“Leave her alone, Lin.” The single sentence from his typically mute father startled Dax—and his mother and sister, too, judging by the way everyone’s eyes swung to the man. For a moment silence—blessed silence—descended. Even the baby, who was being passed between Kat and his mother, had gone quiet.
“This stroganoff is delicious, Mr. Harris,” Amy said, glancing at his father’s plate, which contained only a ham sandwich.
“Can’t stand the stuff myself. Is there anything more disgusting than beef with sour cream? But Lin loves it,” he said, hoisting his sandwich and taking a big bite.
“Alistair’s family owned a restaurant,” Lin said, and Dax sent a silent prayer of thanks heavenward that his father had managed to shift the discussion. This was another of his mother’s favorite topics, but a more benign one. “I’m not sure if I fell in love with him or the beef stroganoff. I’d never had such a thing. Any forays outside of the traditional Chinese food my parents cooked were the typical North American garbage that I encountered—pizza, fast food. But stroganoff!” She slurped up a noodle and smacked her lips. “That was really something.”
“Was it a Russian restaurant?” Amy asked. He could see her trying to make sense of his father’s very British name and the trace of an accent he retained, his family having immigrated when he was a teenager.
“Nope, it was one of those old-school generic ‘family’ restaurants,” his father said. “My parents bought it from an older couple who were retiring. They kept the head cook, who was Russian. Hence the stroganoff. It was a funny place. We also had spaghetti and, of course, my parents introduced fish and chips and bangers and mash. When I started dating Lin, they added chop suey to the menu.”
“Oh, that’s kind of…sweet,” Amy said.
“And racist!” Kat chirped cheerfully. Then she shot Dax a “can you believe this?” face. He knew she was referencing the fact that their father had just spoken in a complete paragraph. It was almost unheard of.
“They didn’t mean it that way,” his mother said. “They were trying to welcome me to the family.”
“It didn’t matter anyway,” his father said, smiling at his wife. “Once you had the stroganoff, I don’t think you ever had anything else on that menu.” He turned to Amy. “When my parents retired and we took over the restaurant, we overhauled the menu, but Lin wouldn’t let me touch the stroganoff.”
His parents beamed at each other. That was the thing—his father was so silent and his mother so talkative, they were almost like a nursery rhyme. Like the conversational equivalent of Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat. If you went by what they said, you had to wonder how they ever fell in love, much less kept the spark alive. But then there would be these moments where they’d look at each other, and you kind of felt like you should leave the room. Which was gross, but also reassuring.
“My father hates stroganoff, but he makes it for my mother—and us—every Sunday,” Kat said, smiling affectionately at their father.
“It’s true,” Dax confirmed. “We’ve been having these Sunday family dinners our whole lives, and I don’t think we’ve ever had anything else.”
“That’s right,” his mother said, nodding decisively.
He could tell Amy was tickled by the whole thing. “What if a holiday like Christmas falls on a Sunday?” she asked.
“Then we have turkey stroganoff,” his mother said, as if the answer was obvious.
“And I have a turkey sandwich,” his father said.
“Well, I think it’s great,” Amy said. “Is the restaurant still open?”
“We’re in the process of selling it to some of the employees,” his mother said. “Since neither of these two ungrateful children wanted it.”
“What do you do?” Amy asked Kat.
Kat barked a laugh. “Isn’t it funny that you’ve seen a baby come out of my vagina, but we don’t actually know each other?”
“Kat!” his mother scolded.
“I’m a lawyer,” she said. “I do intellectual property, patent-type stuff. Mostly in the tech sector. But of course, I’m on maternity leave now.”
“That’s kind of cool that you and Dax work, broadly, in the same field.”
“It was actually perfect,” Dax’s father said. Apparently Amy had somehow unleashed a heretofore unheard-of talkative streak in their father. “Dax was always taking things apart to see how they worked, and Kat was always reading the directions and bossing him around. I think they both ended up exactly where they were supposed to.”