The Blue Bistro (38 page)

Thatcher smiled. “That’s not my style and you know it.” He grabbed her knee. “Hey, it’s fine. I had a really nice time. Your father is a quality person.”

They pulled up in front of the restaurant. Fiona was sitting on the edge of the dory, crying into her hands. Thatcher hopped out and went to her. Adrienne stayed in the truck, wishing she could vaporize. Should she walk into the Bistro as though nothing were wrong, or approach them and make herself the most egregious of intruders? Sitting in the car, gaping, wasn’t an option. She got out.

“Harry brought down the purchase and sale agreement,” Fiona wailed. “And I
signed
it.”

Thatcher sat next to her. “That’s what you were supposed to do.”

“So we’re really going to sell?”

“It was your idea.”

“Yes, but . . .” She let out a staccato breath. “Mario was right. They’re going to tear it down. Next year it will be a fat mansion.”

“It’s better that way,” Thatcher said. “Think how awful it would be if it were still a restaurant but not
our
restaurant.”

Fiona nodded with her lips pressed together in an ugly line. She raised her eyes and noticed Adrienne standing there.

“What do you think?” Fiona asked. “Are we making a mistake?”

“That’s not for me to say.”

“If it were your restaurant, would you sell it?”

“If you had asked me a few hours ago . . .” But now Adrienne regarded the Bistro: the dory filled with geraniums; the menu hanging in a glass box; the smells of the kitchen wafting through the front door; the way the guests’ faces glowed
when they walked in and saw candlelit tables and heard piano music; the sound of a champagne flute sliding across the blue granite; the crackers—God, the crackers.

“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t.”

“Thatcher is one great guy.”

“So you’ve said.”

Adrienne and her father were sitting under a canary yellow umbrella at the Beach Club eating sandwiches from Something Natural. Mavis was having a massage in the room.

“Your mother would have loved him.”

“She loved everybody.”

“True.” Dr. Don popped open a bottle of Nantucket Nectars and studied the label. “These things are just filled with sugar.” He took a long swill.

“So what did you and Thatcher talk about on the boat?”

Dr. Don leaned back in his beach chair. “Oh, you know. The Fighting Irish. His father’s business. His decision to sell to his brothers. And the restaurant. It sounds like he has quite a friendship with this Fiona person.”

There was an understatement. “He does,” Adrienne said.

“She’s sick?”

“He told you that?”

Dr. Don took a bite of his smoked turkey and cheddar.

“So that’s why they’re closing the restaurant,” Adrienne said. “She’s on the list for a transplant.”

“Thatch seemed uncertain about his next step,” Dr. Don said. “It hinges, I guess, on the girl.”

“Girl?”

“Fiona.”

“Yeah,” Adrienne said.

“Which leaves you in a funny position.”

“I’ve been in a funny position all summer,” Adrienne said.

“In what way?”

“I don’t know,” Adrienne said, though she did know. She thought about it all the time. “Thatcher and Fiona have been friends since they were born. And Duncan has his sister Delilah. And the Subiacos, who work in the kitchen, are all
brothers or cousins. And Spillman and Caren and Bruno and Joe have all been at the Bistro since it opened. I was worried when you and Mavis showed up because nobody on the staff seems to have a family. But that’s because they’re each other’s family. And what I realized is that I don’t have any relationships like that. Because we moved.” She looked up to see her father swallow. “We moved and moved and then I moved and moved and so there’s nothing in my life that’s lasted relationship-wise. And that’s strange, isn’t it? I’m twenty-eight years old and there’s no one in my life, you know, permanently.”

“This may be pointing out the obvious,” Dr. Don said, “but you have me.”

“Yes,” Adrienne said. “I have you.”

Two days later when it was time for Dr. Don and Mavis to go to the airport, Thatcher insisted on driving them in Fiona’s Range Rover. Mavis sat up front with Fiona’s oxygen tank at her feet, and Adrienne sat in the back holding hands with her father. She didn’t want him to leave. The Cristal had been a big hit—it brought Mavis to tears—and Adrienne felt saintly, bestowing her blessing.

