Page 20 of Ghost

8

Ghost

The waitress set a slender plate of rice-wrapped raw fish in front of me. I’d seen sushi before, but I’d never planned on eating it. Now that I didn’t have a choice, I wasn’t sure how in the fuck I was going to pick it up.

I nonchalantly searched the table for utensils and found none. In unrolling my napkin, two ornately painted white sticks fell onto the table and bounced a few times before they came to a rest between Abby and me. I stared at them as if they were the cause of a ten-car collision on the five.

Unless I planned to use them as miniature spears, I was going to go hungry. My chopstick skills were equal to my ability to walk a tightrope.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Abby asked as I fumbled to pick up the sticks. “I’m famished.”

I grinned in acknowledgement and then shifted my eyes to my food. I had my doubts I’d be able to pick up anything, short of a few stares and a laugh or two. I searched the restaurant. Two dozen adults and half a dozen children used their chopsticks as an extension of their fingers, eating their food with ease. For them, it seemed like a simple task.

In my attempt to hold the slippery sticks, I looked like a drunken carnival clown trying to juggle pencils. If I continued, I was going to make an utter fool of myself. Aggravated, I scanned the table one last time for a useable utensil. A fucking butter knife would have been better than what I had.

“I never use those things,” Abby said. “Eat it with your hands, it’s more fun. That’s how they do it in Japan.”

Relieved, I slid the cherry blossom adorned sticks to the side and looked up. Abby held a piece of sushi between her fingers, no differently than if she were eating a French fry.

“You can eat this stuff with your hands?” I asked. “I thought it’d be an etiquette thing. I’m not looking to have some pissed off Japanese guy over here yelling at me.”

“A good rule of thumb is if it has rice attached to it you can eat it with your fingers,” she explained. “If it’s sashimi – raw fish – it needs to be eaten with chopsticks.”

I glanced at my food. “What if it’s both?”

She chuckled and nodded toward my plate. “It’s surrounded by rice, so it’s finger food.”

“That’s a good thing,” I said. “If I would have had to use those chopsticks, there would have been more of this stuff on the floor than in my mouth.”

“How do you normally eat it?”

“This is my first time,” I confessed.

Her face contorted. “I asked you if you liked sushi. You said yes.”

“You said how does sushi sound. I said it sounded great.” I studied the piece I held. “I’ve never tried it, though.”

“I hope you like it.” She brushed her hair away from her face, eventually draping it over her ear. After rubbing the bottom of her nose with her index finger, she grinned. “Try it and see what you think.”

I poked the piece into my mouth. Surprisingly, it tasted good. Excited by the complexity of flavors, I looked at Abby with wide eyes. “I ordered the spicy tuna roll because I like tuna and I like spicy things. Looks like I made a good choice. This is pretty tasty.”

“I love sushi,” she said. “I could eat it every day. It’s not fun to eat it alone, though.”

I ate everything alone and didn’t see the complication. “What’s a good alone food?”

She brushed her hair behind her ear again and cocked her head to the side. After some consideration, her gaze met mine. “Salads. Scrambled eggs. Soup. Sandwiches. Those types of things.”

I reached for another piece of sushi. “Things that start with an ‘S’?”

She laughed. “No. Things that are boring. Boring things are okay to eat alone. Things that are fun should be shared with someone.”

I ate the piece of sushi and then wiped my mouth with my napkin. “What’s fun?”

She shrugged. “Pizza. Sushi. Spaghetti. Any Italian food, really. Tacos. Ice cream. Pie. Those are all fun, and they shouldn’t be eaten alone.”

I looked her up and down. Her arms were the size of my wrists. I couldn’t see her legs, but I didn’t need to. I’d seen them plenty when we were in the desert. They were lean and muscular, like that of a conditioned runner. By my guess, pie wasn’t a staple in her diet.

“You don’t look like you eat much pie,” I said.