“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” he said as he dug in.
“Fine.”
I snagged the bottle and squirted some on a tiny portion of my scrambled eggs, with two pieces of melted cheese on top, lightly sprinkled with pepper, just the way I liked them. He watched me as I brought the bite to my lips, grinning like a demented imp when I hummed in appreciation and reached for the ketchup bottle again.
“Okay,” I muttered as I dotted more on my eggs. “I’m sold.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ve got to admit, it’s way better than hot sauce,” I said as I dug in.
“The closest I’ll get to hot sauce is spicy ketchup. Give me a bottle of that, and I’ll put it on everything, even fish sticks.”
I tried to picture that, but the image of fish and ketchup colliding wasn’t one I wanted to envision. “Pass.”
“Didn’t you learn anything from the eggs?”
“Some lines weren’t meant to be crossed.”
“You can always erase them and draw new ones,” Rebel suggested in between bites.
Leave it to him to think of a way around an obstacle he didn’t want to deal with.
“When I was a kid, my father would take my sister and me to the diner at the end of our block every Saturday morning so my mom could get a break from our bullshit,” Rebel said. “That’s theway he’d put it too. He’d always order this huge breakfast platter: linguiça, eggs, pan-fried potatoes, and two pancakes. He’d put ketchup on everything but the pancakes.”
“So, it’s a family tradition,” I said, enjoying the chance to hear him talk about his childhood.
“Oh yeah. Just like Wednesday night dart league and candied hams every Thanksgiving.”
“It was always turkey in my house,” I said. “My old man would drive all over the city, searching for a giant Butterball turkey; it had to be Butterball. Heaven forbid you bring home any other brand. You were better off driving two towns over to pick one up there than coming home with anything but a Butterball.”
“Sounds to me like someone fucked around and found out.”
“You could say that.”
“And you should,” Rebel said. “I want to hear the rest of the story.”
“Fair enough. Just let me preface it by saying that I hit seven grocery stores before I said to hell with it and bought the biggest turkey I could find; there were just no Butterballs anywhere that year. Coolers were stocked with the breasts, but whole turkeys were another story. I don’t know if there was a shortage, or the old man just waited too long to grab one, which was why I was out there in a downpour driving all over hell's creation on a fool’s errand.”
“Uh-oh.”
“That’s an understatement. Mom took one look at it when I stepped into the kitchen and tried to shoo me right back out again, but Dad turned around mid-wave, and you’d have thought I’d tracked dog shit into the kitchen. He took the turkey and the receipt and left with a scathing remark about the turkey I’d brought home. I will say this: Dad got his Butterball. It was after eleven when he got home, but all was right in his world when he popped it in the oven in the morning.”
“Sounds like my old man and his Crown Royal. No other brand would do. To him, the wordwhiskeywas synonymous with Crown Royal, period. I’ve never seen him drink anythingelse. My mom, on the other hand, was always partial to Southern Comfort with a splash of cranberry juice and seven-up. I can’t stand either.”
“We’re all shaped by our childhoods one way or another,” I said.
“Most of mine was spent in someone’s backyard or on the ice during hockey season.”
“When did you start?”
“Pee-wees when I was six, but I’ve had skates almost as long as I’ve had shoes,” he explained.
“That’s when I started too. Inherited my older brother’s hand-me-downs and played all the way through high school. A couple colleges were interested, but I had no interest in another four years of school. I enlisted at the end of my junior year, did basic, then went back to high school to finish up, and shipped out for AIT four days after graduation. The Thanksgiving Dad had me running around looking for a turkey was my last one at home before I joined my unit.”
“We always had Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s house,” Rebel said. “The whole family converged on the place, even my uncle, who lives in California. He flies in every year for ringside seats at the family event of the year. As kids, we missed most of the excitement, since we were constantly being told to go downstairs and play in the game room or outside when the weather was decent enough, but the moment we turned eighteen and graduated to the adult table, holy shit, you never knew what the fuck was going to happen.”
“Don’t stop there; you can’t just tease me with a story and not deliver.”