Chapter 11 - The Saturday Night Out
That evening, for the first time in six years, Dwight and I did something we had never allowed ourselves to do.
We got a babysitter.
Tamika’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Chloe, a straight-A student at Heritage High who was saving up for a car, agreed to watch Cal for two hours while Dwight and I went out to dinner.
We didn't go to Sycamore Glen Country Club. We didn't go anywhere with a dress code or valet parking or a committee reviewing our tax returns.
Instead, Dwight drove us down to a small, unassuming barbecue joint on the edge of downtown Bentonville called The Smoke Pit, where the checkered tablecloths were made of oilcloth and the pulled pork came served on heavy white paper plates with thick slices of white bread and house-pickled jalapeños.
We sat in a corner booth under a string of amber Edison bulbs, sharing a basket of ribs and a cold root beer.
"You okay?" Dwight asked, wiping a smudge of sweet barbecue sauce off his thumb with a paper napkin. He looked across the table at me, his eyes warm and steady in the dim light.
"I'm better than okay," I said, taking a bite of coleslaw. "I feel like I've been carrying a fifty-pound sack of wet concrete in my backpack for six years, and somebody finally cut the straps."
Dwight smiled, a slow, easy grin that crinkled the corners of his eyes. "Good. Because I was getting tired of watching you break your back so your folks could eat prime rib on Sunday nights."
"Why didn't you ever say anything?" I asked, looking down at my hands. "When I first put my card on their account—why didn't you tell me I was being an idiot?"
May you like
He reached across the table, covering my hand with his large, calloused palm. "Because it was your family, Jody. A man has to let his wife figure out her own ghosts. But I promised myself that the day they crossed the line with our boy—that was the day the game ended."
I squeezed his hand back, feeling a deep, abiding warmth that had nothing to do with barbecue and everything to do with the man sitting across from me. We had survived twelve years of low wages, broken appliances, leaky roofs, and parasitic relatives—and we were still standing right here, stronger than ever.
