Grilled Shrimp Pasta

Old injustices were being corrected, new injustices were beginning to be perpetuated.

—Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The entrance to Hops Restaurant-Bar-Brewery flashes its Welcome sign like the river of cars moving along Pine Pembroke Avenue. The lights are barely noticed by the patrons arriving at the restaurant this Friday night; they go immediately to pick up the electronic cards that will tell them when their table is ready. The hostess rewards them with a pasted-on smile, framed between her freckled cheeks like a logotype. She turns the smile on the party of three just approaching the door and delivers the prescribed message:

"We're here to please you. We want to attend to your every need, make your pace our pace, your style our style, and any special request an opportunity to please you."

David looks at his Cuban father-in-law, unsure whether his English is good enough to metabolize the message. But he senses immediately that Fernando has gotten the gist of it, although some words probably remain hanging in his ears. Marta smiles, knowing that her father pretends to speak Oxford English, more exact than Webster's Dictionary.

The couple is unaware that Fernando is dealing with another problem altogether: How to bring up the topic he knows is unavoidable but that will crash noisily on the tablecloth like a packet of firecrackers going off over the plates and leftovers, the silverware and glasses.

"Shall we go to the bar?" Fernando asks in Spanish.

"Let David go. Can you go to the bar, baby, please?"

"Sons-in-law can be . . . He is passing all the tests. I swear."

"Seriously, Daddy? If I didn't know you . . ."

Fernando smiles for the first time since they had gotten out of the Ford Explorer Marta and David bought just days before. He knows that his daughter hangs on his reactions like a spider, suspended between anxious anticipation and approval. He understands that he has absolutely no right to rain on her parade. But he looks at her now as he did when she was three or four years old, after the divorce, and he took her back to the Sevillano in a number 13 bus where they did not give him a seat. He takes her by the arm before responding:

"It seems that David has in his favor his Irish mother and a father who is the son of Germans. Ireland is also a Catholic country."

"But without Yemayá."

"Yes, but I'm sure they have their own goddess of the waters. Probably the one they call Molly Bloom, who knows? And what about the Germans with Odin and his tribes? There's David on his way back."

"Maybe he was able to get seats at the bar."

"Do you talk with him about Cuba?"

"Of course, but what's important is that his Spanish not sound like a señorrita's . . ."

"And that your English not sound like mambo."

"I'll never get rid of my accent. Besides, I'm dark-skinned; besides, I don't feel like it."

"My grandchildren won't have this confusion: Perfect English for them."

"Don't be silly, Daddy, they'll be bilingual: Who better than you to teach them Cuban?"

"Dreams, Marta. They will jabber in Spanish, use it on Christmas Eve and at birthdays. A family relic, which when they grow up they may perhaps find they need for their work."

"Here comes David."

"Please. Seats. Go."

"Okay, let's go."

Fernando thinks the gaudy decoration of the bar, somewhere between a Western saloon and a Pullman car, forms a curious synthesis of Yankee comfort. He notices that the design of the room distributes spaces with efficient rationality. It is simultaneously tight and roomy, informal and ceremonial. No one gets in the way, even in the corridors that lead to the kitchen. There, behind glass walls, the heart of Hops is like a Chaplinesque machine whose moving parts are the...