Oh fuck, not again. Dad is motioning for our server to come over. She already remade his Arnold Palmer with “less ice” and agreed to cook his steak “somewhere between rare and medium-rare.” What more could he possibly want from her? Dead God, please don’t let it be what I think it is.
“Hey sweetheart, come over here for a second,” he shouts across the restaurant. She pretends not to hear him, which buys me a few minutes to try and reason with him. “Please don’t,” I beg. I even try to distract him by asking who won the Ravens vs. Broncos game last night, but it’s too late. He has become an unstoppable force. A man on a mission to glean what he believes is public information: her name.
He motions to her with the urgency of a drowning person. I try to pull him back inside the booth, but his arm has become bionic in his quest to get her undivided attention.
Unable to ignore his increasingly manic body language, she’s forced to come over. “How’s everybody doing over here?” she asks with practiced politeness. He answers by touching her arm. Time stops. I wince as he brings down the hammer. “What’s your name, hon?” he asks.
Stuck between telling him to go fuck himself and keeping her job, she introduces herself as Samantha. “Great name,” he says. He goes on to tell her he had a dog named Samantha growing up that had to be put down after contracting rabies. “Back then, there was no pet euthanasia. It was just you, your dog, and your shotgun.”
Saved by the kitchen bell, Samantha excuses herself to run food. “Good kid,” he says, contorting his body to watch her walk away.
Holy shit, that was bad. A least it wasn’t as bad as the time he asked our server at the Macaroni Grill to explain the meaning behind all of her tattoos. But still pretty rough. He tries to call her back over at a volume usually reserved for sports announcers, but she’s already busy at another table telling someone else’s dad her name is Caroline.