By Nathan Willis
Our game was hide and seek, and the best place to hide in the whole house was the front closet. That’s where mom kept the dress coat she wore to school concerts, family holidays, and nice restaurants. It was long and black and if you pulled it around your shoulders, only your legs and feet were visible.
My sister would check behind, under, and inside of everywhere else first. This was something we did for each other, even though we always knew where the other would ultimately be found.
There were even times we’d pretend not to see each other’s legs sticking out from under the coat, to start the cycle over again, to keep the game going for as long as we could.
The nicest restaurant we went to as a family was Chi-Chi’s. The waiting area was always packed with other families in their dress coats, all straining to hear the hostess over the giddy din of middle-class splurging, and the dopplering sizzle of fajita hot plates.
The dining area was divided into four open-concept sections, creating the illusion of simultaneous separation and inclusion. The overhead lights were never on. There was a lit candle on every table. The walls were painted to look like there were patches of plaster missing, exposing brick underneath. Sombreros and serapes were tacked up on any surface that would support them.
At some point, we asked our parents, “What does Chi-Chi mean?” They told us Chi-Chi is a person. A professional golfer. This is the food he likes and he wants to share it with the people of Ohio.
There was a golf course close by so we had no reason to doubt them.
We went often enough that we had our order locked in. Chicken fajita. Cheese enchiladas. Steak burrito. Chicken enchiladas, no onions. Two Cokes, an unsweetened iced tea, and a Diet Coke. The only unknown was chili con queso.
The queso came in a tray specially designed to sit over the candle. The tray had a wide lip to hold chips. It was a whole situation, big enough that the people at surrounding tables could see. Ordering queso was a very public statement.
Our parents argued at night when they thought we were asleep. Money was a recurring theme. As was my dad’s expense account. And lunches. And the company he kept. And the incidentals on his business trips.
My room was next to the stairs. I heard everything. I didn’t understand the math or the accusations, but it was clear we were on the verge of collapse.
It was by no means definitive, but getting queso became a kind of barometer. If we got queso we were still stable. We had enough money, and no one was preparing to leave or for things to fall apart. It meant we loved each other, and the game would keep going.
If queso wasn’t mentioned by the time we ordered our drinks, I would ask for it. Sometimes my parents said no right away. Other times, they gave each other looks. Plaintive, angry, bitter looks that didn’t have anything to do with the queso. In these instances, us getting queso or not depended on which of them felt bold enough to make some larger point to the other by withholding or requesting queso when the server came back.
There was a movie of the week that aired back then called “A Place at the Table.” The film follows a family who donates their time and money to feed the unhoused and less fortunate. Mom had told us that grandma used to do the same thing. But it was a different time then. The unhoused went door-to-door and grandma would invite them inside while she made them a sandwich.
Mom said she would never do that with us in the house. She knows better. She’s learned the hard way that you can’t trust anyone.
In the movie, the dad loses his job and has to leave town to look for work. While he’s gone, the family relies on the generosity of the community for food and for monetary donations to pay their bills. Not a whole lot of people come through for them.
In the end, the dad is still out there looking for a job. The family is at home sitting before a sparse dinner. The room is dark except for a candle on the table. They glance at the dad’s empty chair. The credits roll as they eat the meal.
Recently, I learned that the restaurant was not, in fact, named for, or owned by, professional golfer Chi-Chi Rodriguez.
“Chi-Chi” was the nickname of the wife of the restaurateur who started the chain.
I tried this once, what my grandma had done. At least a version of it. One of the years that I lived in Los Angeles, on Thanksgiving, my girlfriend at the time and I cooked a turkey and made it into sandwiches that we packed into brown paper bags. We loaded them into the car and drove around looking for the unhoused and less fortunate. We couldn’t find anyone. There were usually people on nearly every street. Then we realized they were probably at all the shelters and churches that were also having Thanksgiving.
We did find one guy on our way back. I gave him a bag and he asked if the sandwich had mustard. It did. He handed it back to me.
We drove home and put the bags in the refrigerator and still felt pretty good about ourselves seeing all that food in one place and knowing it wasn’t for us. Then we got busy and didn’t take them back out again before the turkey went bad. It stunk up the whole apartment. We had to throw all of it away. For the next month, everything that went into that refrigerator came out tasting like spoiled turkey.
There was a weekend when one of the neighbors came over to see if we were sick. He asked if we had gone to Chi-Chi’s the night before. We hadn’t. He said everyone who had gone got food poisoning from bad onions. There would be a story about it in the paper. The neighbor said his whole family got sick. They were still trying to shake it off. He seemed fine.
