The Blue Bistro (48 page)

Mack never asks personal questions. Compared to life at the Bistro, where everyone’s business polluted the air like smoke, working at the hotel is bloodless, boring. It’s just a job. But one day, shortly after Adrienne watched the bulldozers demolishing the bistro, Mack calls her into his office.

“The Harrisons said they saw you last night at the Brant Point Grill,” he says.

“Did they?”

“They said you didn’t recognize them.”

“I try not to fraternize with guests outside of work,” she says. “That was your suggestion.”

“It was,” Mack says. “They told me you were drunk. They were worried.”

The Harrisons are an older couple from Quebec. Mrs. Harrison is another woman who wants to be Adrienne’s mother; she fusses and clucks and makes a big deal about her every time they set foot in the lobby. Adrienne really liked the Harrisons until this very second.

“There’s no reason for anyone to worry about me,” she says. “I’m fine.”

It takes fifteen late-night phone calls, several long letters, and Fiona’s weak but charming attempt to write up a business plan for Thatcher to agree to come to Nantucket to look at this restaurant she’s been talking about. He’s hesitant on several fronts: Fiona is young and relatively inexperienced; he, Thatcher, knows nothing about the restaurant business or the business of living on an island. He fears Fiona is asking him to be her partner because he’s the only person she knows who has access to real money. He can, with ease, sell his fifth of the carpet business. His brothers are greedy for it; Smith’s Carpet and Flooring has become an empire.

He expresses his concerns to Fiona. She, repeatedly, expresses her concerns to him: She hates cooking on the line,
the male cooks harass her, they won’t stop talking about blow jobs, she has to get her own place, she has to be the boss.

“You’re not talking to a normal person,” she finally says over the phone late one night after her shift. “I can’t put in eight or nine years before I strike out on my own. I don’t have that kind of time.”

She has never, in the long history of their friendship, invoked her illness as an excuse or a reason for special treatment and the fact that she does so now makes Thatcher see that she is serious. He agrees to come out to the island, sleep on the floor of Fiona’s spartan cottage, and meet with the Realtor at the ungodly hour of six in the morning to see the place she’s found. It’s a burger shack, plain and simple: picnic tables in the sand sheltered by half-walls and an awning. The only things properly inside are the kitchen, the bathrooms, and a meager counter where one places an order, and yet the young, exhausted-looking real estate agent tells them the current owners want seven hundred thousand dollars for it. Fiona loves the place; she loves the way it sits on a beach all by itself like a restaurant on a deserted island. Thatcher remains skeptical; it’s still too dark for him to even see the water.

“It’s not close to anything,” Thatcher says. “It’s not in town. How will people know to come here?”

“It will be a destination restaurant,” Fiona says. “Ever heard of the Michelin Guide?”

“It doesn’t even have floors,” Thatcher says. How will he explain to his father that he’s investing nearly three quarters of a million dollars in a building without floors?

“Let’s look at the kitchen,” Fiona says. She’s skipping, giddy, as happy as he’s ever seen her, already dressed in her whites for her other job. She is so small she looks like a child dressed up as a chef for Halloween. The kitchen is, at least, clean, and the appliances are impressively large and modern. Fiona opens the walk-in: it’s stocked with burger patties and bags of French fries and tubs of mayonnaise.

“Have you ever eaten here?” Thatcher asks.

“Of course not,” Fiona says.

They return to the dining room, where the real estate agent sits forlornly at one of the picnic tables, fiddling with a packet of ketchup. She has, she informed them on the drive out, shown the restaurant almost sixty times between the hours of six and seven
A.M
. or after eleven at night. In her opinion, it’s overpriced.

“Don’t you see it?” Fiona says.

“See what?”

“We’ll get a piano player, and one of those zinc bars like they have at the bistros in Paris. We’ll have white linen tablecloths, candlelight. We’ll have new lives, Thatch. Me in the kitchen with a civilized crew, you up front greeting the guests. I can make crackers.”

“You can make crackers?” He has no idea what she’s talking about. She wants to spend all of his inheritance and then some on a fancy restaurant and make crackers? Still, he feels himself succumbing. If she makes crackers, they will be the best crackers on earth, he knows it.

She smiles at him. She has a burn mark on her cheek from a sauce that bubbled up the night before at work; the burn is round, the size of a dime. “This will be a great place.”

