The Blue Bistro (49 page)

All along, Thatcher has had a plan: Marry her. He’s talked about it with Father Ott. For months, they’ve gone over the sticky emotional territory. Fiona yearns to be married, and what she really wanted was to marry JZ. But JZ is already married; he had a chance to make things right with Fiona and he blew it. So that leaves Thatcher, who wants to make a pledge of his devotion to this person—his friend, his partner, his first love. She is more his family than his own family. He has planned to marry her all along and she agreed to it only by saying, “At the very end. If nobody else wants us.”

How ironic, and awful, that this was the summer Thatcher fell in love. He didn’t think it was possible—at age thirty-five, as solitary as he liked to be, as devoted to his business and Fiona, as impermeable to romance—and yet, one morning, just as he was wondering where he was going to find the kind of help that would enable him to make it through the summer, there she was. Adrienne Dealey. Beautiful, yes, but he loves Adrienne not because she is beautiful but because she is different. He has never known a woman so free from conceit, vanity, ambition, and pretense. He has never known a woman so willing to show the world that she is a human being. He has never known a woman with such an appetite—a literal appetite, but also an appetite for adventure—the places she’s been, unafraid, all by herself. Thatcher loves her in a huge, mature, adult way. He loves her
the right way. Now he has to hope that God grants her patience and understanding and faith. Whenever he prays these days, he prays for Adrienne, too.

He calls the hospital chapel and reserves it for two hours. He orders flowers from the gift shop near Admitting. They aren’t prepared to outfit a wedding, but they can put together a bouquet. One of the nurses in oncology plays the piano; Thatcher discovers her lunch hour is from one thirty to two thirty. He phones Father Ott who is staying at the rectory of St. Ann’s, then he takes Fiona’s hand. Her hands are so important to her for chopping and dicing and mixing and blending and stirring and rolling and sprinkling, and yet she’s always been so self-conscious about her swollen fingers and her discolored fingernails that he’s never been allowed to touch them. There’s a scar across her left palm from the day she picked up a hot sauté pan without a side towel. She went to the emergency room for that burn, and for the stitches she got when she cut herself while boning a duck breast—fifteen stitches across the tips of her second and third fingers. There are other marks and scars that Thatcher can’t identify; if he could, he’d ask her about each one.

She’s off the vent but her eyes are closed.

“Fiona,” he says.

She opens her eyes.

“We’re getting married at two o’clock.”

The words terrify him, because he knows that she’ll know what they signify. At the very end. If nobody else wants us.

Fiona’s lips are cracked and bleeding, and although it must hurt, she smiles.

In this ward of the hospital there isn’t much in the way of good news, but everyone is excited about a wedding. Thatcher goes back to his room at the hotel to shower, shave, and change, and he spends a full, precious five minutes considering the telephone.

Call Adrienne? And say what?

When he returns, the nurses have put Fiona back on the vent—just until she’s ready to go—and they have changed
her into a fresh white johnny and brushed her hair so that it flows down over the top of the sheet. The gift shop has done a beautiful job with the bouquet of roses and Fiona holds it as they unhook her from the ventilator and wheel her down the corridor toward the chapel. Thatcher tries to be present in the moment, he tries not to peer behind the half-open doors they pass, he tries not to listen to the dialogue of the soap operas on TV. The attending nurse, a woman named Ella, chatters about her own wedding twenty-eight years earlier at the steepled Congregational Church in Acton.

“Do you have rings?” Ella whispers to Thatcher.

