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. Speciaclass="underline" 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.
“The guests are taking things,” she said. “Silverware, plates, wineglasses. The matches, my pencils, the menus. They’re stealing.”
Thatcher looked upon her with weary eyes. Of everybody up front, Thatcher seemed the most exhausted. And not only exhausted but sad. The sign that hung in the kitchen seemed to speak straight from his heart. His world was ending in twenty-five days. “Can you blame them?” he said. “We close in three and a half weeks. Whatever they took, that’s all they’ll be left with.”
August thirteenth: two hundred and fifty covers, twenty-one reservations on the wait list. Speciaclass="underline" oven-roasted tomatoes with garlic and thyme, served with grilled peasant bread.