The Blue Bistro (36 page)

“I want you to be happy,” he said.

“I am happy,” Adrienne snarled.

“Good,” Mavis said, and Adrienne saw her hand land on Dr. Don’s arm. As if to say,
Enough already, Donald!
This was a sad state of affairs. There was no one to come to Adrienne’s defense except for Mavis.

“Anyway, how’s Maryland?” Adrienne asked. “You like it?”

“Oh, yes!” Mavis said, clearly relieved at the shift in topic. “You’re a doll to ask.”

“Business is good,” Dr. Don said. “And the eastern shore is something else, especially now that it’s summer. A few weeks ago we went to Chincoteague to see the wild horses.”

“We didn’t actually see any,” Mavis said.

“I think we might stay in Maryland awhile,” Dr. Don said. “Settle in. I’m too old to keep moving around so much.”

These words had the same effect on Adrienne as a drum roll.
Just say it!
she thought. She wanted it over with. Spillman approached with the appetizers. Foie gras for Adrienne, corn chowder for Dr. Don, the Caesar, no anchovies, for Mavis. Spillman twisted the pepper mill over everyone’s plates.

“Can I bring you anything else right now?” he asked.

“Kamikaze shot,” Adrienne said. She stared at him, thinking:
Get me out of here!
Then, finally, she smiled. “Only kidding.”

Spillman’s facade never cracked. The man was a professional. “Enjoy your food,” he said.

The sun was a juicy pink as it sank toward the water. Rex played “As Time Goes By.” The foie gras was good enough to shift Adrienne’s mood from despondent to merely poor. It was deliciously fatty, a heavenly richness balanced by the sweet roasted figs. Who wanted to be married and have children when she could be eating foie gras like this with a front-row seat for the sunset? Adrienne forgot her manners. She devoured her appetizer in five lusty bites, and then she helped herself to more caviar. She was
starving.

Dr. Don took soup into his spoon back-to-front, the way Adrienne’s mother had taught her eighty-two years earlier. Adrienne tried to imagine what her mother would think about her father and Mavis getting married. It was impossible to imagine Rosalie feeling betrayed or hurt.
Sixteen years,
she would say.
What took you so long?
Adrienne couldn’t stage a protest to the marriage on her mother’s behalf. She would have to claim responsibility herself. She didn’t want her father to get married because then he wouldn’t belong to her anymore. By marrying Mavis, he would be calling an end to their sixteen-year mourning period. Rapping the gavel.
Time to move on!
Easy enough when it was your wife, but there was no way to replace your mother. Had he bothered to think of that? There was no way to replace your mother. The hole was there forever.

“How are the boys?” Adrienne asked.

Mavis dabbed her coral lips with a napkin. “Good, good. Graham is at Galludet getting his master’s in education. Cole is in California working for Sun Microsystems.”

“Girlfriends?”

“Graham is dating a girl named Charlotte who goes to Galludet with him.”

“She’s deaf?”

Mavis nodded, eyes wide. “And with Cole, I can’t keep track of the girls from one week to the next.”

Adrienne pressed the soles of her fabulous shoes to the floor. “Do they know that you’re engaged?”

Mavis put down her fork slowly as though Adrienne were
holding a gun to her head and had forbidden any sudden movements. “Yes,” she said. “They do. We called them last week.”

“Honey,” Dr. Don said.

A few tears fell onto Adrienne’s appetizer plate. Here it was, then: the scene where Adrienne cried at her father’s happy news.

“Congratulations,” she said. She couldn’t look at either of them because she was afraid she’d break down, and so she studied the band of bright pink sky hovering above the ocean.

“Honey,” Dr. Don said. He reached into her lap and squeezed her wrist. “Both Mavis and I have the utmost respect for the memory of your mother. And we have respect for you. We wanted to tell you in person.”

Adrienne could feel the gazes of a hundred and twenty interested guests at her back. She took a deep breath and said, “When’s the wedding?”

