“Yes and no,” Beau replied, not opening the menu. Once he had gotten the black bean burger and the wedge salad here, he hadn’t ordered anything else since. He knew he should broaden his horizons but sometimes you wanted an old stand by you knew would deliver. “I mean, yeah, there’s more of a variety because Chicago had a bit more time to build back up but that’s nothing to how quickly I’ve seen businesses sprout up here. I feel like I pass a new storefront every single day. It’s pretty damn impressive.”
Beau tried to be delicate about the situation, not knowing what exactly Pete had been through from living in Austin so long. Come to think of it, Beau didn’t know much about what was going on in other cities besides Chicago so he was just as curious as his doctor friend on what it was like where JJ was from.
"There's definitely been a big change over the last couple of months. It's kind of weird to not see busted windows all over, but I'm pretty happy about it." Pete set his menu down once he'd settled on a chili pepper burger, then grinned across the table at both of his dining companions. Forget the fact that Luc had stolen his two old bros; Pete had two of the best looking guys in town as his new bros now!
“I’ve traveled around a lot so I’ve gotten to see what most of the cities have to offer, but I gotta say, the small town I’m from barely has 650 people so Austin seems like a big city in comparison,” JJ said with a laugh as he looked up from his menu. Everything looked so good, but seeing as he was in Austin, he figured he would have to give the “Austin Style” a try and add some brisket.
“I lived on this tiny island in Lake Michigan. We had places to eat because tourism was pretty big in the summer, but it was never very worldly.”
Beau listened intently, trying to imagine what it would be like to grow up in such a small town. Beau had always lived in a city and contemplated what it would be like to live somewhere with so few people. There was something about the hustle and bustle of a metropolis that energized and inspired him. He liked that it was never quite quiet; the ambient white noise of a burgs like Austin and Chicago soothed him. Things were always growing and moving and changing and there was something exciting about that. Beau wondered if coming from a smaller town was impetus behind JJ joining the military.
"650? That's crazy!" Technically Pete's hometown of Del Mar, California had a couple thousand people in it, but it felt like way more because of its proximity to San Diego. "Were you just dying to get out of there?"
“I guess you could say that,” JJ said with a laugh. He liked his hometown just fine and he knew that a lot of people found very happy and fulfilling lives by living there forever, but JJ just never saw himself like that. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great place. I just felt like I didn’t have much choice in anything. My family’s run a church there for generations and I was set to be the next in line, but I think my purpose was to do God’s work on a bigger scale. Seems like my redirection has been working out okay because here I am in Austin opening the first church you guys have seen in years.”
Not everyone was going to want to come back to Church or even back to God but JJ liked knowing that he was bringing the option back to those who wanted it.
“So God is sort of like, the family business,” Beau said, nodding his head. “Only you saw you could do more and franchised it, for lack of a better word. That’s pretty ambitious, man.”