She almost seemed to be smiling. She hadn’t gotten up and walked out, at least, leaving me to pay for her Vietnamese coffee.

“No.”

“Hi. I’m Brian and I’ll be your server tonight.”

“And just in time,” I said.

Brian was tall and wide-shouldered, handsome as a shirt model. He blinked twice and started to try to get us to buy drinks before we ate. I could see in his face and hear in his voice that he was the type of person who was nervous around people and pretended not to be. He’d built an elaborate personality over his nervousness. He’d developed an armor, an act, a defensive outgoingness. It was the kind of thing that made me dislike someone right away. And the name was no good, besides. One of God’s little jokes.

I said, “We’ll both have the special.”

“There are two specials tonight.”

“We’ll have one each.” I turned back to Janet. “Would you pick the appetizers and dessert?”

Jason went into one of the speeches he had memorized: “The appetizer special tonight is braised scallops in a lemon butter saffron sauce with shallots and thinly sliced Shiitake mushrooms, finished with a kumquat glaze.”

“We’ll try one,” Janet told him. “Two forks, please.”

I could tell by the way she said “forks” that she was a real Bostonian.

“I’ll have what she’s drinking,” I said.

Adam wrote this down and then began to tell us what the two dinner specials were. I put my hand on his arm. “We’ll have them,” I said. “One each. We’ve been married eight years, this is our anniversary, we’re trying to introduce some unpredictability into the relationship, so we don’t really want to know what we’re having, if that’s okay with you.”

Dominick looked at me earnestly. The menus were huge and he was awkward collecting them. “Anything to drink?” he asked.

“What she’s having.”

“Very good. I’ll be right back with the scallops. They’re excellent.”