Chapter Fifteen: A Real First Date?

I asked her To Attend

Somewhere in there, between that birthday dinner and the slow return to something resembling normal life, Gayle and I were still just friends. At least that is what I believed at the time. Looking back now, I can see the line where things probably shifted, though neither of us would have said it out loud then.

It happened because of my son.

I love my son, William Turner Jabbour, and his birthday falls on December 14 every year. In 2014 that meant he was turning twenty-two. I had always had a little saying for younger people who didn’t yet have kids.

“Have them by the time you’re thirty-two,” I would tell them, “because when you’re fifty and they’re eighteen you might still need to be cool.”

In December of 2014 I was fifty-two and Turner was twenty-two, so I suppose I still qualified as cool enough to host the weekend.

Turner came down from Memphis with a few of his friends and stayed with me at the house in Sugarwood. The plan was simple enough. A birthday weekend at the beach, a little time with friends, and a dinner out.

Somewhere between my birthday on November 25 and Turner’s arrival in December, Gayle had stopped by the house again. I needed to run over to Lily Pad to pick up one last piece of furniture to finish the place. She came along with me. We walked around the shop, she looked at things, and we spoke very little.

I found a bench I liked.

She nodded and said it was cool.

We brought it back to the house and I set it where it belonged. As she was leaving I mentioned that Turner was coming into town for his birthday and that we were going to dinner at Whiskey Bravo.

“Stop by and go with us,” I said.

She said sure.

Whiskey Bravo was an easy walk from the house. My friend Eddie Upchurch had once allowed me an easement through his yard on Seagrove Village Boulevard that led to a walking path toward the beach and over toward the restaurant. Eddie has since passed away and I miss him. He was one of those good people life places along your path for a while.

So that evening, December 14, we walked that way.

Turner was there, along with a few of his friends. They were all in that wonderful stage of life where the future is still wide open and the world feels like it belongs to you.

Gayle joined us for dinner.

And that night something felt just slightly different.

For the first time since I had met her she was dressed up a bit. Not in an obvious way, just enough that I noticed it and had the brief thought that maybe she looked like she was heading out on a date.

Then I dismissed the thought. We were just friends.

We all sat down and started ordering. The table quickly filled with the kind of food twenty-two-year-olds tend to gravitate toward.

Tomahawk pork chops.

Steaks.

Burgers.

Appetizers.

Everyone was all in.

Except Brian.

Brian was one of Turner’s friends and when the waiter came around he ordered a salad.

I didn’t think much of it at first. But when the appetizers arrived and the table was beginning to fill up with plates I leaned over and asked him quietly,

“Hey man… you ordered a salad. You sure that’s all you want?”

He looked at me and said, very politely,

“Yes sir. That’s all I can afford.”

The entire table exploded in laughter.

Brian had not yet realized the dinner was on me.

He took the joke well, and for the rest of the night the table settled into that easy rhythm that happens when good people share a meal and no one is in a hurry to be anywhere else.

At some point during the evening I remember looking across the table at Gayle. We were watching these kids laugh and talk about their lives and their futures.

And for a moment it felt almost like we were the elder parents presiding over the beginning of something they had not yet experienced.

It was a quiet moment.

But I think that might have been the first time either of us felt the possibility that maybe, just maybe, we would become something more than two people who had met for coffee a few weeks earlier.

When the evening ended we walked back toward the house.

Before she left, Gayle paused for a moment and said something that still makes me smile when I think about it.

“You know,” she said, “in Louisiana we hug our friends. It’s okay to hug, you know.”

And so we hugged goodnight.

That was it.

Looking back now, that may have been the first real date.

Neither of us knew it at the time.