Sam came to our table.
He was in his early twenties, I thought, with a careful quality about him, the particular care of someone who takes his work seriously and is making sure to do it right. He held his order pad with both hands. He greeted us with genuine warmth and asked about drinks and wrote down the order and read it back to us line by line to confirm he had it correct.
Leo was already smiling before Sam finished.
I knew what the smile was. I had spent fourteen years reading my son’s face and I knew the difference between his smiles, the genuine one and the performing one and the uncomfortable one and this one, which was the one that appeared when something had struck him as funny and he had not yet decided whether to express it.
I put my foot against his leg under the table.
He looked past me.
Sam moved into the specials and there was a word that was difficult, the way certain words are difficult for certain mouths, a word that required more from him than others, and he stopped and started it again from the beginning, slower this time, making sure he got it right.
Leo rolled his eyes.
The rolling of the eyes alone I could have addressed and moved past. But then he pulled his shoulders forward. Then he tilted his head. Just for a moment, just long enough for me to see it clearly, and his friend was getting a text at that moment with the same expression still on his face, the expression of someone who has found a joke and is sharing it.
Sam finished the specials.
He thanked us and went back toward the kitchen with the same care he had brought to the table.
I sat in the booth and I looked at my son and I could not find the boy who sat with lonely kids at parties anywhere in what I was seeing.
I did not make a scene.
I want to explain this choice because some people would say that making a scene was the correct response, that Sam deserved a public defense, that Leo deserved a public consequence. I do not disagree that Sam deserved to be defended. What I chose, instead of the public version, was the version that would produce something more than the immediate satisfaction of the defense. Making a scene at that table would have become, in Leo’s memory and in his telling of it to his friends, the story of the time his mom embarrassed him in public. The thing I was trying to produce was not embarrassment. It was understanding.
