We were shown to a table.
The restaurant was the kind that took its food seriously but was not precious about it, the kind of place where people were there to eat and the eating was good, with the low light and the leather booths that had the quality of somewhere that had been there long enough to mean something.
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.
