Yesterday, Daniel and I were driving to a meeting. All the restaurants and stores we passed brought back memories from the 14 years we lived here, memories of Dragon. Here was the Game Stop from which he’d buy his video games; here was the Creamistry we went to that one time; here was the Mens Wearhouse where we bought his first suit. Each storefront was a stab to my heart, and not surprisingly, I started crying. Then we passed Islands.
“Were you with us, at that lunch at Islands?” I asked Daniel, “That one time with Dragon and Hannah?”
“No,” Daniel replied, “what happened?”
It was a hot Saturday, and the three of us had gone out for hamburgers. We went to Islands. We each ordered our burgers and fries, and the kids ordered sodas. The burgers were great, and as we wiped our mouths with our napkins, Dragon took one last sip from the straw of his soda. He then peeled off the lid of the plastic soda cup so that he could suck on the ice cubes, and what did we see? A dead fly doing the backstroke in his empty soda cup.
I quickly felt ill, thinking about how that fly had been in his drink THE WHOLE TIME.
I called the waiter over and explained what happened. Sympathetically disgusted, he took the cup away, saying he would take care of it. When he returned, I was expecting him to offer Dragon a new glass of soda – which I would REFUSE, afraid to chance another dead fly. Instead, he put our check down with a sincere apology, and explained that for their mistake, they wanted to pay for our lunch. It was an honorable way to handle a yucky situation.
I relayed the information to Dragon and Hannah, and told them that the management was giving us a free lunch for the mistake of serving us a drink with a fly in it.
“Mom,” Dragon quickly chimed, with a sparkle in his eye. “We should always travel with a dead fly in a Ziploc. Then we could put it in our glass at the end of our meals. Imagine, all the time, free lunch!”
Recent Comments