At the airport, Thatcher stayed in the car while Adrienne walked into the terminal with her father. Mavis hurried ahead to get in line at the US Air counter. Adrienne’s nose tingled. It was the school play again: teary good-bye scene.

“October?” her father said. Dr. Don and Mavis had chosen October sixteenth as their wedding day. Even though it was only two and a half months away, Adrienne wondered what she’d be doing. Would she be staying on this island or leaving?

“I’ll be there,” she said.

Her father put down his suitcase and hugged her. “I probably don’t have to say this, but I will anyway because I’m your father. I want you to be careful.”

“I will.”

“He told me he loves you.”

“Did he?”

“He did. And I took him at his word. But that doesn’t mean . . .”

“I know.”

Her father scanned his eyes over the scene in the terminal: the people on cell phones, the Louis Vuitton luggage, the golden retrievers. “I wanted you to get married first,” he said. “I wanted you to be settled before I married Mavis. Do you forgive me for wanting that?”

“Yes,” Adrienne said. “But I’m glad you didn’t wait for me. I may never be settled.”

“You will someday.” He kissed her forehead. “I’m proud of you, honey. And so is your mother. You know that?”

“Yes,” she said.

He picked up his suitcase and kissed her again. “Love.”

“Love,” Adrienne said. She watched her father join Mavis in line. Then he turned around and waved one last time, and only then did she let herself cry.

Sign hanging next to the walk-in refrigerator:

35 DAYS UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD

Adrienne had been hearing about August since her first day of work. When the bar was busy, Caren might say, “It’s busy, but not as busy as August.” When the dining room was slow back in mid-June, Thatcher had said, “You’ll be longing for this once it’s August.” What was it about August?
Everyone
was on Nantucket in August—the celebrities, the big money, the old families. It was America’s summer vacation. Thirty-one days of sun, beach, boating, outdoor showers, fireflies, garden parties, linen sheets, coffee on the deck in the morning, a gin and tonic on the patio in the evening.

In the restaurant business, August meant every table was booked every night. Thatcher and Adrienne were forced to start a waiting list. If a guest didn’t reconfirm by noon, he lost his reservation. There was no mercy; it was simply too busy. It was too busy for anyone to take a night off; the staff was to work straight through the next thirty-five days until the Saturday of Labor Day weekend when the bistro would close its doors forever.

“You want a break,” Thatcher said one night during the menu meeting, “take it then.”

In the restaurant kitchen, August meant lobsters, blackberries, silver queen corn, and tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. In honor of the last year of the restaurant, Fiona was creating a different tomato special for each day of the month. The first of August (two hundred and fifty covers on the book, eleven reservation wait list) was a roasted yellow tomato soup. The second of August (two hundred and fifty covers, seven reservation wait list) was tomato pie with a Gruyère crust. On the third of August, Ernie Otemeyer came in with his wife to celebrate his birthday and since Ernie liked food that went with his Bud Light, Fiona made a Sicilian pizza—a thick, doughy crust, a layer of fresh buffalo mozzarella, topped with a voluptuous tomato-basil sauce. One morning when she was working the phone, Adrienne stepped into the kitchen hoping to get a few minutes with Mario, and she found Fiona taking a bite out of a red ripe tomato like it was an apple. Fiona held the tomato out.

“I’d put this on the menu,” she said. “But few would understand.”

In August, it felt like someone had turned up the heat, bringing life to a rolling boil. It wasn’t unusual to have nineteen or twenty VIP tables per seating; it wasn’t unheard-of to have thirty-five people waiting in line for the bar. The Subiacos had never done a better job—they cranked out beautiful plates, they made a double order of crackers at the end of the night, and they kept a sense of humor. The staff in the front of the house, on the other hand, started to resemble prisoners of war. Adrienne actually heard Duncan say to Caren, “I can’t have sex with you tonight. I’m too tired.” For Adrienne, work started at five fifty-nine when she checked her teeth, and after a blur of Beluga caviar, Menetou-Salon, foie gras, steak frites, requests for Patsy Cline, compliments on her shoes, and the never-ending question, “So what’s going to happen to this place next year?” it would end with six or seven hundred dollars in her pocket and Thatcher leading her at two o’clock in the morning out to his truck where she invariably fell asleep with her head against the window.

