Dinner at Joyce’s (part 2)

So Joyce had served me the appetizer of the three course dinner she had cooked for me when I went over to have her put the sim card from my old phone into the new iPhone X she’d bought me. We were in the dining room by candlelight, and I could tell that it was supposed to be romantic. The only thing was that Joyce kept getting up and running around like a dog chasing his own tail and that kept it from feeling too romantic.

That was fine with me. That it was supposed to be a romantic dinner kept making me think of Becky Landry, who pretty much stalked me my last two years in high school. I told y’all that she kept putting notes written in pink ink on doilies in my locker. She did a lot of other scaryass stuff to both me and my girlfriend, Shoshanah…but I’ll tell y’all about that another time.

Let’s just say that Becky Landry was half a brick short of a load and thinking about her while Joyce was serving me a home-cooked dinner with a different Stone beer for each course was making me uncomfortable

“I hope you like this one,” Joyce said when she came out of the kitchen with my beer to go with the main course. It was the Stone Totalitarian Russian Stout. “I had to buy six bottles. But I used one cooking the meat.”

“The Totalitarian is dope,” I said, telling the truth. Only problem is that it packs a punch when it comes to alcohol content and I’d had…like five IPAs already. But I’d also had half a dozen devilled eggs and nearly as many Pillsbury biscuits. I was still ok.

Joyce killed it with the main dish: beef cooked in beer with vegetables and a baked potato on the side with butter and crumbled bacon. Maybe it wasn’t exactly down home cooking like Meemaw’s, but it was something Mom might have made. Nothing too fancyass. There’s something I like about Joyce: she doesn’t try to teach me shit when we go out to dinner.

I had thirds on the main dish. I finished the biscuits, too. And Joyce finally chilled. After she brought me a second bottle of the Totalitarian.

Y’all can probably tell where this is going. I don’t think that Joyce was trying to get me all tore up…but I was pretty much tore up from the floor up by the time she brought in dessert.

The dessert beer was the Stone Tangerine Express IPA. I don’t usually like gayass fruity beers, and it was a “bubba no likey” the one the one time I tasted it. But maybe there is something to this putting beer and food together shit. If you drink the tangerine IPA with those chocolate cakes that are warm and liquid in the center, it’s pretty dang good. Especially if you’ve got seven beers in your system already lol.

Joyce admitted that she’d bought the dessert and just put it in the oven. I wasn’t expecting her to bake me a cake, but I liked it that she didn’t pretend she’d made them from scratch.

Wherever the cakes came from, she’d made me a dang good dinner. I was nice and full and I told her so. I figured she could cook some because she’s a chick and has lived alone all these years, but the meat cooked in the beer really was dope. Papaw would have said that it makes your tongue slap your brains out. I didn’t tell Joyce that, although now I’m thinking maybe I should have.

Now that I’m writing this I realized something else: I wasn’t thinking about Becky Landry or where to play Kiké Hernandez by the time we got to dessert.

She said we should go have coffee in the living room, which meant she was making expresso for herself. I said I was good and would just finish the tangerine IPA. I poured what was left in the 22 oz bottle into my glass and got up and walked to the couch. I was glad that I could walk as well as I did.

Okay, so… She came in with her coffee, turned down the lights, sat next to me on the couch and…

Y’all got the picture.