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: Ade12177@hotmail.com
FROM: DrDon@toothache.com
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.