Soft Reset — Part 2: The Belt

The restaurant was three blocks from the convention center, in a building that had been six different restaurants in six different languages and kept all their old signage bolted somewhere behind the current one. A conveyor belt ran the length of the counter, little colored plates riding around like a toy train nobody had told to stop.

Mom had her arm looped through mine before we'd even gotten our badges scanned off — hers still clipped to her blazer from the demo floor, mine borrowed, a size too big, EXHIBITOR GUEST in letters she couldn't see and I didn't bother reading out loud, because she already knew what it said. She always knew what things said. It took me years to understand that not seeing a sign and not knowing what it said were two completely different problems, and that my mother had solved the second one for herself long before I showed up to help with the first.

"Tell me the belt," she said, once we'd sat down, the way you'd ask someone to read a menu, except the menu wouldn't hold still for it.

So I told her the belt.

"Salmon, going away from us. Something orange — tamago, egg, maybe. A plate with three pieces and no cover, so it's been out a while, skip it. Tuna. More tuna. Oh — there's a good one, the one with the sauce that drips."

"The seared one."

"The seared one. Coming back around. Want it?"

"Grab it when it's close."

I grabbed it when it was close. That became, without either of us deciding it on purpose, the whole afternoon: me narrating a small circular parade, my mother's hand finding the plate at exactly the right second because I'd told her exactly the right second, food arriving in her hands like she'd ordered it out of the air.

Kat had never had sushi.

She said so like a confession, mouth already full of the one roll on the belt that looked like food she trusted, and then declared war on a pair of chopsticks the waiter had rubber-banded together at the hinge — the kids' trick, training wheels for a person who'd never done this before. She had the band off before he'd even turned around.

"I don't need the baby ones," she said.

She very much needed the baby ones. She spent the next twenty minutes in open negotiation with two loose, uncooperative sticks, refusing, on principle, to ask for the rubber band back.

"You're holding it like a shovel," I told her.

"I'm holding it like it deserves."

"Here." I got behind her, moved her fingers one at a time — this one stays still, this one moves. Four tries. On the fifth she got a single grain of rice from the plate to her mouth and looked up at me like she'd split the atom.

"I did the thing," she said.

"You did the thing."

A stool opened up on Kat's other side around then — someone finished and left, badge lanyard swinging — and it didn't stay empty long. Conventions like that one didn't leave anything empty long. Some guy slid onto it mid-plate, and though I didn't turn to look at him directly, I caught the peripheral impression of rolled shirtsleeves and an active phone—the universal shape of a man taking a break from being professionally interesting to strangers. He didn't say anything to us. We didn't say anything to him. That was the whole point of a counter like that — you sat close enough to touch and owed each other nothing.

Kat went quiet for a second, the way she did sometimes around people she didn't know, and I remember thinking, distantly, she'll warm up, and reaching for the next plate, because there was always a next plate, and I had a belt to keep narrating.