Jen Maria (Leal) Harris

We just wanted our cheat meal.

It’s a long enough drive up the North Shore on a full stomach, but after two weeks of intermittent fasting, substituting zucchini for pasta, cauliflower for rice, lettuce for bread, and consuming less than 50g of sugar per day, the crave was high. Oh yes, it was high. 

After living in Northern Minnesota for four years, we have developed a comprehensive list of our  favorites: best reuben sandwich, best coffee shop, best buffet, and best plate of onion rings. Food is serious business for us. There are times when these treats aren’t just down the street so you have to prepare for a mini road trip and pack accordingly.  Really, we’ll take any excuse to take Scenic Highway 61 with Lake Superior nestled at our side.

We would have walked 500 miles for those beer battered onion rings at one of our favorite rustic log-cabin-esque touristy roadside restaurants, but 35.8 miles in a car was about the threshold I could withstand before getting hangry and hallucinating that our orange cat was a gigantic fried delight.

The last time that we came here, the quality of the food was a little off, so we always like to give our go-to spots the benefit of the doubt, knowing that summer tourism can be a beast for those in the service industry. So we made the effort to try them again.

On the wait list for twenty minutes, we were directed to a familiar table in the middle of the pine-paneled restaurant. We sat down facing one another, in between us a small wooden table lacquered to high hell; our table for two. 

“Your server will be right with you.”

A few minutes passed as we patiently waited to order, wistfully glancing at the tall, towering spruce that imposed high above the highway through the front picture window. We knew what we wanted. 

The server slapped the left side of his upper back.

“Oh my god, how are ya??!”

I slowly raised my gaze at my husband’s direction as I had just been looking down at that moment in daydream. 

My eyes see a middle-aged woman smiling from ear to ear with her hand still on his back. My brain does not process the next moment until some time later. 

This stranger then pivots her torso and braces herself on his shoulder. Suddenly half of her head was underneath our table, placing her eyes on the ground in between his feet.  She was searching for something.

“Where’s the baby?”

My mortified face caught up with my brain and our happy server and I locked eyes. I would imagine that my face was that of a nauseous person about to cry and vomit soon thereafter. 

I forgot all about my hunger. I now focused on compartmentalizing the flood of emotions about to spill out after a movie played feverishly in my head. We’ve been together twenty-four years and are a childless not by choice couple. We can’t have a baby.

How was this movie already edited? Of course; I’ve played it in my mind a thousand times. The days turned nights of tear-soaked pillows and our morning-afters of a silence that makes blame blush. Our family trees growing around us with buds and blossoms reaching toward the sun while he and I are still stuck in the weeds, living in the shadows of friends, family, and society. The painful fertility testing and hearing the bad news soon thereafter - the innumerable negative pregnancy tests being dumped into the trash can - the fits of rage and shame after moments of unexpected triggers and damaging words - the mental anguish of knowing that we ran out of options after our bodies together cannot create - and the time, only a few months ago, that I had to talk myself out of putting an end to my suffering knowing that the void exists between us.

My face now showed the absence of the small strides that I had made recently.  Honestly, it had been nearly a month of being able to physically and mentally handle my triggers and it felt so good to not succumb to despondency.

The thousand yard stare strikes again.  How quickly I fell back into the depths.

As she apologized for mistaking him as somebody that she knew, she finally took our order. Not much was uttered on my side of the table.

We barely talked over that order of onion rings, but withdrew within instead. The stranger came back again fifteen minutes later because why would anybody take the hint or want to acknowledge the face of grief? She then cracked an awkward joke about how it must have been for me to see another hand on “your man’s back.”

I did not respond.

Fixating on the crusted cap on the bottle of ketchup, I thought to myself, “Where is the baby?...”