He has rings, expensive rings purchased that morning from Shreve, Crump & Low. As Ella and Thatcher wheel Fiona’s gurney into the chapel, he checks his shirt pocket for their delicate presence—two circles wrapped in tissue paper. The chapel is a brown room, dimly lit, with sturdy, functional-looking wooden benches and a large plain wooden cross hanging over the carpeted stairs of the altar. Father Ott waits there, all six foot six of him, in his flowing white robe. Oncology nurse, Teri Lee, a diminutive Korean woman, waits for Thatcher’s signal, and then she starts to play Pachelbel’s Canon in D. On this piano, in this chapel, under these circumstances, the music is plaintive. A third nurse named Kristin Benedict is sitting in the first row; she has spent a great many hours caring for Fiona, and what makes her even more special is that she’s eaten at the Bistro (in the summer of 1996, while she was on vacation with her husband). Thatcher has asked her to be a witness. Kristin is a crier; she sobs quietly as Teri plays the piano, as the gurney moves down the aisle, Thatcher on one side, Ella on the other. Once they reach the altar, the music subsides, Thatcher takes Fiona’s scarred hand and Father Ott raises his arms and proclaims in his resonant voice:
“We gather here today in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Thatcher crosses himself and out of the corner of his eye, he sees Fiona lift her hand and cross herself. She is smiling.

Father Ott leads them, briskly, through the age-old wedding
vows. He is hurrying, Thatcher suspects, because no one knows how long Fiona will last without oxygen. Thatcher tries, tries, to stay present in the moment, and not to think of how Father Ott will, at some point, give Fiona the sacrament of Last Rites, he will anoint her with oil, he will whisper Psalm 23 into her deaf ear. Fiona’s parents are to land at Logan at six o’clock. Thatcher offered to pick them up but Mrs. Kemp doesn’t want Fiona to be alone, even for a second. Thatcher is shaking. Fiona will die, she will be cold to the touch, gone from Thatcher in every human sense, even though she is alive now—she is alive and he is marrying her and she is marrying him. They are getting married, honoring the thirty years that they’ve been best friends—through the chocolate swirl cheesecake, and the beer on the playground, and the day they bought the restaurant, and every moment in between and since.

Fiona is smiling. She takes a deep breath and whispers, “I do.” Thatcher slips a ring on her finger. It’s way too big and he’s crushed because he wants her to take the ring with her when she goes. She holds it in place with her thumb. Thatcher puts on his own ring; he swears he will never take it off. Father Ott bestows a blessing and they cross themselves again, but not Fiona; her eyes are glazing over, she’s checking out. But not yet! Not yet!

“You may kiss the bride,” Father Ott says. Teri Lee starts in with the piano and Kristin Benedict sobs and Thatcher kisses Fiona, his new wife, on her cracked lips. For the first time ever, he kisses her.

Adrienne doesn’t sleep.

She was able to wheedle only the most basic information out of Mario before he checked his watch and claimed he was late meeting Louis and Hector at the RopeWalk and left. The basic information was this: Thatcher was back, Mario had bumped into him at the airport, Thatcher asked if Mario had seen Adrienne and Mario said no. Thatcher asked Mario to find Adrienne and let her know that he, Thatcher, wanted to talk to her.

Talk to me about what?
Adrienne asked.

He didn’t say.

This is not something she bargained for: Thatcher, here, on Nantucket, looking for her. The restaurant is gone, Fiona is dead, and Adrienne is most comfortable placing Thatcher in a similar category: disappeared, vanished, nonexistent. Easier that way to banish him from her mind. Not so easy now that she knows he is asleep (or not) on this tiny island.

She gets home from work at eleven thirty and sits in her kitchen with all the lights off contemplating a glass of wine. But no, she’s promised herself, no. She tries to read, she tries turning off the light and closing her eyes. She gets up and looks out into her backyard—the one big tree is swaying. It’s windy, but not particularly cold. She throws on a fleece and goes outside. She feels better being outside.

She rides her bike to Thatcher’s cottage, the cottage behind the big house in town. There is a light on. She feels like if she opens her mouth, something awful will come out. He’s right there, ten feet away, in that cottage, and she panics because she can’t face him, she can’t deal with closure; it will kill her, and those words are so wrong, so harsh in light of what he’s just been through, but they will kill her in a sense. Closure will destroy her fragile sense of okay-for-now. Seeing him will ruin every step toward healing that she’s made in the last month.

