“I can’t. I shouldn’t have even included that in the options.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“It’s blasphemy, like Taco Bell for Mexican people. My Asian friends and I have an unspoken rule that we aren’t supposed to eat at PFC’s because it’s a fake Asian hodgepodge restaurant concocted by greedy corporate white people.”
He barked out a laugh. “I’ll bet you twenty dollars that you like the food.”
Twenty bucks was incentive enough for me to break trust with my Asian brethren. “You’re on.”
The rain pelted us from all directions the whole way there, only partially shielded by the giant golf umbrella he held high above us. The entire walk there, Nolan’s phone buzzed with texts, which he continually ignored.
“Sounds important,” I said as we turned down Pine Street.
He shook his head and frowned. “It’s just my parents. Both of them, tag-teaming me with messages. They want me to come visit them during fall break.”
“That sounds nice,” I murmured. “They want you home.” I couldn’t remember the last time my parents had begged me to come home to visit them.
“Nah, it’s more dubious than that. They want me to move back to North Carolina after grad school.”
I swallowed hard and kept quiet. Nothing could happen between us anyway. Not while I was his “boss.” Not with Asher ready to get me fired in a moment’s notice if I crossed the line.
A booth was ready as soon as we arrived, and the hostess walked us to a table near the window and handed us our menus. My stomach gurgled and made those yeti noises again. I hated to admit it, but each time the waiters passed us with trays of food, my mouth watered. Everything looked and smelled so tasty. We got our drink orders in and pored over the menu tome.
“Mmmm, pot stickers. And egg rolls. And stuffed wontons sound good,” I murmured.
He laughed. “That sounds very . . . deep fried. But delicious. Maybe we need some vegetables or salad or something.”
“You’re right. Vegetable tempura? Just kidding. Let’s do edamame. No salad.”
He raised an eyebrow. “No salads today, or like, ever?”
“Ever. I hate them, even the ones with fried chicken or bacon bits on top. Lettuce is no one’s favorite food. Or tomato. And combining them together to be the staple of any meal is an offensive culinary travesty.”
“I see you have strong feelings about this,” he joked.
“A salad is a giant, colorful bowl of disappointment. Well, except for taco salad. Taco salad is fake salad because it has cheese and sour cream on it. It’s basically nachos with lettuce confetti.”
He laughed. “Oh, man, too bad P.F. Chang’s doesn’t have nachos.”
Grinning, I raised a glass as soon as the server placed our drinks on the table. “To nachos.” We toasted and I gulped down wine number one pretty quickly. “Okay, time to be serious for a sec. I want to apologize for two things. One, for snapping at you when you were trying to be nice. And second, for assuming you got this job only because of your connections. Clearly you have spreadsheet skills.”
His eyes sparkled under the hanging dome light above our table. “And you forgive me for breaking your mug?”
“Nope.” I took the wine out of his hand and took a large sip. “Hey, I like yours better.”
Nolan leaned back into his booth seat and laughed. When the waiter came by, we ordered our food. “Do you like beer?” he asked me.
“Nah, I hate it.”
“A beer for me then.” He glanced at me as he talked with the server. “That way she won’t steal that drink, too.”
The waiter winked. “I do the same thing with my wife. You two are cute together.”
My stomach did that fluttery thing again. “We’re work friends,” I clarified.
He nodded. “Ah, gotcha. But just so you know, my wife and I were work friends, too.” He took away our empty wineglasses and walked away humming an unfamiliar tune.
The food came quickly. I handed over my twenty bucks to Nolan while shrimp lo mein dangled from my mouth. I thought about it, but couldn’t bear ordering Korean cuisine there, that’s where I drew the line. It was already shameful that I sometimes bought kimchi from Safeway. Getting my Korean food fix at P.F. Chang’s would make me a full-blown sellout. I’d need a seventy-five-dollar wager to even consider it.
Conversation flowed easily. I even admitted to Nolan that I googled him when he joined the company. “Why do you have so many elitist photos of you online?”
He coughed into his drink. “Elitist? What the hell?”
