“Order up!”

As a child, my Mom had always asked me, after every single cartoon or sitcom, what catch phrase I would like to respond to when I grew up. She always told me the best heroes always knew when they had to step up to the plate by a certain ‘call to action’ they would receive.

I never quite got around to answering her question, it was far too difficult for a kid to answer, I suspect, and I never really saw myself as a larger than life character to begin with. It’s either you got it or you don’t, right?

So I wasn’t larger than life, but I was starting to feel like I was too large for my uniform as I stood up to respond to my call of duty. I tugged on my uniform to straighten out the creases that had set in from me sitting down and folding napkins. I looked down at myself, seeing the polyester hug onto my figure, and that reminded me so much of my Mother’s figure. I always feared the day I would cross the line, where I didn’t just weigh more than average.

I didn’t have that much to worry about though, I wasn’t getting any heavier. I spent most of my day serving people food, I hardly had time to eat any food myself, but I would have to tell my Dad to order me a new uniform anyway. This uniform was still too tight on me.

My dad and I were your modern day partners in crime and the Baxter’s Family Restaurant was our main gig. We’ve had a family restaurant in the middle of nowhere since I was a little girl and as much as my Mom filled me with fantasies of doing bigger things with my life, responding to some great catch phrase of a call, the semantic version of a bat signal perhaps, I found myself pretty content spending my days responding to my Dad’s voice calling “Order up!”.

Muleshoe, Texas, was a notoriously small town and our family restaurant was the cornerstone of its dining culture. As a little girl, it was great, from what I remember. I spent every evening helping my Mom clean tables and talking to the locals as they waited for their meals. Seeing as the town was so small, we knew every customer we had on a first name basis, and our restaurant was like an extended home to everyone in our town, and my Mom was virtually, I daresay, the town’s ray of sunshine. All anyone had to do on a stressful, barren day was order the special at the Baxter’s family restaurant and ask my Mom for five minutes of her time, and it would be all okay, and if it wasn’t, all you had to do was add some Sangria to your order, we were the only place in town that stocked it. I liked to see my parents as small time heroes of a small time city, and I gobbled up every chance to learn the ins and outs of the business. They always talked about how in their post-adolescence, when the world was but a stage and they had an infinite pool of dreams and potential to pick from, that they would dream of having a restaurant, and it elated me that they had being able to achieve their goals in their lifetime – especially now that Mom was gone.

It had only been a few years since my Mom had lost her fight with cancer, and that’s when life really started to change. My Dad had vowed to her that he would keep their dream alive until his dying breath, but she had forced me to take a different kind of vow. Okay she didn’t really force me, but she urged me not to stay in this small town forever – she told me a secret she had never shared with dad. Although she loved our little town of Muleshoe with all her heart, and loved every family she was connected to in it, she had always dreamed of seeing the world, or at least travelling to a bigger town, and she regretted dying without doing it. She asked me to find the courage in myself to explore what the world had to offer, and not limit myself to the family restaurant. She said it was made to let our dreams become a reality, not to hold us back. Of course at the time this sounded almost ludicrous. She was supposed to get better! All that talk about death was superfluous and quite stifling, all she had to do was get better and we could all see the world. Together.

“Teresa! Did you hear me? Table seven’s order is ready,” the sound of my Dad’s voice was stern, but still held its gentle tendencies. That’s just the kind of guy he was, it was always difficult to keep a grudge against him.

“Sorry, Dad. Does this seem a little too tight to you?” I asked, tugging at the hemline of my dress. My dad called them ‘traditional style uniforms’ which was pretty much code for ancient and unattractive if you asked me.

“What are you talking about?” he asked, not even glancing at my uniform. He was too busy getting his act together for lunch hour. “The lunch rush is happening in ten minutes, and you need to be on top of your current tables. So, could you please take this food to the Martins?”

I sighed and grabbed the two plates out of the window, trying to push back down the rising levels of self-consciousness my shrinking dress was giving me. I noticed my Dad was smirking, and for the briefest moment I thought he might be mocking my dress in his head, until I realized he was just admiring his ‘work’. Dad’s Masterpiece Meatloaf was on the day’s special board, and he was really proud of his recipe. Both plates were filled with a gracious amount of portions, along with mixed vegetables and a roll. He always kept things simple. He constantly reminded me that keeping things simple was what the locals wanted, every time I suggested a bit of a change to our almost archaic menu. The business had managed to stay profitable in this small town for over thirty-five years, so maybe he did have a point, but all it was going to take to give us a serious run for our money was a new restaurant with a new menu. I turned around with the Martin’s orders and headed to their table.

