“Are you okay?” Tate asks, pulling me out of my thoughts as we drive past a couple of run down brick buildings and pull into a jam-packed parking lot.
“Yeah, I’m good.”
“Are you sure? You’ve been really quiet the whole drive over.”
“I just was thinking about how I wish I had come to this part of town more often when I was younger.”
“It’s the strip club, isn’t it? I always knew you had a wild streak.”
I laugh and playfully swat his arm as he parks and cuts the engine. As I unbuckle my seat belt, Tate comes around and holds the door open for me, holding out his hand to help me step down. His palm engulfs mine as his fingers curl around mine and we walk toward the restaurant.
The air smells like charcoal and beer, making my mouth water and as we approach the doors, I wonder how long this place has been in business. Spending time in Los Angeles, I’ve learned not to judge anything by their appearance, especially restaurants. Some of the best food I’ve had while in California was at little hole-in-the-wall places that didn’t bother with proper lighting and saw nothing wrong with duct-taping the upholstery on their booths. In a city built on fame-hungry chefs, all vying for their restaurant to be “the next big thing”, the real contenders for the best food in the city were mom-and-pop places where you wouldn’t find TV crews or journalists doing reviews, but would usually get a warm smile and a free cookie with your bill.
I’m not sure what to expect as we walk by a huge statue of a bronze cow sitting off to the side next to a row of rocking chairs and a wooden bench. The restaurant looks like it once was a large barn, but the paint is peeling off the shingled planks, the roof is mismatched from various patchworks, and the glowing neon sign is only half lit, so instead of reading,
Burger Barn
, it just says, Barn.
One step inside and I’m in love. The floors are littered in peanut shells, and white Christmas lights hang down the supporting beams creating a soft glow against the dark mahogany walls. The exposed kitchen sits at the back, next to a u-shaped bar where the drink specials are written on a chalkboard. Oversized wooden picnic tables make up a majority of the space, encouraging strangers to sit with each other, and kitschy old advertisements from the fifties hang on the walls.
“I love the vibe here,” I say, as the hostess shows us to an open spot in the back corner and hands us each a menu. “It has that down-home country feel. It reminds me of Texas.”
“Have you been back to Texas at all since you’ve had Jonah?”
“No. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it, but the few times I’ve tried to reach out to my parents, they just brushed me off. I suppose it’s easier for them to just pretend like I never existed.”
“I’m really sorry, Callie. No parent should ever want to forget their kids.”
His jaw grows tight and I wonder if he’s thinking about his mom and the way she abandoned them. I understand the anger that comes along with wondering how a parent could do that since mine have been doing it for seven years, but I also know that this probably isn’t the right time to talk about this stuff. I don’t want to sour our first date talking about spoiled relationships.
“Listen, how about we agree for tonight, there’s no talk of our parents, okay?”
“Deal.”
“So, do you come here a lot?”
He opens up his menu and I quickly follow. “Yeah, I love coming here. The guys usually prefer going to Red’s because it’s open later, but Matt and I usually come here at least once a week. Did you have anything like this in L.A.?”
“No, not really. There were some decent burger and barbecue places, but nothing like back home in Texas. It’s one of the things I really miss about back home. Hard to find a Californian who knows how to slow-smoke their meat properly.”
“Yeah, when I was in Beaufort, there were some really amazing BBQ places. The south really knows how to do it like no other part of the country. There was this one place I went to called Babe’s and it wasn’t a big place, it was probably about a fourth of the size of this one, but it was run by this woman named Holly and I swear, she must have put crack in her dry rub because after one bite, I was addicted. Went back there nearly every day for lunch. It was probably my third week in that she sat down across from me with a straight face and told me very seriously, ‘Son, you’re an attractive man, but you have the wrong parts to get into my pants. I don’t do dick.’ I literally started choking on my food. I never really thought about how it would look to her, me showing up like that day after day.”
I laugh and reach for my napkin, unrolling the silverware before smoothing the napkin across my lap. “Oh my god, I’m not sure who I’m more embarrassed for.”
“Yeah, it was a little awkward for a few days after that, but I reassured her that I was truly there just for the food, and then things got back to normal. She still emails me occasionally asking when I’m going to come back to visit.”
“I can’t believe you ate the same thing every day for so long. Didn’t you get sick of it?”
“Not at all.”
“I can’t imagine eating the same thing every day for lunch.”
“I guess once I find something I like, it has a way of sticking with me.”
He winks at me and I pull my menu upright to hide the grin that’s crossing my face. Our waitress swings by to take our drink order and Tate orders a beer while I choose to try their strawberry lemonade, which according to their menu claims to be the best in the world. The waitress jots down our drinks on her notepad and leaves us to decide on our food.
“So, what’s your favorite thing to order here?” I stare at the laminated pages.
“Guess.”
I stare at the menu, glancing up at him every few seconds to find him watching me with an amused expression on his face. It takes me a minute, but then I see. And I can hardly believe it. “The Charred-Charlene burger. A beef brisket burger with cheddar cheese, onions, grilled tomatoes and a spicy chipotle mayonnaise. You got her burger on the menu?”
A full, throaty sound emits from his lips when he throws his head back and laughs. I want to die wrapped in that sound.
“I can’t believe you remember.” He shakes his head.
“That’s definitely a memory I’ll never forget,” I reply smiling. “I’ve never seen Charlene get so mad before. I really thought she was going to kill us that day.”
When we were fourteen, Charlene decided to make a full Fourth of July dinner to bring to the block party our neighbors were throwing. She’d spent twelve hours making her family’s brisket recipe complete with her homemade cornbread. Her mistake was leaving it out on the counter while she went to take a shower. Tate and I were just home from spending the morning out by the lake with Tate’s dad, and we were
famished.
