We went to the fanciest restaurant I had ever seen, with French decor and white tablecloths and beautiful paintings on the walls. The menus were written in calligraphy on textured cream-colored paper, and the food was described in such intricate terms—roulades
and rissoles and complex sauces—I had no idea what to order. The prices nearly gave me a heart attack. The cheapest item on the menu was a ten-dollar appetizer, and it consisted of a single shrimp prepared in ways I couldn't begin to pronounce. Near the bottom of the menu I saw a description of a hamburger served with sweet potato fries, and nearly spewed a mouthful of diet Coke when I saw the price.
"Churchill," I said in disbelief, "there's a hundred-dollar hamburger on the menu."
He frowned, not out of shared incredulity but because my menu had prices on it. One twitch of his finger summoned a waiter, who apologized profusely. The menu was whipped out of my hands and replaced by another, almost identical one. except this one had no dollar amounts.
"Why shouldn't mine have prices on it?" I asked.
"Because you're the woman," Churchill said, still annoyed by the waiter's mistake. "I'm taking you to lunch, and you're not supposed to think about how much it costs."
"That hamburger was one hundred dollars." I couldn't stop obsessing over it. "What could they possibly do to that hamburger to make it worth a hundred dollars?"
My expression seemed to amuse him. "Let's ask."
A waiter was enlisted to answer questions about the menu. When asked how the hamburger was prepared and what made it so special, he explained the ingredients were all organic, including those in the homemade parmesan bun, and it contained smoked buffalo mozzarella, hydroponic butterhead lettuce, vine-ripened tomato, and chile compote layered atop a burger made of organic beef and ground emu.
The word "emu" set me off.
I felt a laugh break from my lips, and then another, and then there was no stopping the helpless giggles that made my eyes water and my shoulders tremble. I clamped a hand over my mouth to hold them back, but that only made it worse. I began to seriously worry if I could stop. I was making a spectacle of myself in the fanciest restaurant I'd ever been in.
The waiter tactfully disappeared. I tried to gasp out an apology to Churchill, who watched me with concern and shook his head slightly, as if to say No, don 't apologize. He put his hand on my wrist in a reassuring grip. Somehow the pressure on my wrist quieted the wild laughter. I was able to take a long breath, and my chest relaxed.
I told him about moving to the trailer in Welcome, and Mama's boyfriend named Flip who had shot the emu. I couldn't seem to talk fast enough, so many details tumbled out. Churchill caught every word, his eyes crinkling at the corners, and when I finally reached the part about giving the dead emu to the Cateses, he was chuckling.
Although I hadn't been aware of ordering wine, the waiter brought a bottle of pinot noir. The liquid glittered richly in tall-stemmed crystal glasses. "I shouldn't." I said. "I'm going back to work after lunch."
"You're not going back to work."
"Of course I am. My afternoon is booked." But I felt weary at the thought of it, not just the work, but summoning the appropriate charm and cheerfulness my clients expected.
Churchill reached inside his jacket, extracted a cell phone no larger than a domino, and dialed Salon One. As I watched, openmouthed, he asked for Zenko, informed him that I would be taking the afternoon off, and asked if that would be all right. According to Churchill, Zenko said of course it would be all right and he would rearrange the schedule. No problem.
As Churchill closed the cell phone with a self-satisfied click, I said darkly, "I'm going to catch hell for this later. And if anyone else but you had made that call, Zenko would have asked if you have your head up your culo."
Churchill grinned. One of his flaws was that he enjoyed people's inability to tell him off.
I talked through the entire lunch, prodded by Churchill's questions, his warm interest, the wineglass that somehow never emptied no matter how much I drank. The freedom of saying anything to him, telling all, relieved a burden I hadn't even realized I'd been carrying. In my relentless push to keep moving forward, there had been so many emotions I hadn't let myself inhabit fully, so many things I hadn't talked about. Now I couldn't quite catch up to myself. I fumbled in my purse for my wallet and got out Carrington's school picture. She had a gap-toothed smile, and one of her ponytails was a little higher than the other.
Churchill looked at the photo for a long time, even reached in his pocket for a pair of reading glasses so he could see every detail. He drank some wine before commenting. "Happy child, looks like."