chili's
I spent many Fridays of my childhood at Chili's. Every weekend, after my father and brother got back from the Friday prayer, we would all get dressed and my father would drive us to the mall. We ate there every Friday for years until my mother complained one day that we always went to Chili's and she didn't even like it all that much. From then on out, there was a rule that each of us got a turn to pick a restaurant for Friday lunch. There were four of us, which was lucky. The first Friday was my dad's turn and he always picked Chili's. Then came my mother's turn and she often picked an Italian place or a Lebanese place. She liked trying new places that her colleagues told her about or that she read about somewhere or another. When it got to my turn, I often picked Chili's, which irritated my mother a great deal. My brother and I knew that we couldn't both pick Chili's in a given month. There was no guessing how that would play out. When I picked Chili's, he would go for Pizza Hut or Burger King.
I liked Chili's because the waiters were friendly and the chips and salsa were bottomless. There was one Egyptian waiter in particular who always said hello to my father, and I never forgot him because of the scar on his arm. It stood out to me as a child because it looked like somebody had stubbed a cigarette into his arm. I had recently watched the film Slumdog Millionaire and knew then that people were capable of truly evil things.
A few weeks ago, I moved back into my parents’ house after years of living abroad and trying to build a life of my own. I asked my father once I had settled in if we could go to Chili’s and he said that we can go on a Saturday because those were his Fridays now. That Saturday was yesterday. We nearly got into a car accident on the way that would have killed the three of us on the spot and I said it would be a shame for the reason of our death to be that we were on our way to Chili’s. It seemed too sad a story that we didn’t even get to order bottomless chips and salsa. Except we did order the chips and salsa and I got the quesadillas and my brother got the burger and my dad got the fajitas. And we all shared a Paradise Pie.
Towards the end of our meal, the restaurant manager stopped by to ask if we enjoyed our meal. He looked at my dad and asked if he recognised him and I immediately named the branch we went to when I was a child. My father later wondered how I recognised him so quickly and I said that he has a memorable scar. It did not frighten me at all to look at his scar. Perhaps because I now thought cigarette burn scars look beautiful and I also now knew that this was not a cigarette burn and also none of my business.
The truth is that I always think of him when I think of Chili’s. There was a point where I think I looked forward to seeing his face as much as I looked forward to taking a seat in their red leather booths and taking in the smell of corn and sizzling chicken. He was always more of a face than a name to me and it touched me to learn that our paths would magically cross fifteen years later and it would make my day like we were lifelong friends. It makes me wonder about what magical paths I’ll cross fifteen years from now.