The Martins, like most of the folk in this town, were a peaceful couple well into their twilight years. They just sat there, sipping on their hot tea and engaging in small talk about seeds for their garden, how good a job the painter did or whatever it was old couples considered small talk. They lived a few blocks down, so they were practically our neighbors. I had graduated high school with their grandson, Gavin. He had left our little town a few years back and Dean and Phyllis were the only members of that household left.

“Here you go,” I smiled as I placed a plate in front of Phyllis. “Take it easy diving into the food now, we don’t want another incident, now do we?” I teased Dean as I lay his meal in front of him.

“Don’t worry about me, pumpkin!” Dean responded, smiling voraciously as he got ready to eat.

“Anything else you would like?” I asked as I arranged the napkins and cutlery the same way my Mom taught me all those years back.

“No, dear,” said Dean in his earnest and elderly voice. “I’m ready to eat this meal up. How ‘bout you Love?” he glanced away from his meal for a split second, almost as if to register with his wife to show that he always remembered his love for her, even when faced with his favorite meal.

Phyllis gave a subtle roll of her eyes at Dean’s feigned concern then shot me with a kind smile. “Everything’s fine, Teresa. Thank you.” I nodded and stepped away from the table, but before I could get two steps away Phyllis called out to me, “Oh, Teresa.”

“Yes?” I spun around. The way my dress moved brought back my over awareness of my size.

“I forgot to tell you. Gavin insisted I tell you he will be in town next weekend. He knows we spend a lot of time here and that you still work here.”

“Oh,” I responded. Gavin, huh? I wondered what his life was like, outside our small town life. I hadn’t seen the guy since we graduated, nor had I heard anything about him until this very moment. The little bits of detail I could recall all came from town gossip, which was rather inconclusive, people simply said he had gone to college. Nobody said what he went to do or where he went to do it. I was close to him as a kid because we lived on the same street, but we drifted apart when we entered high school. I was more into sports and he was more into Physics. That kind of stuff can make or break a friendship in high school. “How is he doing? I bet he’s having a grand time with his big city family, isn’t he?”

Phyllis chuckled a little. “Family? Gavin doesn’t have any family except those of us he left here. That boy is married to his work, I tell you. Treats his contracts like babies, instead of having real children. I’m still trying to accept the fact that I won’t have any great-grandchildren, but at least we made it this far, right Dean?” She looked at Dean, who was engrossed in his meal already and hardly paying any attention.

He swallowed his food and let his cutlery down for a moment. “Let the boy make his own choices, Phyllis. Each to their own. He don’t wanna have kids? He shouldn’t have kids then. Maybe one day some pretty city girl will take a liking to him and he’ll buckle under the pressure of her goldilocks, but until then, we mind our own business.”

“He’s over forty, Dean. You focus on your meatloaf instead of wishing on the stars like that.” Phyllis said. It was always amusing watching old couples squabble. No one ever won and no one ever lost, but they did it anyway. “You know the reason he’s going to be in town is for the reunion. I’m sure you’ll meet each other there.”

The reunion. It had been weeks since the invitation popped up in my email, and I had completely forgotten about it. Attending my twenty-year high school reunion was not exactly on my to-do list. I must have pushed it to the back of my mind as soon as I had finished reading it because I had no interested whatsoever in attending it. Thinking about it in retrospect, it was a good call to discard it. Meeting all those people there, people like Gavin, was a whole load of unnecessary pressure. I couldn’t imagine finding any pleasure in spending an entire evening with people that had all grown up in this town, just like me, that eventually left this town, unlike me. I chose to stay in this town because I liked this town. If no one else felt the same way I did, I couldn’t bear having to explain myself and convincing twenty-three fellow graduates that I was happy here.

Saying they all left might be a bit of an exaggeration on my part but the few people that did stay here still got involved with the corporate world, pursued big time white collar careers and spent their free time building families and creating legacies. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had sex, so the chance of having babies was pretty low. I had lived the single woman life for a while now, and I wouldn’t have anything in common with anyone at that reunion. I decided it was not worth my time at all.