The Dragon’s E-Mail Order Menage

Chapter 5

    “What do you have to offer a man to drink around here? What about scotch? Do you have any really good scotches in this place?”

“Um, maybe? I don’t really know, sir. I can go and ask the bartender if you want. He’s got a better chance of knowing than I do.”

“What about champagne? What’s the nicest champagne you serve, young man?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. I’m not sure we really have any champagne. I can check, when I check about the scotch.”

“You know what? Don’t worry about it. Just tell the bartender to make three top shelf margaritas. Tell him to make them with whatever he would want to drink, okay? That sound good?”

“Yes,” the server said with an audible sigh of relief and a smile clearly meant for Levi and Levi alone, “I can definitely do that. I’ll be right back with those.”

“Excellent. Oh! And queso. Big bowl of queso.”

“Sure thing! Coming right up!”

Levi gave him the most reassuring smile he could manage, a smile he hoped conveyed to the harried looking waiter that they were going to get through this together. He waited until the kid (he didn’t look like he could be much older than eighteen) ran off with a grateful look on his face. Then he turned his attention to his parents, giving them both the sour look they deserved and would undoubtedly fail to even notice being shot in their direction.

His father never appeared to notice at all. He just looked around with a slightly disgruntled expression on his face. His nose was wrinkled like he smelled something that wasn’t quite up to his high standards and the way he was peering at every surface he could get his judgmental eyes on like he was hoping to find something he could complain about.

His mother looked around like she was afraid (and god was that embarrassing; his ridiculously dressed up mother looking around her like she had inadvertently landed herself in some third world country). Finally she made eye contact with him and Levi gave her a grin that wasn’t meant to make her feel better in any way.

“What?”

“What do you mean, ‘What?’”

“Well, you’re just sitting there staring at me, Levi. Why are you looking at me with that expression?”

“And which expression would you be referring to?”

“Don’t, Levi. Don’t pretend to be feeble-minded with me. You know exactly which expression I’m talking about. It’s that one where you’re telling me how stupid, how ridiculous I’m being without ever actually saying anything. It’s a look you perfected in high school and it only seems to have gotten better with age. So I guess, in some ways, bravo. You’ve accomplished something.”

“Well Jesus, Mom, have you looked around? Have either of you looked around? We aren’t at some five star restaurant.”

“Clearly,” his father said with a look of poorly-contained disgust.

“Yes, clearly,” his mother chimed in. “Why did you bring us here?”

“Why did I bring you here? Because, my darling mother, this is my favorite place in Santa Fe.”

“But why, sweetheart? There are so many wonderful places in the city. Places that don’t toss a basket of chips on the table when you sit down.”

“But the tamales are out of this world. And the margaritas are fu*king fantastic. They’ll make you forget all about that scotch and champagne.”

“Levi!” his mother said with the kind of breathless disapproval that always drove him crazy in a woman. “Language! You were raised better than that, and I should know.”

Levi bit his tongue, unwilling to get into the sort of sh*t his mother was on her way to starting right now. But it was rich, it was definitely rich to hear her talking about the way she had raised him. He had been raised all right, and he had been raised very well. He had been loved, watched over, doted over, if he was telling the truth. But it hadn’t been by his mother. It hadn’t been by his father, either.

 Neither of his parents had been around the house long enough to do those things. They checked in with him, of course, that was what dutiful parents did and they were all about keeping up appearances. But it had been a nanny who had really raised him. He had loved her, too, in a way that had made it confusing for him when he was young. He  had trouble deciphering who was his actual parent. Sh*t, he had been confused as to what a parent really was.

He knew who he was supposed to call parents and he knew they spent hardly any time with him at all. Then there was Miss Charlotte who was only supposed to be the nanny and she was the one who knew exactly how he liked his grilled cheese and made him Sleepy Time tea when he woke up with a nightmare he couldn’t get over enough to get back to sleep. He had loved her the way, he realized as an adult, he should have loved a mother. She had been the constant, the support system in his life and then, when he was thirteen years old, he had come home to find that she was gone.

There was a lovely letter she had left for him that was actually stained with tears (he hadn’t realized that was something that actually happened before he had slid that envelope open and read the goodbye he hadn’t even been granted in person) and nobody in the vast, unyielding house to greet or comfort him. He just sat there, not turning on a light not making any food. Not doing anything but waiting for his parents to come home and explain what the fu*k had happened.

He had no idea how long it was that he sat there but when they got home they were both drunk (which was not too terribly unusual) and both the inside and the outside of the house were pitch black (which was unusual). They didn’t even notice him sitting there for the first fifteen minutes or so of them being home and when they did see him there, his father laughed at him and his mother scolded him for leaving everything dark.