Living Without Dreams

Chapter 14 - The Past in This Life

It was six o’clock when Susan, Greg, Zackary, and Jessie all sat down to their take-out Chinese dinner at the new house. It wasn’t the first dinner they’d had there together, but it was the first since they’d officially moved in.

“What’s with the Chinese food, Mom?” Zackary asked after Greg, Susan, and Jessie prayed. There was something in his mother’s expression that lead him to believe there was something significant about the menu they chose for dinner on this day.

 “It came from the place you recommended,” Greg told him as they began to pass around the cartons of food for their meal.

“I know. But why are we having it?”

Susan shrugged. “It’s sort of a tradition. When Greg and I move, we tend to have Chinese food,” she told him.

“Okay, but why?”

“Because it’s easy, it’s good, it makes good left overs, and it’s relatively inexpensive,” Susan told him. “It least it was in most of the places we’ve lived. And we’ve moved quite a lot, you know.”

“You mean like when you first moved to Australia?” Zackary asked curiously.

“Yes, we did have it when we first moved into our apartment in Sydney,” Susan confirmed. “But we also moved several times before that.”

“We did,” Greg agreed. “And you are correct. We had Chinese food on several of those occasions as well.”

“Like where?” Zackary asked eagerly.

“I think we had it our first night in Telleron City,” Susan recalled.

“That’s about all you could get at the marketplace, Susan. It’s not like we consciously chose to have Chinese on that evening,” Greg reminded her.

“True. The reasons for it were different, but we still did. I think we did in Moreno Island as well,” Susan said.

“Yes. In fact the only place I can recall having something different was when we went to the Capitol. I remember eating in an American restaurant. It felt exotic to be doing so and yet simply having a hamburger seemed like heaven,” Greg shared.

“I do remember that,” Susan said with a smile. “So any ways Zack, that’s how it came to be a tradition. And since we couldn’t figure out what to do about dinner tonight and I didn’t feel like cooking, Greg remembered and so we had this.”

Zackary grinned.

“Do you like it?” Susan asked cautiously. She couldn’t remember either of her sons particularly being fond of Chinese food before.

“The food’s okay, Mom. But what I like best is you’re moving with me, and the Chinese food thing is what you do, so that’s okay,” Zackary said. “It’s better this way.”

Susan smiled. “Thank you. I think so too.”

“Speaking of moving in together, what do you think of the furniture that came today?” Greg asked Zackary.

“My room looks like a real room now,” Zackary said with a smile. “And we’ve got a place for Matt, so that’s good. It’s like he’s the visitor now, not me.”

Susan smiled. “You’re living here now, definitely not visiting … which is why you have the bigger bed.”

“Cool,” Zackary said as his smile became a grin.

“How about everything else?” Susan asked. “We got quite a lot today.”

“The table is really good,” Zackary told her. “A lot better than the card table.”