The Waitresses Thought He Was Dangerous

I was on a first date. Three beers later I was trapped in an Applebee’s grief seminar

Photo by Hans Vivek on Unsplash

I should have known something was off when he suggested Applebee’s.

Not that I had room to be picky. My life had become a cycle of wheelchair transfers, pill schedules, and listening to my mother find fault with everything from the soup temperature to the audacity of aides who didn’t arrange her pillows right. The woman could find fault with a sunrise.

So when Tim from Match.com suggested dinner, I said yes faster than a desperate person should. His photos looked normal. He had all his teeth, or at least the ones visible in his carefully cropped headshots. I spent an hour getting ready, which felt like an Olympic event after months of living in clothes that could survive bodily fluids and wheelchair grease. Real pants. Makeup. Hope, even. Which was stupid of me.

The hostess looked at me with the kind of pity usually reserved for people dining alone on Valentine’s Day.

“Just you tonight, hon?”

“I’m actually meeting someone,” I said.

Then Tim walked in.

The man in the photos had apparently sent a substitute. This version was wearing a ratty gray hoodie that had seen better decades, jeans that had simply seen too much of everything, and hair that suggested grooming was one of those social conventions he’d quietly opted out of. But the real tell was his eyes. He had the look of a man about to unload on whoever sat across from him.

I ordered a beer immediately. The waitress gave me a look that said she’d keep them coming.

“So,” Tim said, skipping small talk entirely, “my mother died six months ago.”

For the next two hours, I learned more about Tim’s mother than I know about some of my living relatives. Her favorite flowers. Her legendary meatloaf. Her final words, which apparently included instructions to find a nice girl. Her burial dress. Her gravestone inscription. Her opinion on every major decision Tim had ever made was delivered posthumously through her beloved son.

My beer disappeared at a pace that seemed entirely reasonable under the circumstances. I sat there watching this grown man almost cry over appetizers about a woman who had apparently never taught him that dumping your grief on a stranger is not the same as connection.

“She would have loved you,” he said at one point, reaching across the table. His fingers were damp. Everything about Tim was perpetually damp.

The waitresses had started hovering. At first, I figured they were just exceptionally good waitresses. But then I noticed the positioning, the way they kept Tim in their sightline, and the manager doing casual laps past our booth every twenty minutes. So the next time our waitress came by while he was in the restroom, I was compelled to find out the details.

“Do you know this guy?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “But he seems a little weird. You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s weird, but he’s not dangerous. More like a lost puppy.”

“We’ll keep an eye out anyway.”

Tim couldn’t have intimidated a folding chair. But something about his energy, the way he’d spent the entire evening talking without once asking me a real question about myself, had set off every radar in the building. I could have been a federal agent or an escaped convict. Tim wouldn’t have noticed. His mother was the only featured attraction.

Tim wasn’t malicious. Mostly, he just seemed profoundly unequipped for adulthood after losing the person who’d apparently been steering it.

Which made what happened next so baffling.

Somewhere between the french fries and the check, Tim shifted. He glanced around the restaurant, leaned across the table, and lowered his voice like he was finally getting to the important part.

“Hey,” he said. “Can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

“I’m into some alternative lifestyle stuff.” A pause for effect. “More dominant arrangements. I like to be in control.”

I stared at him.

This man who had spent the whole time crying about his mother, who needed the waitstaff to babysit him through an appetizer course, and who had tear tracks on his cheeks from discussing funeral flowers twenty minutes ago. This man was now explaining that he was dominant.

“I’ve done a lot of research,” he continued. “Techniques. Psychological dominance. Ropes. Restraints.”

He actually said the word alpha without irony. While his eyes were still red.

A golden retriever who had watched exactly enough internet porn videos to think he was a wolf.

“That’s interesting,” I said, because what else do you say?

He walked me out to the parking lot. I glanced back and the waitresses were watching through the window until I got into my car. I gave a small wave. They nodded like a bunch of Applebee’s servers who had collectively decided I was their problem now. I gave Tim a quick hug, told him we’d talk, and drove home trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.

Good morning messages that circled back to his mother began. Weather observations that reminded him of things she used to say. Questions about my day that became excuses to talk about his mother again. Tim had apparently decided our Applebee’s grief session meant we were a thing now, and he was going to maintain it whether I was paying into or not.

Then, a couple weeks in, he came clean about something.

“I feel like I should be honest with you. I do have a girlfriend.”

A girlfriend. Of three-plus years. Naturally.

She had zero interest in his budding dominant lifestyle. So he’d gone looking elsewhere, and what he found instead was me, sitting at Applebee’s, drinking through his eulogy.

His girlfriend’s mother was very sick. Dying, actually. So Tim had grief coming at him from every angle, his own mother six months gone, his girlfriend’s mother going, and instead of being there for the woman he was actually with, he was texting a stranger from a dating app about dominance and asking if I was seeing anyone.

I told him he should probably focus on his girlfriend. He texted a few more times. I lied and said I started seeing someone. He said good, he had a girlfriend anyway, like he’d forgotten he’d already told me that.

“Does he know about your submissive side?”

I laughed out loud. Tim had decided that somewhere in that Applebee’s booth, he had figured something out about me.

“Don’t worry about my submissive side,” I texted back. “Worry about your own girlfriend.”

Then it stopped.

Somewhere out there, Tim is probably on a dating app. Some other woman is learning about white roses and legendary meatloaf while the waitresses watch nervously from across the restaurant. The melancholy golden retriever who thinks he’s a wolf, looking for an audience who hasn’t seen the act yet.

I hope he’s okay, genuinely. He was harmless and sad and completely lost. I hope his girlfriend either sorted him out or left him, because those are really the only two reasonable outcomes.

As for me, I left Applebee’s with a good story, three beers’ worth of patience, and no interest whatsoever in becoming someone’s replacement mother.

MaryAnn of the Sea writes personal essays about relationships, connection, and the quiet absurdities of wanting something real in a world that prefers manageable.