David shook the thought away.
“And I wanted to ask if you want to meet her?”
“Of course I do.”
“Okay. I know your schedule’s hectic, but you think you can take off Friday?”
“I’ll try. I’ll let you know. All right?”
“Sure. Love you, kiddo.”
“Love you, Dad.”
Jeri had been positively gleeful when David asked for Friday off and told her why.
“Oh my god, you’re going to have a new stepmom!” she teased, as David restocked their WineStation, swapping out empty bottles for fresh ones and checking the argon tank.
“It’s not like they’re getting married,” David groused, tapping the gauge, but it was empty. “Can you hand me another tank?”
Still, there was no denying that it was a big step. If David’s dad had dated since the divorce—over fifteen years ago, now—David hadn’t heard about it. And he’d certainly never met any of his dad’s girlfriends before.
Not that David had brought home anyone since Marcus, either. No one he’d dated in Chicago had been worth it.
Friday afternoon David got a text with the address, a place up in the Northland. Something about it tickled David’s memory—had he eaten there before?—but he didn’t have time to look it up, not when he was knee-deep in the indigenous grapes of Italy.
When five o’clock rolled around, he took a sponge comb to his freshly rescued twists (no sense giving his dad any more comedy material), dressed in dark-wash jeans and a white sweater, pulled on his newest boots—these ones shiny wine-red jacquard on black—and headed out, bopping to his Square Enix playlist. Ever since the Siri mishap, he’d remembered what great driving music it made.
The overcast sky hung low over him as he drove north. He missed the long days of summer.
His phone’s directions led him to a cluster of buildings and strip malls in Gladstone, with a bank, a Starbucks, a hairstylist, a Chinese buffet, a preschool, a nail salon, and—
Oh, fuck.
He pulled up right in front of a plain white building with large windows stretching across the front. The left side was taken up by the nail salon, but on the right side, huge red light-up letters spelledSHIRAZ BISTRO.
His dad had brought him right to Farzan’s restaurant.
What the fuck.
twenty-eight
David
It wasn’t like David could bail on dinner with his dad. And especially not on his dad’s new girlfriend. But why didn’t he bother checking where they were going?
He knew the address looked familiar—he knew it. He just hadn’t put two and two together. And now here he was, outside Farzan’s restaurant, and what if Farzan was there working? Would it look like David was bringing his parents for Farzan to meet? That was abso-fucking-lutely not the signal David wanted to be sending.
A light rain had started to fall, misting over David’s windshield. His phone buzzed; he had missed a fewAre you still alive?texts from Ayesha. He’d been meaning to give her a call for the last couple weeks, but between Aspire, and his test, and Farzan, he’d been too busy. He was typing out an apology when a familiar off-white SUV pulled into the spot beside him.
He could finish it later.
David checked his hair in his visor mirror before stepping out.
His dad shot a quick smile his way before scurrying around the hoodto open the door for his girlfriend—a chivalrous move David couldn’t remember Christopher Curtis ever pulling off before.
David got most of his looks from his dad: the same dark brown skin with cobalt underneath, the same high cheekbones, the same blocky hands. (He’d gotten his eyes from his mom, though: Christopher Curtis’s eyes were small and spaced a bit too close to his nose.) David was the same height as his dad, too, though lately he’d seen the slightest of stoops in his father’s shoulders. He refused to think about that.
The woman his father helped out of the car was lovely: dark amber skin, a broad nose, full lips painted a cool purple that matched her cardigan. She was short and plump, with a shy smile that turned the corners of her eyes up as she looked at David.