And it was in August that Adrienne’s nightmares started, nightmares much worse than a bushel of rotten peaches. She forgot coffee for table ten. She threw the contents of her champagne glass in Duncan’s face and only when his face started to melt did she realize she’d thrown boiling oil. She sat down at the piano to fill in for Rex, then panicked because every guest in the restaurant was silent, waiting for her to begin. It was a
recital,
but she didn’t know how to play. She crammed ten two-year-olds in high chairs at table twenty. She sent Holt Millman to the end of the bar line. She went into the back office to find Thatcher and Fiona having sex on Thatcher’s desk. She got locked, somehow, in the walk-in refrigerator and when she pounded on the door with the heel of her Jimmy Choo sling back, nobody answered. The restaurant was closed. She was alone. She was going to die.

When strange things started to happen at the restaurant, Adrienne thought she was suffering from sleep deprivation. Garden-variety fatigue.

August ninth: two hundred and fifty covers and an unprecedented twenty-six reservations on the wait list. Special: whole tomatoes stuffed with a crab, smoked corn, and Thai basil salad, dressed with a lime-shallot beurre blanc.

At the end of first seating, Adrienne had a complaint from Tyler Lefroy. On the Tuesday after Labor Day, Tyler was headed to the Citadel for four years of military college—his father’s idea. Tyler was dreading the end of summer. He loved this job, he told Adrienne. She knew he loved it because of the money and the crackers and because he partied after work with Eddie, Paco, and Jojo at the Subiaco compound. The actual work left him cold, though, and he was forever complaining.

“The guests have been stealing the silverware,” he said. “And the plates.”

“Stealing?”

“Yeah.” He held out his rubber bin. “This, for example, is what I just cleared from table twenty-seven. A four-top. And, as you see, I only have three chargers. I only have three dessert forks. And there was a cappuccino at that table, but I don’t see the cup or the saucer. Seem strange?”

“Maybe Roy or Gage cleared them,” Adrienne said.

“They never help me out,” Tyler said. “Nev-er.”

This was true. Roy and Gage didn’t like Tyler. They thought he was a smart-ass. They thought he
deserved
four years of military college.

“Maybe they did it as a joke, then,” Adrienne said.

“Okay,” Tyler said. “Except it’s not funny.”

“So you’re telling me you think someone at table twenty-seven stole dishes.”

“Yes.”

Adrienne checked the reservation book. Table twenty-seven had been two couples from Sconset with houses on Baxter Road, the oldest money on the island. What was the likelihood that they had
stolen
dishes?

“The one lady had a big purse,” Tyler added.

“Okay, Nancy Drew,” Adrienne said. “Let me know if you notice anything else.”

The next evening after second seating, Gage approached the podium. “I saw a woman hide a wineglass under her blouse,” he said. “She walked out with it.”

Adrienne stared at him in disbelief. She didn’t know exactly what to make of Gage. Sometimes she thought he was a wasted life and other times she thought he was a good, though unlucky, man trying to make the best of bad circumstances by taking a job suited for teenagers. “Why didn’t you stop her?”

He shrugged. “I just bus.”

The following night there was a third incident. A well-dressed, middle-aged couple who had languished on the waiting list three nights running agreed to come in and have their meal at the bar. When they were through, they left money for their bill and a good tip, but absconded with the leather folder that the bill came in. Duncan was sure of it, because—
Hello, Adrienne, it’s missing and where the hell did it go?

“We’re all tired,” Adrienne said. But that didn’t explain it. At the podium, her bowl of matches had to be refilled every two days and her Blue Bistro pencils kept disappearing. A
count showed that she was short five menus. Five! She confronted Thatcher.