She rides her bike home and makes a decision. She has to leave. Tomorrow.

She spends the rest of the night packing up her clothes, her new pairs of beautiful shoes, the hand bell. Mack will not be happy that she’s leaving him with two weeks until the hotel closes for the season, but what else can she do? At first light, she writes out a note of apology and hops back on her bike. Cowardly girl, she thinks, quitting by note. She will never be able to use Mack or Thatcher as a reference. This is a summer that will be missing from her résumé. The summer that didn’t count. The summer that was a mistake.

Nantucket is too beautiful to be a mistake, however, especially
this morning. The sun comes up and the sky is pale at first with the promise of that brilliant blue; the air is crisp and rich with smells of the water. She pedals down the road toward the Beach Club, trying to correct her thinking. Nantucket was not a mistake. She learned so much about food, about wine, about people, about herself. Because it is so early and she still has lots of time, she takes the turn in the road that she made the first day here—the stretch that leads to the spot where the Bistro used to be. From a hundred yards away, she sees the frame of the Elperns’ new house. It’s impressively large, as large as Holt Millman’s house. She is so amazed that something so tall and grandiose could be built in two short weeks that she doesn’t notice the silver truck in the parking lot until it’s too late. But then, once she does see the truck, right there, his truck, a strange thing happens: She keeps going, propelling herself closer to the very thing she’s running away from.

Thatcher stands in the parking lot wearing his red fleece jacket, his hands in his pockets, staring at the house. Adrienne has plenty of time to turn around, a more than good chance of leaving undetected. But she is drawn to him. She wonders what it feels like to be looking at the thing that is standing in the place where your life used to be. Is it awful? Is it a relief?

“Thatcher,” she says.

He whips around; she’s scared him. Good. She wanted to scare him. He stares at her a second, and she dismounts her bike. He squeezes her so tightly she cries out and then, before she knows it, they’re kissing. They’re kissing and Adrienne starts to cry.

“I’m sorry,” Adrienne says. “About Fee. I’m so sorry.”

He holds her face in his hands. She can feel his wedding band against her cheek.

“I love you,” he says. “I know you don’t believe it, but I do.”

She does believe it, but she’s afraid to say so.

“I wanted to call, but . . . it’s been so . . . I was in South Bend for three weeks . . . I wasn’t sure if you’d understand . . . I felt like, God, if I got back and you were still here . . .”

“I was going to leave today,” she says. She holds up the note, which she has been crushing in her palm since she left her house. “I was about to tell Mack and go.”

“Because of me?”

She nods; there are more tears. She can’t predict what’s going to happen: Is it good, is it bad? Will he come with her to her father’s wedding? And what on earth will they do after that? Another restaurant? Another business? Will he marry her and be a man who wears two wedding rings? Maybe he will. And since when is she the kind of person who needs so many answers?

While she was packing her bags she took a minute and inspected the hand bell that Duncan bequeathed to her, the one he rang each night for last call. Inside the bottom rim, she found an inscription: “To Thatcher Smith with appreciation from the Parish of St. Joseph’s, South Bend, Indiana.” It had alarmed her that she was taking Thatcher’s bell, but at the same time she felt she had a right to it; she felt she had earned that small piece of Thatcher. She is not sure she deserves more than that small piece; she is not at all sure she deserves what she has now: his whole self in her arms, declaring his love.

“I want to talk to you,” Thatcher says. “So I can tell you I love you. What time do you have to be at work?”

She crumples the note to Mack in her hand. “Eight thirty.”

“That’s in two hours,” he says, checking his beautiful watch.

“What should we do?” she asks.

Thatcher turns her so that she is facing the Elpern house; it will be a lovely house when it is finished. He takes her hand and leads her to his truck and he picks up her bike with one hand and lays it down in the back.

Adrienne doesn’t ask where they are going; she already knows.

They are going to breakfast.