Carrows in 1989.

I was 13 in 1989. It was early evening, just past the time when daylight had faded. The blue AMC Concord pulled into the Carrows parking lot. I sat in the back, while my mom and dad were in the front. Mom always drove because she couldn’t stand it when anyone else did. She was one of those passengers whose body would always be tense, her right foot smashing the empty floorboard as if looking for a brake pedal, while she gripped her seatbelt. My father wasn't a particularly good driver, always distracted and lost in his mind, but it wouldn’t have mattered who was driving—she would've reacted the same way.

This Carrows was my Carrows. My parents chose it as my "Cheers," my reliable place we could always go to. No matter how often we moved or how inconvenient, this was the Carrows we frequented. I always ordered the bacon burger with steak fries and an extra side of barbecue sauce, which I would drink like a shot. I remember the round windows in the wooden facade, the smell of steak and fries, hamburgers, and the salad bar. Although I don’t actually recall if Carrows had a salad bar—my other favorite restaurant was Sizzler—it exists in my memories.

We got a booth with those big, puffy seats wrapped in vinyl; the tabletop was just above my chest. I draped my crossed arms over it and remember the cool, laminated wood under my arms. I’d lay my head down and feel the surface against my cheek. I didn’t notice anything different about this night compared to any other when we came to Carrows. I got my usual order and an iced tea, which I filled with sugar and lemons. We must've eaten like we normally would. I would've finished long before my parents, and, as usual, tried to entertain myself while waiting for them to clear their plates. Throughout my life, I’ve always finished eating before other people. We weren’t a dessert kind of family, so all that was left was to pay the bill.

I don’t have a clear memory what happened next. There’s a gap between this moment and asking to leave the table with the car keys so I could be alone. I do recall sitting in the car, feeling the world spin around me. My face hardened like a statue, even as tears somehow broke through and rolled toward my nose, then down to the edge of my mouth before falling seemingly into nothing. What I remember most is numbness.

I know what happened before I left the diner not because I remember, but because I kept replaying it in my mind. My parents told me my father was going to die. They didn’t say it in so many words, of course, but I knew that’s what they meant. For the last six years, I’d watched my mother’s friends—my “uncles,” a big family of gay men—die one after another from AIDS. My mother was always there for them, so when my parents told me in that Carrows that my father had HIV, I knew exactly what it meant. Two years later, he died. I don’t remember exactly when, but I think it was December because there was snow on the ground. We had moved from LA back to Albuquerque, where my mother’s family lived. And sometimes it snowed in Albuquerque.

For many years after, I couldn’t stand being in a diner. I had this habit of standing at the diner’s table when I ate because something about sitting in that setting made me dizzy. Then, when I realized why I hated diners, I started to feel better. I didn’t start loving diners, but at least they didn’t make me feel odd anymore. I could sit and eat instead of standing at the table. Instead of being consumed by a shapeless dread, I found comfort in memories—the smell of my father’s bathrobe, the nearly exclusive attire of his last days, and the warmth of his chest.