“It has no floors,” Thatcher says in a last ditch effort to escape his fate.

“The doctors gave me ten years,” Fiona says. “Maybe fifteen.”

“Maybe fifty,” Thatcher says. He sighs, digs a toe in the sand, and nods toward the glum Realtor. Outside, the sky is lightening. “Let’s do it, then. Let’s make this lady’s day.”

TO
: [email protected]

FROM
: [email protected]

DATE
: September 26, 2005, 7:01
P.M
.

SUBJECT
: wedding and worries

I will start by telling you what you already know which is that I am sick with worry about you. I wish you would call. I try you every night at the number you gave me for the cottage but you never answer and you are the last person in America without an answering
machine. Please call me soon or I will mortify you by calling you at the hotel. You don’t have to pretend to be happy. I just want to make sure you’re breathing, eating, brushing.

The wedding has ballooned to include a few of the friends we’ve made here and some of Mavis’s family from Louisiana, so now it’s sixty people for sure with the possibility of seventy-five so we’ve gone and booked a banquet room at this wonderful restaurant in St. Michael’s. You will love St. Mike’s, and in fact, I think you should consider staying here in Maryland for a while, through the holidays at least. You can get a job if you want, though I would be happy to bankroll my little girl again for a few months so that you can simply relax and reflect and have some quiet time. That way I will see for myself that you’re breathing, eating, and brushing.

I’m not sure, Adrienne, what you’re still doing there. I worry.

Love love love.

Autumn arrives at the end of September. The weather grows cool and misty, the trees in town turn yellow and orange and red; at the end of her shift each afternoon, Adrienne lights a fire in the lobby’s fireplace. Adrienne takes comfort in all this; it’s been a long time since she experienced fall. On a rare excursion into town on her day off, she ventures into Dessert to buy herself a sweater. The woman with the red hair isn’t in, and Adrienne feels both sorry and relieved. Part of her wants to be recognized as the hostess from the Blue Bistro, Thatcher’s girlfriend, and part of her wishes the three months of summer never happened.

She spends a lot of time thinking about the summer before her mother died, her summer at Camp Hideaway. She had grown to love the smell of her cabin, and the soft flannel lining of her sleeping bag. She loved the certainty of flag raising and oatmeal with just-picked raspberries and Pammy Ipp who was her partner in everything from canoeing to late-night trips to the bathhouse. The summer at Hideaway was
an escape to a place where the rules for the real world didn’t apply. Her mother wasn’t sick—her mythical brother was. But Adrienne had realized even then that it wouldn’t last forever. The bubble would pop: She would leave behind the days of swimming in the cold green water of Lake Sherwood and sitting around the campfire singing “Red River Valley” as the very cute Nick Boccio strummed his guitar. She would confess the truth to Pammy Ipp and return home to spend August watching
General Hospital
in the air-conditioned dens of her regular, at-home friends, and visiting her mother in the hospital. In many ways it was as though Camp Hideaway had never happened, except it had, and now, so many years later, she was still thinking about it with longing and regret.

One night at the Brant Point Grill, a very quiet Monday night, Adrienne drinks too much. She received an e-mail from her father about his wedding, less than three weeks away, and she realizes she has to make a decision. Her lease at the cottage ends the day after Columbus Day. What
is
she still doing here? She’s passing the time, filling up hours, waiting. The thought of not waiting, of going to Maryland or St. Bart’s or some other place panics her. So she drinks her vodkas steadily and evenly, with purpose. She forgets to order food. It’s the regular bartender’s night off, and there’s a young brunette woman in his stead. This girl pours with a smile so fake that Adrienne orders more often just to study her insincerity.

Next thing she knows, she’s in the bartender’s arms, inhaling the wholesome Aveda scent of her hair.

“Here we go,” the bartender directs. “Toward the door.”

Adrienne stares down at her feet (she is wearing a pair of red suede driving moccasins, a holdover from Aspen). She’s doing some kind of dance step—stumbling, weaving, buckling.

“We’re almost there,” the bartender says. “I called you a cab, though you might need an ambulance.” This is said with concern, probably more for her job than for Adrienne’s well-being, though maybe not. The bartender’s arms are strong
and she handles Adrienne firmly but carefully, like she’s a child.