“In the fall,” Dr. Don said. “Just Mavis and myself, the boys, and you, if you’ll come. Small church, a nice dinner out afterward . . .”

Adrienne didn’t have to answer because Roy appeared to clear their plates and crumb the table, and although Adrienne knew she should introduce him, she was silent until he left.

“We’re sorry to spring this on you,” Mavis said. “I told Donald we should give you the news in private.”

“That’s okay,” Adrienne said. “I noticed your ring. It’s beautiful.”

“Thank you.” Mavis held out her hand to admire the ring, then she fidgeted with one of the gold buttons on the front of her dress. “I think I’ll go to the ladies’ room.”

“It’s by the front door,” Adrienne said.

Mavis left and Dr. Don tightened his grip on Adrienne’s wrist.

“Don’t say anything, Dad,” she said. “Please. You’ll make me cry.”

“Even if I tell you how much I love you?”

“Yes. Please stop.”

“And your mother loved you. She loved you, Adrienne, and she was so afraid you would grow up not remembering that.”

Tears splashed onto Adrienne’s charger. She held her napkin to her face. For two months she had watched guests eat dinner at these tables. She had seen guests laugh, cry, argue, declare their love, tell stories, hold hands, kiss, and in the case of Lucy Elpern, go into labor. From the safe distance of the podium, this all seemed well and fine. However, sitting at table twenty was turning out to be a keenly painful experience.

“I remember,” Adrienne said. To avoid her father’s gaze, she turned around. Charlie was waving at her from the bar. He pointed to his steak and gave her the thumbs-up. Out of the corner of her eye, Adrienne saw the red of Mavis’s dress coming closer, and behind her, Spillman with their dinner. Adrienne waited for the table to settle. Mavis sat, and a minute later Spillman served. Did they need anything else?
Nothing he could bring them,
Adrienne thought. The plates were gorgeous. Mavis had ordered the lamb lollipops.

“They’re adorable,” she said. “Donald, will you take a picture of my dinner?”

Adrienne shifted ever so slightly in her chair.

“We can’t embarrass Adrienne like that,” Dr. Don said.

Adrienne took a huge bite of her sandwich. Guests took pictures of the food all the time, but somehow Adrienne felt victorious about robbing Mavis of this one pleasure. There would be no toast celebrating the marriage and no pictures taken at the table. Adrienne licked a glob of mayonnaise from her lip and thought about Fiona constructing her sandwich.
Your family is our family. Yeah, right.
Adrienne couldn’t wait to get back to work.

It wasn’t until two o’clock in the morning when she and Thatcher were safely in bed that she told him the news. By that time, she had cultivated the offhand tone she wished she’d had access to at dinner.

“My father and Mavis are getting married,” she said.

Thatcher lay on his back, and Adrienne was sprawled across his chest. Sometimes they fell asleep like this.

“Is this good news or bad news?”

“Bad.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I thought so.”

They lay there in the dark and Adrienne cried, free at last, and freer than ever because Caren wasn’t home. She could make as much noise as she wanted, she could scream and yell, but she just sobbed quietly, wallowing in the childish sadness she felt. Sad, sad, sad—and not even really about the marriage. It was all the old stuff, too. Thatcher rubbed Adrienne’s back and touched her hair and when she quieted and her eyes were burning and her throat ached, he kissed her and her need for him was so deep and overwhelming that when they made love, she batted herself against him furiously. She grabbed his red-gold hair and clung to him, thinking,
Can you make this longing go away? Can you fill up the empty spot? Can you help me, Thatcher Smith? You who do so much for so many people night after night, granting wishes, fulfilling dreams, can you help me?
She put her hands around his neck while they thrust together and then Thatcher groaned and fell back against the mattress with a soft thud but Adrienne remained upright, even as he softened and slipped from her.

“I love you,” she whispered.

