“Table for two?”
Lexi took a breath.
“The bar please,” I said quickly.
“Right this way.”
“I can’t believe I’m actually eating inside here.” Lexi was giddy. “I hope they have cake.”
“They always have cake,” I assured her.
I watched her fumble around on the barstool, jumping as she tried to get on it. When finally she was half climbing up the shoe rail on the bar, I picked her up around the waist and set her on the barstool.
“I was going to get up there eventually.”
“I decided to spare both of us the pain.”
I settled in my usual spot and checked the mirror. My mother and her new family—her real family—were happily passing the bread basket around.
“I love this herb butter,” my mother was saying to her father.
The first time I had seen them, when I’d inadvertently been at the restaurant for a business lunch years ago, her father’s eyes had held so much pain. Today, the pain was still there, but it seemed to have lessened somewhat, or maybe it was wishful thinking on my part.
I didn’t have children, didn’t know if I trusted myself to have children, but if I did and what happened to my mother happened to my child, I wouldn’t have been able to bear it.
“He doesn’t seem any worse for the wear,” Lexi was saying to Matt, the bartender, when I turned my attention back to them, wishing I hadn’t come, wishing I hadn’t dragged Lexi into this horrible swamp of maladaptive coping.
“It’s bad training,” Matt said as he expertly measured liquor. “People think that just because they’re iguanas they can’t be trained, but it’s not true.”
“Gizzy knows commands. He can do down and stay.”
“No, he doesn’t,” I said to her. “You can barely control that thing.”
“He’s leash trained, and he doesn’t run off like Marshmallow did at the iguana meetup.”
Matt sat a martini on the bar top.
“Do you have an iguana?” Matt asked me.
“He has a pet rock,” Lexi said proudly. “His name is Crumpet, and Grayson takes very good care of him and even brought him a little hat back from Paris. I should have taken a picture. It was so adorable.”
I made a strangled noise.
“You look like you need a drink,” Lexi said, sliding the martini across the bar to me.
I opened my mouth to protest then thought, what the hell. We were talking about iguanas and my pet rock. I took a long sip of the martini.
“Our mysterious owner becomes even more of an enigma,” Matt joked.
Lexi’s eyes bugged out.
“You own this restaurant?” she squealed.
“Shhh.” I put two fingers to her mouth.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said in a stage whisper. “You didn’t tell me you owned this place.”
Matt was looking between us with what could only be described as a shit-eating grin.