“Do you have children?” Adrienne hears herself ask.

The bartender nods. “Three.”

Adrienne tries to say something about how she hardly looks old enough but her words come out slurred and mangled and there isn’t time to start the thought over because a cab whips into the circular driveway. The cabbie, who looks familiar somehow, accepts Adrienne from the bartender and pours her into the backseat of the cab.

She wakes up at four in the morning with her face stuck to the linoleum floor of the kitchen, but she’s powerless to move. At seven thirty, when the sun comes up, she crawls to the phone and calls Mack.

Not coming in today,
she says.
Too sick to work.

Two days later, she agrees to work a double as penance. Tiny, the night desk person, wants a break, and Adrienne volunteers to cover for her. In addition to getting Adrienne out of the doghouse with Mack, it will keep her away from the bars. She has promised herself she will never drink again, and she wonders how long it will be until she wants to.

Adrienne has never worked the night desk before and she finds that she likes it. Between six and seven o’clock, the hotel guests meet cabs out front or walk into town for dinner. All the other great places are still open: Club Car, Boarding House, 21 Federal, American Seasons, Company of the Cauldron, Le Languedoc, Blue Fin, 56 Union, the Pearl, Cinco. Then, when most of the guests have wandered out, Adrienne puts on some opera and makes herself a cup of tea and enjoys the fire.

She is a person with a broken heart. That hardly makes her special. It happens to everyone. She herself broke Michael Sullivan’s heart less than three years earlier. How does she think he felt banging around Chatham after she fled for Hawaii? He probably felt like she does now. Adrienne considers calling him up to apologize. Then she thinks about calling Pammy Ipp.

St. Michael’s might not be so bad,
she thinks. It’s another charming resort town that probably needs help through Christmas. She can attend her father’s wedding and simply stay with him and Mavis in their new home. In January, she can try St. Bart’s, maybe, if she feels up to it. Then in the spring she might join Kyra and the landscape painter in Carmel. So there it is: An entire year of possibility. Adrienne feels better than she has since Fiona’s collapse. She feels clean and right-headed and warm, in her new sweater in front of the fire. Her heart is broken, but it will heal. That’s what hearts do.

And then, she feels a blast of cold air. The door opens and Mario walks in.

At first, Adrienne mistakes him for a late check-in: a handsome, dark-haired man in a black silk shirt, jeans, tweed blazer. Her newfound optimism blooms, because maybe what she needs is a mild flirtation to carry her even farther from her sadness. But as the man approaches, Adrienne’s mind whispers,
Mario. Is it him? No. Yes, it is. No. It is so. It’s him.

She stands perfectly still, her left hand wrapped around the now-cold mug of tea. She wonders if he’s heard about her poor showing at the Brant Point Grill. (She finally figured out that the cabbie who drove her home that night was the same one who had picked her up from the Subiacos’ first party, because she didn’t remember giving him her address, and yet she arrived home safely.) Maybe Mario is here to suggest AA. Or maybe he’s come to declare his love for her, and how will Adrienne feel about that? Will she be able, in the face of all her pain and rejection, to turn him down? She takes a shallow breath. Maybe he’s here to ask her again about working at his new restaurant, or to show her the piece that has finally been run in
Vanity Fair
(Adrienne has the issue at home but can’t bring herself to read it). Or maybe he’s just here to catch up because they had, after all, been friends. But his stride is purposeful and his black eyes are intent and Adrienne is petrified. She clenches the mug. He doesn’t try to kiss her or hug her; he doesn’t even greet her. But he does, with two swift words, cut the rope that ties Adrienne to the heavy load of her uncertainty. She’s finished waiting.

Mario’s voice is low and husky, barely audible over the crackling fire and the Andrea Bocelli.

“Thatcher’s back,” he says.

Fiona hasn’t been off the vent for more than an hour at a time since they got to the hospital, and when she does come off, the nurses have warned her not to talk—talking uses up too much oxygen. The corners of Fiona’s mouth are cracked and bleeding from all the times she’s been intubated. Her O
₂
sats are very low, the new drug has failed; Fiona won’t be getting any better. The doctors suggested Thatcher call Fiona’s parents. They’re on their way. This is it—Thatcher knows it and Fiona knows it and yet neither of them can speak.