed it back down.
“It’s not okay,” I said.
“I know.”
“She’s going to scream in restaurants for a long time, Dad. Years. And we’re going to keep bringing her. To all of them. Every time.”
“I know,” he said.
“And if you come, you don’t get to go to the car.”
He nodded. He kept nodding, like his head forgot how to stop.
Niamh woke up then. She does that, all at once, no warm-up. She blinked at the big gray man sitting where her father had been, and her face started to go, and I got ready, and Mom turned around in her seat.
But Dad didn’t move. He didn’t reach for her. He just sat there with his hands on his knees and let her look at him.
She looked at him a long time. Then she held the lizard out. Not to give it to him. To show him. Squeezing it so its rubber belly bulged out.
“That’s a good lizard,” he said.
She squeezed it again.
“Does it have a name?”
She didn’t answer. Mom didn’t need her to, in the van, and he didn’t need her to now. Niamh pulled the lizard back to her chin and started humming. The three notes. Over and over.
I took the pink shoe out of my coat pocket and passed it back to him over the seat. He looked at it in his hand like it weighed something.
“Left foot,” I said.
He leaned over her car seat with his bad knees and worked the sock back up first, the seam lined up straight across her toes the way she likes it, the way I still like it. Then the shoe. He fumbled the Velcro twice. She let him.
Then, under her three notes, I heard a fourth one. Low. Out of tune. My father, humming the lizard song with my daughter in the back of my van.
Mom reached across and turned her wedding ring around so the stone faced out.
“Okay,” I said, and put the van in drive.
If your family has a Golden Wok of its own, send this to the one who carried you out.
For more stories about family members crossing painful lines, read the mother who called her adopted toddler “feral” and the cousin who cut family from her wedding. There’s also a daughter-in-law’s clash over a late husband’s piano.