As soon as the words were out, she hoped and prayed that he was asleep—he did that after sex, fell hard and immediately to sleep. But she didn’t hear him breathing; if anything she heard him
not
breathing. She wondered what had made her say those words, words she had never said to anyone before, except, of course, her parents. Then she thought, stupidly, of a Norma Klein book she had once begged her mother for, a book called
It’s OK If You Don’t Love Me,
whose plot Adrienne had long forgotten, though it certainly had a moment in its pages just like this one.
I’m sorry,
she almost said,
I’m sorry I said that.
Except she wasn’t sorry. She did love him and she didn’t feel like playing games to make him say it first. She was being honest with her feelings; no one would catch her in a
room at the Ritz-Carlton with a sham lover. She was brave, like Kyra in Carmel, making plans four months in advance to move halfway across the country with her landscape painter.

And yet, she listened for the catch of his breath. The room was completely dark; they always pulled the shades against the morning sun, which rose at five. So she couldn’t even tell if his eyes were open.

“I . . .” he said.

Her skin prickled, her sweat drying in the cool night air.
Shit!
she thought.
Shit, shit, shit!

“I love you, too,” he said. “I’ve loved you since the first second I saw you.”

Adrienne tried to speak but the noise she made sounded like water trying to pass through a clogged drain. What was he saying?

Finally, she managed a whisper. “You mean, in the
parking lot
?”

“My heart fell on its knees in front of you.
I thought maybe I could wait tables. Someone told me it was a piece of cake.
Your purple jacket. Your rosy cheeks. And then you inhaled that breakfast like you hadn’t eaten in three days. My heart was prostrate at your feet.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’ve loved you since that very first morning.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You can ask Fiona,” Thatcher said. “After you left I went back into the kitchen and told Fiona that I had fallen in love with a woman named Adrienne Dealey and that everyone else would fall in love with her, too.”

“You said that to Fiona?”

“I did.”

Adrienne thought back to her first conversation with Fiona when Adrienne told her the Parrishes wanted her to bring their bread.

Thatcher was right about you, then.

Right about me how? I mean, what did he say . . .

“Caren loves you. The Parrishes. Mario. Mario wanted to ask you out and I told him if he did, I would fire him. He
didn’t speak to me for three days.”

“Stop it,” Adrienne said.

“You think I’m making it up,” Thatcher said. “I am not making it up. I love you . . .” His voice trailed off and Adrienne sensed the other shoe about to drop.

“But?” she said.

“But,” he said. He rolled onto his side so that he could look down on her. “The reason why I haven’t had a relationship in twelve years is because of Fee. There hasn’t been time to think about anyone else.”

Adrienne was silent.

“And I never met the right person,” he said, quickly. “You, Adrienne Dealey, are the right person. I love you. But I love Fee, too. Differently. She’s my best friend and has been for a
long time.
”

“I know that,” Adrienne said, trying not to let impatience creep into her voice.

“And sometimes, I don’t know how to handle things. I don’t know who to put first.”

That’s clear,
Adrienne thought. She could tell Thatch was at a loss, like a teenager trying to figure it all out for the first time.

“I don’t have to be first,” Adrienne said, then she checked herself. Was she lying? Was she just trying to be brave? What had she learned earlier that night? That being first or second had nothing to do with love, really. Her father loved her, Thatcher loved her. Her father also loved Mavis, Thatcher also loved Fiona. That was okay, wasn’t it? It would have to be okay. “I understand.”

“You do?” Thatcher said. He sounded unconvinced, but hopeful. “Do you really?”

“I do really,” Adrienne said. She lifted her head to kiss him, and then, deciding she didn’t want to talk anymore lest she ruin the moment or change her mind, she closed her eyes, pretending to sleep.

The next morning at nine, Thatcher and Dr. Don went fishing on the
Just Do It, Too.
Dr. Don had offered the fishing trip up to Thatcher the night before and Adrienne was sure
that Thatcher would decline, but instead he’d looked beseechingly to Adrienne. He could only go if Adrienne covered the phone in the morning.

“Go,” she’d said, though, really, the last thing she wanted was her father and Thatcher alone for three hours on a boat when the only topic they had in common was her.