The Blue Bistro (37 page)

She dropped them off at the docks in the morning. Pulling out of the A&P parking lot in Thatcher’s enormous truck, she almost ran over a family of four. Lack of sleep. Nerves.

She drove out to the airport to pick up Caren, who had called very early on a sketchy cell phone line and begged a ride.
I don’t have a dime left for a taxi,
she’d said. Adrienne found her standing on the curb in front of the terminal. Caren was wearing the same outfit she’d left in—her white jeans and black halter top. Her hair was down but tangled and messy and her clothes were rumpled. She looked like a half-smoked cigarette. And when she climbed into the cab of Thatcher’s truck, there was a horrible smell: spoiled wine, rotten meat, a bad fart. Adrienne cracked her window.

“So,” she said. “How was it?”

“I drank too much. Smoked weed. Did a line of cocaine. Took X.”

“Does that mean it was good or bad?” Adrienne said.

“The concert was good. Are you kidding me? Sixth row for Mick Jagger? But that was the great beginning of something bad. I never even saw the inside of the Ritz. We left the concert and went to Radius. I had three martinis for dinner. Then we went to Mistral. Then a party somewhere in Back Bay where we all did coke. Haven’t been that stupid in many, many years. Then to Saint.” She eyed the dashboard. “I left Saint at six.”

“This morning?”

“Choked down a ricotta cannoli in the North End. I feel lousy.”

“So you haven’t slept.”

“Half an hour on the plane. I need a shower and a Percocet. My bed. Room-darkening shades. Six cups of espresso before I go to work.”

“That would be a start,” Adrienne said.

“Did you talk to Duncan? Was he upset? He didn’t call my cell.”

Adrienne gnawed her lower lip. Before she’d left the restaurant the night before, she had one more conversation with Duncan as he cleaned up the bar.

“I guess I won’t be seeing you at our house tonight,” Adrienne had said. “It’ll probably feel weird to sleep in your own bed.”

“Who said I’m sleeping in my own bed?” Duncan said.

“Where else would you sleep?” Adrienne asked.

“We’re going
out,
” Duncan said. He nodded toward Charlie who, after seventeen beers, was staggering near the front door. “Last call at the Chicken Box. For
starters.
And when you talk to Caren, feel free to tell her so.”

But Adrienne had no desire to tell Caren so. Adrienne had too much emotional work of her own.

“Well,” Adrienne said, “he asked a lot of questions about Tate.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Just about who he was.”

“You didn’t tell Duncan that Tate was gay?”

“Of course not.” Adrienne glanced at Caren. It was a hundred degrees out and the woman was shivering in her seat. “What do you expect from Duncan, anyway?”

“The same thing every woman expects,” Caren said.

“Which is what?” Adrienne was asking because she really wanted to know. Thatcher had said he loved her, but now what happened? Where did they go? What did they do?

“Which is this,” Caren said. She pointed to a white van from Flowers on Chestnut idling in their driveway.

Adrienne parked alongside the van while Caren bolted for the house. By the time Adrienne got inside, Caren had her face buried in what must have been three dozen long-stemmed red roses.

For me,
Adrienne thought.
Thatcher? Dad?

But the card was addressed to Caren. She held it in the air like a winning lottery ticket.

“He loves me,” she said.

By the time Adrienne was ready to leave for work fifteen minutes later, Duncan was carrying Caren down the hall toward the bedroom.

“Don’t ever take off on me like that again,” Duncan said. “You made me crazy. Wasn’t I crazy, Adrienne?”

“You were crazy,” Adrienne said. She inhaled the deep perfume of the roses. Proof that there was more than one way to skin a cat. Adrienne wondered if her father and Thatcher were talking about her. Two hours left.

At work, the phone rang off the hook. Now that summer was more than half over, she heard a new desperation in everyone’s voice. Or maybe everyone else was the same and it was Adrienne with the desperation.

“The thirty-first is Saturday,” Adrienne said. Her brain was a swarm of names, dates, and times, as pesky as gnats.

“No, the thirty-first is Sunday.”

“No,” Adrienne said, checking her reservation sheet. “The thirty-first is Saturday.”

“Reference your calendar,” Mack said. “I’ll wait.”

