Yesterday, after a long-awaited (and fortunately not too painful) dentist appointment, Charles and I took the little ones to the Red Lobster. I hadn't been to a Red Lobster in years. It was near the dentists' office, and, with the rain pouring buckets, we decided to have lunch out before picking Ines up from school.
The restaurant was really crowded. There were a lot of people out to lunch on a Friday, and many retirees. Manon was fascinated by the lobster tank in the waiting area. "Mommy, there's the mommy lobster!" she said. "There's a big one!". The baby just gazed at the slightly bubbling tank. If it's shiny, even just a little bit, he loves it.
Finally the host brought us to our table. "Your seafood expert will be right with you." I laughed a little. Soon enough, a waitress with long dark hair pulled roughly back off her face came up. She seemed to be in her mid or late twenties. "Hi, welcome to Red Lobster," she said, pretty friendly. I joked with her, "Are you our seafood expert?" She looked at me quietly, smiled and said, "Yes, I guess so." And so we ordered, got the kids settled. I kept lifting the baby up to see in the mirror that was right behind our table. Manon was really excited to be there too. There was a lot of chattering and babbling in our corner booth.
After the waitress brought our lunch, she came back to help crack Manon's child portion of crab legs. She looked at the baby sideways and then turned to the cracking, but she said "How old's the baby? Four months?" I told her he was six months, then asked her if she had any children.
Then she turned to me and said, really slowly, "I had a little boy." Then she went on to tell us that one morning in March she had walked into her little boy's room, and found him dead. He was only 14 months old. "They don't usually seat me parties with children," she said. "But we were really busy." Then she pulled out her black waitress pad, the kind with the guest checks overflowing, and lifted up all the mess of guest checks and put it on the table. There were two pictures: one a beautiful baby, maybe a year, crawling on the floor, smiling a wide dimpled grin. The other was of a small family, hours after a birth. "His name was Jamison."
"How do you cope?" I asked her, not knowing what else to say. "I don't know." She stared off, at the back wall of the restaurant. "He was too good for this place, that's what I keep telling myself. I'll see him again." And then she left, to cash out another table. But later she came back.
"You will always be his mother." Again, I couldn't think of anything else to say. And then she said, "For a whole month I couldn't even go into his room. Now I go in, and sit on the floor and play with his toys. I smell his diapers, I just want to feel him around me. He was my love, my best friend. I know I'll see him again."
I think there's a reason we went to Red Lobster yesterday. I don't think it was to comfort a woman who had just lost a child. You can't really do that. Maybe it was for us to have a lesson in keeping things in perspective. Maybe. I'm not sure.
I looked at my children in a different way yesterday afternoon, and held them close.
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