This is a small restaurant. A meat-and-three, where waitresses wear T-shirts. Where your iced tea never falls below the rim of your glass. Where catfish is fried whole on the bone.
I have two dates accompanying me tonight.
My mother-in-law—who holds my arm for balance. I’m carrying her purse. And my wife—who walks ten steps ahead of us at all times.
The dress code is summer weekend casual. I’m wearing jeans. My dates are wearing pearls, pumps, and ruby lipstick.
They always do. In fact, I’ve never seen them exit the house in anything they wouldn’t want to be buried in.
We order a round of teas. My dates scan the menus without conversation. When our server arrives, my dates have questions.
“Is your tartar sauce made with DUKE’S?” asks my wife.
“Are there REAL ham hocks in
your collards?” asks my mother-in-law. “I don’t like those ham-flavored packets.”
“What’s in the potato salad?” asks my wife. “If I even LOOK at a stick of celery I start gagging…”
“Are your French fries STEAK fries, or shoestring?”
“What kind of cake do you have tonight?”
“Where’d you graduate high school?”
“What’s your stance on foreign commerce?”
“What’s your social security number?”
The server looks to me.
“I’ll have a barbecue sandwich, ma’am,” I say.
Two more women enter the restaurant. They have white hair, and they are also sporting pearls. They sit behind us. They speak with accents that are soft and sophisticated.
As fate would have it, my two dates know them—sort of.
Miss Youth Dew and Miss Dignified are from Anytown, Alabama. My mother-in-law…