The plan was to go back to my house so I could change, and then meet up with his dad at the park for hot dogs. The only problem with that plan was that we were hungry
now.
Seeing that brisket out on the counter top was like putting Tweety-Bird in front of Sylvester. There was absolutely no way Tate wasn’t going to eat some of that meat. What I hadn’t accounted for when I agreed that we could eat some, was that he was fourteen years old and a growing teenage boy, which meant within ten minutes, three-quarters of the brisket had been inhaled, so by the time Charlene came back downstairs, she didn’t have anything to bring to the block party. Luckily, she was able to use the remainder of the brisket to make hamburger patties, and people still talked about those burgers even years later.
“It was the best damn brisket I’d ever had,” Tate says with glassy eyes, as he recalls the memory.
“And the last. At least from our household.”
The waitress stops by again, and Tate orders the brisket burger while I’m still caught between choices. I can feel the aggravation rolling off her in the way her hand twitches around her pen and the tight smile her lips have formed. Before moving here, I would have considered that rude. I would have looked at the way her hip is cocked to the side and the way her toe is tapping against the floor and thought, I’m the customer, why are you rushing me? But after working at Red’s, I get it. Time is money in the business of serving. The longer one customer takes, it means the less time you have to refill drinks for the others, less time to check if you have a new table, which ultimately means, less money.
“I’m sorry,” I say again to the waitress for the third time. “I’m just really torn.”
Tate reaches over the table and grabs my hand, letting his thumb caress the inside of my palm. It’s such a sweet gesture, and completely unexpected, that I look up in confusion.
“Do you trust me?” he asks.
Feeling like this is a trick question of some kind, I slowly reply, “Yes…” drawing out the s.
He turns his attention away from me to look at the waitress. “She’ll have the “Yo, Vito!” burger. Extra provolone and hold the pickled onion.”
I feel like it just got twenty-degrees hotter. It shouldn’t really surprise me that he knows exactly what I like without me having to say anything. It shouldn’t surprise me that he remembers that my love for cheese comes in only second to my son, and that I hate onions of all varieties. But it does. And the fact that he just ordered for me is one of the sexiest things I’ve ever experienced.
I’m not really an old-fashioned kind of girl. I don’t believe men should have to open doors for women, or that men should have to make more money than a woman in a relationship. And I don’t usually believe in men ordering for women at restaurants. But there’s something so inherently sexy having Tate order for me, not because it’s chivalrous, but because he does it knowing me so thoroughly that he knows what I’ll want. And there’s nothing sexier than a man who listens, and truly knows a woman.
After our waitress leaves, I reach over and grab a small metal pail that’s filled with peanuts and begin to shuck one. “So, tell me, what was South Carolina like?”
“Humid as fuck.”
I laugh and take a sip of my lemonade remembering how thick the air in Texas is during the summer months. There were days I’d wake up and go to school looking like I’d stuck my finger in an electrical socket because a can of aerosol had nothing on Mother Nature.
“You would have loved Beaufort, though. The trees all had that Spanish moss you love, and everyone puts hot sauce on
everything
.”
“What can I say? I like things that are hot and spicy,” I say with a shrug.
“I’m counting on that.”
My cheeks heat with his innuendo and I find myself picking at the edge of my napkin. Squirming in my seat, I clear my throat and try to steer the conversation back to a safe topic because the way Tate’s staring at me, I’m about three seconds away from becoming a full on floozy by swiping everything off this table and begging him to take me right here. Other people be damned.
“Aren’t there a lot of crocodiles over there?”
“Alligators, and yes, there are.”
I shudder with the thought. I’m not someone who gets spooked by eight-legged creepy-crawlies, but alligators and sharks are definitely on my red-list of creatures I’d be okay with never encountering in my lifetime.
He laughs and pops a handful of peanuts in his mouth. “They’re not so bad, really. I mean, yeah, you don’t want to go sticking your hand near its mouth, but in general they don’t bother people as long as people don’t bother them. Although, Matt almost got his arm taken off by one after he was poking it with a stick.”
“Sounds smart.”
“Yeah. It was right after he turned twenty-one and we were drunk.”
“Alcohol has a funny way of making people do stupid things. What did you guys do for fun over there?”
“Everything and anything we could find.” He pauses and strums his fingers on the tabletop as he thinks. “There’s a lot of water holes in that area, so we’d go swimming, kayaking and fishing. Of course a lot of our time was spent at bars, and occasionally we’d drive into Charleston to go to a concert or club. But we didn’t really have all that much free-time because my Uncle kept us pretty busy at the precinct. What about you? What did you do for fun in L.A.?”
“Honestly? Nothing really. Most of my time was spent either working or with Jonah.”
“You never got out and did all those touristy things? Los Angeles is one of the top tourist destinations in the world, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, I suppose. My friend, Patty and I would occasionally go into Chinatown for dim sum or I’d take Jonah to the beach, but otherwise I usually was at home reading or playing Bejeweled on the computer.”
He groans and shakes his head. “You still read those smutty romance novels, don’t you?”
I huff out a breath. “They’re not smutty!”
“Oh really? What’s the title of the one you’re reading now and I’ll go look at the cover?”
“You can’t judge a book by the cover, Tate.”
“If it has some Fabio looking guy on it, I sure as hell can.” He grins.
“You’re just jealous that you’re not on the cover of a book, aren’t you?”
He leans forward and cocks an eyebrow at me. “Oh sweetness, don’t think I didn’t see you checking out my abs that first night I showed up on your doorstep during my run. You know as well as I do, I could damn well be on a cover if I wanted to.”