I thought it was just our Chi-Chi’s that got the bad onions and maybe it was. Maybe the onion thing happened twice. Because this was before my parents got divorced, which would have put it at around 1990. But if you look it up online, the largest Hepatitis A outbreak in the history of the United States was caused by bad onions served at Chi-Chi’s restaurants in 1994—after the divorce, and after the trial.
Back in Ohio ca.1990, after that first, localized round of food poisoning, people stopped going to our Chi-Chi’s. My parents would talk about how Chi-Chi’s was going to shut down any time now. Think of the overhead. The location. They made guesses on when it would happen. First, it was a matter of weeks. Then maybe a couple of months. Then dad moved out and there was no more guessing. They were both wrong anyway.
Chi-Chi’s held on for at least another year. I am sure of this because they stayed open long enough for us to go there one more time, after our last day in court.
We knew it was going to be a hard day no matter what. This would be the first time we had seen our dad since he left, but we knew the lawyers and counselors had met in advance and agreed that none of them were going to put either of us, the children, on the stand. Then dad’s team switched it up at the last minute and said, On the other hand, let’s go ahead and make this as painful as humanly fucking possible for everyone involved, except the Defendant.
So, we got through that and we needed a light at the end of the tunnel.
We’d never been to Chi-Chi’s during the day. The overhead lights were on. There was no sizzle. The bricks on the walls were just paint. We were the only customers. We could hear the staff in the kitchen complaining about employees from the other shifts.
Mom’s sister, our Aunt Charlene, was with us. She was supposed to make us stronger. She had agreed to co-sign on a loan that would allow mom to keep the house.
When the waitress came for our order, we did not get queso and I did not ask for it. I knew who we were at that point and we were not queso people.
Mom wanted to talk about the house but every time she brought it up, Aunt Charlene changed the subject. When we were done eating, mom and Aunt Charlene talked in the parking lot while my sister and I waited in the car. We watched them wave their arms and shake their heads.
My aunt drove off in her cream-colored sedan. Mom got into our old Camry. She slammed the door to seal us in and she punished the world with an open-throated yell. The world did not care.
She cried and punched the steering wheel. She punched harder than I’ll ever be able to. I marveled at her power and the miracle that none of her bones broke.
Aunt Charlene had changed her mind about the loan. Now, mom didn’t know where we were going to live but she knew she was going to have to figure that out on her own and she would have to juggle multiple jobs and odd hours and we were going to have to budget some of our meals out to a dollar fifty each at the Taco Bell drive-thru that we would then drive across the street and park to eat in the car at the Drug Mart parking lot because they had thirty-five cent soda machines out front.
As she thought all of that through, I like to think that back inside of Chi-Chi’s, the General Manager got the call from Chi-Chi Rodriguez or the wife of the restauranteur, and whichever of them it was, they would say, “We’ve had a good run but it’s time to shut this shit down.” And the General Manager would pull a switch and the place would go dark. The employees would gather their things, go to their cars and drive away and we would still be there in the parking lot trying to figure out how we were going to make it. We would be the last to leave.
Thirty years later, as part of a naive and admirably masochistic effort at reconciliation, mom arranged for us to have Thanksgiving at Aunt Charlene’s house.
Mom’s car was in the driveway when my partner and I got there. We pulled up to the curb and took in the three very large crosses in the front yard. They were solid wood, and they were not seasonal.
Inside, the kitchen counters were crowded with Thanksgiving staples in plastic containers and takeout boxes from homestyle restaurants. Everyone else who came, except for us, brought store bought pies. There was more pie that actual food. I thought of all the times we ate in the Drug Mart parking lot.
The flatware was gold-plated and the dinnerware was ornate bone china, and as we ate, Aunt Charlene told us about all the joys and challenges of training dachshunds.
The three of us left shortly after dinner. Our coats were in a pile on the hall tree. My mom had a nice coat that was fashionable at the time. Her black special occasion coat was long gone. It, along with virtually everything else from our lives back then had been sold or otherwise lost.
Our local grocery store carries jars of Chi-Chi’s chili con queso. I had been walking past it without noticing for years. As I put a jar in my cart, I remembered about the onions, and Thanksgiving, and the trial and the credits rolling, and eating queso by candlelight, as though everything was fine.
I called my sister to ask if queso ever meant more to her than just queso. It didn’t. She never really liked any of the food at Chi-Chi’s and if she had to pick, Taco Bell was much better.
I knew she was right. I put the jar back on the shelf.
Nathan Willis is a writer from Ohio. His work has appeared in Split Lip, HAD, hex, matchbook, Swamp Pink, Pithead Chapel, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. His stories have been nominated for Best Small Fictions and appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist. He can be found online at nathan-willis.com.