Page 54 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

"The Reuben."

"Oh, the Reuben." Carol looked at the menu again, her finger traveling down the page. "I'm having the chicken." A pause. She looked up at me. "I had a Reuben in Pittsburgh once. Big as your head. Couldn't finish it. Bob says these are smaller, which is probably good." A pause. "I should probably not be having a big Reuben in front of my future stepdaughter on the first day."

She laughed. Dad laughed too. Dad's laugh was a quarter-beat off. It was the laugh of a man who'd heard the joke before it was made and had been hoping she wouldn't make it.

I laughed. I made mine bigger than the situation called for, on purpose, the way I'd laughed last week at the seven-year-old patient who told me a knock-knock joke he'd been working on for three days.

"Carol. You can have whatever you want."

"I want chicken," she said firmly. "I want chicken and I want to be nervous about meeting you. Both. I want both."

She'd said it before she could stop herself. I watched her catch up to having said it about half a second after the rest of us heard it. A small flush moved up her neck. She covered it by looking at the menu again.

I hadn't been ready for that. I looked at her properly for the first time.

Her hand on the menu had a small tremor in it. The makeup was perfect. The dress was perfect. The hair was perfect. The hand was vibrating at the edge of the menu.

There were a few possible readings. Adrenaline. Caffeine. Some nervous-system thing I had no business diagnosing across a restaurant table after five minutes. The one I went with, provisionally, was that this woman had been nervous about lunch considerably longer than I'd been nervous about lunch.

It was the first time all morning I'd considered that I wasn't the only one being assessed.

I looked at Dad.

Dad was watching me with the small attention of a man holding his breath through an outcome he couldn't influence. He looked at me, and he tried to keep his face the face it had been, and for half a second he looked almost afraid.

I'd been planning, in a way I hadn't entirely admitted to myself, to be angry with my father for the rest of my life. An architect of the marriage I'd spent fifteen years not leaving. The version of him sitting across from me now was complicating that plan, and I had no idea what to do about it.

I made my voice warm. I didn't have to decide to. It came out warm.

"Carol. I think the chicken's an excellent choice. You should have whatever you want. Order the Reuben if you want the Reuben, the portion's reasonable. And I'm not your stepdaughter yet."

Carol looked up sharply. Her face went still for a fraction of a second. Then she laughed. It was the first laugh I'd heard from her that was hers and not a social instrument.

"Oh, well." She wiped under one eye with a pinky, careful of the mascara. "You're not, are you? You're not yet. That's good."

She looked at Dad.

"I'm sorry." A small laugh. "I've been calling you that in my head for weeks. Bob told me not to get ahead of myself." She glanced at my father. "I suppose I didn't listen."

I laughed properly this time. The defensive note was new. I hadn't heard her sound like a person who sometimes overrode my father before.

Dad's beaming came back, less performed than it had been since they sat down.

I closed my menu. I didn't need to look at it again. I'd been coming to this restaurant since I was a resident.

"Carol. I'm going to have the chicken too. Dad, get whatever you want. Then I want to hear how you two met."

Carol's whole posture changed when I said her name like that. The shoulders came down. She set her menu on top of mine, neatly, slightly too neatly, how a woman sets a menu down when she puts things in particular places at home. She looked at Dad.

"Did you tell her how we met?"

"Some of it."

"Oh, then I get to tell the rest."

The waitress came. We ordered. Carol had a complicated set of questions about the dressing on the salad, then decided to get the chicken, and apologized after the waitress had walked away. Sorry. The food's much better here than what I'm used to. The apology wasn't smooth, and she didn't try to make it smooth. It sat there, a small bare thing she'd put on the table by accident.

It went past Dad like a wave he didn't notice. I wasn't sure yet whether it was a class signal or one more version of the nervousness she'd been carrying since the parking lot. I'd been jumping to conclusions all morning. This was the one I decided to be slower about.