Disaster Date

I hear the bang of the door as María thrusts it open with her typical dramatics. The banging doesn't happen as often now that she hasn’t lived in this house for four years- her five younger siblings haven’t quite inherited her expressiveness.

Snow falls steadily outside; the sky is oddly bright as it often is on a snowy mid-March Colorado afternoon. María promised she would stop by our house for dinner, despite the somewhat unexpected snowstorm. She yells a greeting that is mostly directed to the two basset hounds who pace around her feet with excited barks and thumping tails.

“Hola, mijita!” I call from the kitchen. I am peering into the oven, checking on the enchiladas baking inside, “Make sure the dogs don’t get out! I just got them dry.”

Her boots thump, one by one, into the pile of shoes by the door. Her younger siblings are all upstairs, thawing out and drying off from a day in the snow. She enters the kitchen, drops her coat on a chair and slides down onto the floor, laying on her back while the dogs cluster around her and try to lick her face. She sighs a dramatic, heaving sigh, “I just had the worst first date ever.”

I close the oven, stand up and turn to look at her, surprised, “You went on a date in this weather? With who?”

She groans and throws her forearm over her eyes, speaking rapidly, “I should have taken it as a sign and cancelled. Everything went wrong. I was so nervous. We had planned to hike and get a beer after and I already had to reschedule because of my work but I still wanted to try to do something and then,” her voice rising, “he thought it would be fun to go snowshoeing instead! Can you believe it?!”

I raise my eyebrows at her and begin cleaning up the counter, sweeping away remnants of tomatoes and peppers and onions, “This isn’t really snowshoeing snow.”

She groans, “Exactly! But that’s not even the worst part. It was me. You aren’t going to believe this, but like twelve steps from the car, my foot caught on rocks and I fell into A RIVER. I got soaked. The water was freezing! It was so embarrassing. I really like him but it just...”

Only when she says this do I notice she’s wearing sweatpants too big for her, rolled up several times at the waist, and a t-shirt I haven't seen before. My mouth quirks into a grin, but I try to maintain a more appropriate expression of justified horror at her embarrassment. Her story spills out with animated gestures and repeated eye-rolling at her own awkwardness. He had to give her clothes from his gym bag so she wouldn’t be wearing soaking wet clothes.

She is making her way through a list all of the dumb things she said when I finish cleaning and sit down at the kitchen table. When she’s finally done, she’s sitting upright. Her face is flushed. I laugh, “Have I ever told you about my first date with your father?”

Her eyes move to mine, a deep and warm brown, just like his. She thinks about it for a moment; I see her realize she had never considered a time of us before us, “No, you two always say something vague about rain and shrimp and laugh it off.”

I nod and settle into my chair, “Do you want a glass of wine, mijita?”

She nods and stands up, groaning as if she is eighty-two instead of twenty-two, “I need it! Agh, I really thought that he might-” she looks back up at me, “Me saying yes doesn’t mean you get out of telling me about it.”

I point to the half empty bottle of Merlot sitting on the counter, “Grab that and two mugs. All the wine glasses are dirty.”

She obeys. We sit, hands wrapped around faded mugs purchased for some forgotten school fundraiser. They have the school's logo on them along with a faded image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

“Your father and I met through a mutual friend just after he moved up to Denver. I saw the way he was looking at me, but I wasn’t really that interested. I knew he was going to ask me out before he did because, well, you know,” I winked at her and she finished my thought with a smile.

“Girls always know.”

“Exactly,” I laughed, “He planned a picnic for us and tried to make a shrimp stir-fry, which was somehow my current food obsession at the time.”

“Aw,” she says thoughtfully, “That’s sweet.”

I grin and say in a voice mimicking her dramatic storytelling, “But then, everything went wrong.”

Maria’s eyebrows narrow, then lift in amazement, “You’re lying.”

Laughing, I tell her about how we planned to meet at a parking lot on the way out of town, but traffic made me twenty minutes late. Then, the road was closed to the trailhead he had wanted, so we had to double back and find somewhere else.

She groans in solidarity as I continue, “Then, when we had finally found something nearby- without the help of GoogleMaps, mind you- a storm blew in right as we were unpacking everything. It started pouring- thunder, lightning, the whole bit. I slipped and knocked over all the food so that it spilled everywhere.”

“No,” she gasps and covers her smile with her hands, “Momma, no way.”

I grin, “Rice, veggies, shrimp, everywhere. We had to pack it all up into his cooler, halfway blinded from the rain. Once we made it back to his truck, it cleared up immediately, of course, but all the food was ruined. By the time we made it back into town, all the restaurants had two hour waits for a Friday night.

“But he was so determined,” I said, laughter bubbling up again as I remember his goofily adamant effort to make it special, “We ended up going through a drive through and getting burgers and fries. He pulled over at the first lookout he saw and backed in so we could sit on the tailgate and eat. By then, the sun had almost set.”

“Wasn’t the tailgate wet?”

I nodded, “He had some camping chairs stuck in the back of the cab. I laughed so hard when he pulled them out along with a crumpled, half empty wine bag. He even fished out two camping mugs from somewhere.”

“You had bagged wine back then?”

I rolled my eyes, “Very funny. Wine bags are not innovative. They’ve been around since biblical times.”

“And then what happened?”

“And then, he dropped me off at my car and we both drove back to Denver.”

She looks at me, expectantly.

I smirk, “And on my drive home I thought about all the dumb things I had said during the date.”

“What? Was that it?”

At this moment, Cesar enters the kitchen, our youngest son dangling upside down from his shoulders. At ten years old, Miguel is somehow still small enough for his six foot three inches father to sling him around.

“María!” he kisses the top of her head and narrowly avoids whacking her with Miguel's feet, “So glad you made it.”

I smirked and looked at my husband, “María wanted to know what happened after our first date.”

He rolls his eyes and flips Miguel right side up, setting him down on his feet, “I was so embarrassed that I didn’t call her for two weeks. I thought she just humored me because we were stuck together, but-”

“You thought about me every day” I finish his sentence with a laugh, “He says that every time, but when he finally called me, I told him our second date was dangerously close to not happening.”

“So, I wasted no more time!” he declares and puffs out his chest, winking at me, “We went out that night. I thought actually going to the restaurant she liked would be a better idea.”

I look at María, with her chin resting thoughtfully on one hand. I ask my husband, “And, dear husband, what did we think of that perfect second date with no hiccups, an indoor restaurant, and everything going smoothly?”

He grins, “It wasn’t nearly as fun or as good of a story as everything going wrong. I will never forget the look on your face when it started pouring on us.”

I sip my wine, trying to hide my smile as Maria’s eyes widen and she blushes deeply. Cesar looks at our daughter, “Did you have a disaster date?”

She nods and lifts her mug to salute him, “May I have the great luck of a perfect first disaster date someday.”

He snags my mug, grandly returns her salute, and takes a sip. As he hands it back to me, he kisses me briefly across the table. I can taste the wine on his lips, “It certainly was perfect, wasn’t it.”