“Just bring the check. Our son owns this place — dinner should be free.”….

“You might want to look at table fourteen,” she said.

I glanced down.

And for a moment the kitchen noise seemed to fade.

Harrison.
Party of four.

Same last name as mine.

The same name that had once been spoken in the small kitchen of a cramped suburban house where, on the night I turned eighteen, my mother had handed me two black trash bags filled with clothes and told me they could not afford to keep feeding me.