Adrienne flipped to the front of the book where the calendar was pasted inside the front cover. The hair on her arms stood up. She felt like she was the one on a boat, a boat precariously keeled to one side, threatening to dump her in with the sharks. Her book was all wrong. She had been booking reservations for Friday on Saturday’s page. She flipped to Saturday and was horrified to find it was full—and so all the people who had called that morning asking for Saturday had to be called back. There was no room! Adrienne scrambled with her eraser. This was awful. A hideous mess. How many reservations had she made today? How many really were for Sunday? This was her worst fuckup so far. This was worse than skipping a line on her SATs and not realizing it until the end of the section when she had one more answer than space. Now she had to call back nearly everyone she had
spoken to in the past hour to tell them,
Sorry, Saturday is booked.

Adrienne hung up with Mack and tried to channel her thoughts. Paris, France. Kevin in New York. Kennedy could eat on Saturday night but not at table twenty, unless Thatcher wanted to move him. Who else? Dustin Hoffman? Adrienne walked away from the podium. The phone rang but she didn’t answer. She went into the ladies’ room and, out of habit, checked her teeth.

The two of them were out on the water, talking about her.

When Adrienne next saw her father and Thatcher, they were walking down the dock like lovers. Adrienne was quaking. She had managed to staunch the bleeding of her massive trauma that morning, but it wasn’t pretty. In the end she gave the three tables she had left on Saturday night to Kennedy, Hoffman, and Leigh Stanford and she called everyone else back to renege with enormous apologies. Mrs. Langley screamed so loudly Adrienne had to set the receiver down. Kevin changed his party’s reservation to Sunday but at the end of their conversation he said, “This kind of thing never happened when I worked there.” Mascaro threatened to call the chamber of commerce.

“It was a
mistake,
” Adrienne said.

Just as she thought she might fill her pockets with tablecloth weights and walk out into the ocean, Henry Subiaco emerged from the kitchen with a mug of his homemade root beer.

“This is the best root beer I’ve ever tasted,” Adrienne said.

“Next year,” he said, “you work for me.”

Now Adrienne was confronted with her father’s hand on the back of Thatcher’s neck as they strolled toward her. Grinning, faces red from the sun. With his free hand, her father waved.

“Did you catch anything?” she asked.

“Thatch caught a thirty-nine-inch striper,” Dr. Don said. “It was a thing of beauty.”

“Family meal tonight,” Thatcher said.

“Where’s the fish?”

“First mate’s cleaning it for me. How was work?”

“I quit,” she said. “I’m going to work for Henry Subiaco.”

“That bad?”

“Worse than bad.” She looked at her father. “We’re taking you back to the hotel?”

“Can you join Mavis and I on the beach?” Dr. Don asked.

Adrienne checked her running watch. Twelve fifteen, one foot above sea level, and sinking by the minute. “I can. After I go over some work stuff with Thatcher. Say two o’clock?”

“Thank you, sweetie.”

“You don’t have to thank me for spending time with you,” she said.

They waited on the dock until the first mate delivered a huge plastic bag of filleted fish. Dr. Don clapped Thatcher on the shoulder. “This is a great guy, Adrienne.”

Three hours on the water and they were best friends.

“You’re the great guy,” Thatcher said. “I haven’t been fishing in years. Thank you for taking me.”

Adrienne stifled a yawn. Nerves. Lack of sleep.

Thatcher and Adrienne dropped Dr. Don off at the Beach Club and headed back to the restaurant. Adrienne tried to explain the train wreck that was her morning, but Thatcher seemed distracted.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “Did my father say something inappropriate? He’s famous for that.”

Thatcher took her hand. “He wants your blessing. With Mavis.”

“He has my blessing. I sent him and Mavis a bottle of Cristal at the Pearl tonight.”

“That’s my girl,” Thatcher said.

“What else did you talk about?” Adrienne asked.

“Baseball. Football. Notre Dame. My family’s business. I think your dad wanted to get a sense of me. I tried to give it to him.”

“Did my name come up?”

“From time to time. Like I said, he wants you to feel okay about Mavis.”

“Did you talk about . . . us? You and me?”

“A little.”

Adrienne banged her head against the window.
What a morning!
“I need you to tell me word for word what was said.”