“You know, photos of you with all those politicians. All those fancy and exotic places you traveled.”
He furrowed his brow. “You mean the ones where I was doing a microfinancing project in Lima and Harare for a nonprofit?”
I slowed my wine to small sips. “Uh . . . yeah. And how about those photos where you cropped out that girl?”
His eyebrows drew into a deep V. “I think I know what photos you’re talking about. She’s a friend who is good at taking selfies with fancy filters. You know, you almost sound a little bit jealous.”
“Oh yeah, my photo filter game is pathetic,” I cut in, hoping to divert attention from his accusation.
We laughed about the weirdos in the office, especially Asher. I told him about my old advertising jobs, and he told me he had finished his first year of business school at UW but wasn’t sure he’d go back next semester.
“There are a lot of shark types in my MBA class. I’m not like them.” We hit a dialogue lull when he bit his lip and picked the label off his beer bottle. Something big weighed on his mind.
“Okay, you look terrified. Spill it.”
He sighed. “My parents are coming to visit soon, and I have to tell them I don’t know if I’m going to go back to school. It’s just not the thing for me. But I also don’t know what I want to do careerwise. Isn’t that dumb? I’m twenty-eight and have no clue what I want to do with my life.”
I lifted up my wine and toasted him again. It was all about tipsy toasts that night. “Twenty-eight? You’re my age! Well, almost my age. I’m twenty-seven. I assumed by now I’d know what I wanted to be when I grew up too. When does the growing-up part of life end? When do we have to make final life decisions?”
He looked at me like I just told him I believed in Santa Claus. “Really? You look like you know what you want in life. You seem like it, anyway.”
I coughed some wine out my nose. “Sorry, I’d never heard that before. Ever.”
We both laughed. It felt so good to laugh. This all felt so good. Thank you, wine number two!
The restaurant became much noisier when a bus let off dozens of European tourists at the bar. He leaned forward so I could hear him. “My parents stress me out. They’re cool in some ways. They work hard and want me to make something of myself. And they talk about money all the time. It’s all they think about, and it’s kind of embarrassing. It’s hard to explain.”
My parents embarrassed me all the time and were focused on money too. Well, at least my mom was. She tried to manage their cash flow down to the penny. Contrast this to my dad, who stuck to a “looser” fiscal approach. He bought lawnmowers and golf clubs every other month without telling my mother, and they ended up in screaming matches about their month-end budget. His parents could never top mine on the humiliation scale, though. My parents had everyone else beat. Effortlessly.
He exhaled a sad sigh. “They just, really have strong ideas on how life should play out. And nine times out of ten, it’s not what I want.”
Part of me wanted to hug him in consolation, the other half wanted to slap him into taking action. As they say in the sexist world I lived in, Man up, bro. Also, I knew quite well now, hugging and/or slapping would be an HR violation. “I think you need to think about whether you should fight harder for what you want.”
He nodded. “You make it look so easy.”
I coughed out a bitter laugh. Yeah, so easy.
“I’m serious. You fight for what you think is right, no matter what. It’s amazing.” He cracked a smile.
“Well, nine times out of ten, it doesn’t work in my favor,” I scoffed. “Failure ain’t pretty.”
“You bounce back, though.”
“Right. And by that do you mean I don’t take a hint and keep trying, or I’m successful at recuperating from failure?”
He looked me in the eyes. “You don’t give up. And your life is what you made of it.”
“Well, I’m not the type of person who gets things handed to them on a silver platter.” I swept my arm and flicked my hand toward him. “I don’t usually make friends with guys like you, no offense.”
He cocked his head. “You think we’re all that different?”
Hahahahaha. Is this guy for real? I leaned forward on my elbows. “Look, I worked hard to get my job, all by myself. None of this silver spoon shit. I don’t have any family in high places.” I fell back into my booth seat. “That’s why I didn’t want your help before. I didn’t want to be associated with you because people would think I was getting special treatment just by knowing you.” A beat passed. “No offense,” I added with a wince.