The Blue Bistro (45 page)

“Where’s JZ?” Adrienne asked.

“He’s out,” the kid said. “Sick.”

That night, family meal was ten pizzas from the Muse. Adrienne wanted to say something at menu meeting, but what to say? Fiona’s left lung had collapsed, she was coughing up blood, her O
₂
sats were very low. The lung infection she’d been battling all summer was back, but they were trying a new drug. That, and praying for a lung donor. Thatcher had
given Adrienne these stark details but had asked her not to share them. And so, Adrienne sat quietly at the twelve-top while the staff ate pizza. She watched Tyler stuff half a piece in his mouth like a healthy eighteen-year-old boy who was ten days away from having every freedom of his young life rescinded at military college. She watched Caren, who was eating a bowl of lettuce that she had swiped from the reach-in. She watched Joe, who ate his pizza neatly, with a knife and fork. The staff looked tired, worried, uninspired. Adrienne lifted a slice of pepperoni off the greasy paper plate, but she couldn’t eat. She was starving, ravenous, but food wasn’t going to help. She was hungry for something else: the phone ringing, Thatcher’s voice, good news, love.

And yet, the restaurant opened at six and service began: the pretzel bread, the mustard, the doughnuts, the VIP orders, the crab cakes, the steak frites, the fondue. Antonio expedited, the kitchen sent out impeccable plates, Rex played the piano, Duncan poured drinks, Tyler Lefroy complained that he was working twice as hard as Gage who, he informed Adrienne, had gotten
stoned
before work. The guests laughed, talked, paid their bills, left tips, raved about the food. No one could tell there was a single thing wrong.

Holt Millman was in, table twenty, party of four.
Better than ever,
he said.
Tell Fiona I said so.

Thatcher didn’t call. Adrienne left him a message with the totals from the floor and the bar. She said nothing else.

August twenty-sixth: two hundred and fifty covers, thirty-six reservation wait list. The special was an inside-out BLT: mâche, crispy pancetta, and a round garlic crouton sandwiched between two slices of tomato, drizzled with basil aioli. Adrienne’s stomach growled at the sight of it, but she couldn’t eat.

Cat was in, having fondue at one of the four-tops in the sand. They polished off a magnum of Laurent-Perrier, then ordered port. So Cat was tipsy and then some when, at the end of the night, she pulled Adrienne aside.

“There are rumors going around,” Cat said.

“Really?” Adrienne said. “What’s the word?”

“The word is that Fiona is dead.”

Adrienne laughed; it was a strange sound, even to her own ears. “No,” Adrienne said. “She’s not dead.”

The next morning, Adrienne called her father at work. She got Mavis on the phone, who said, “Adrienne, doll, he’s with a patient. Can I have him call you?”

“I have to speak with him now,” Adrienne said.

Mavis put Adrienne on hold to some awful Muzak and Adrienne stared at the calendar in the front of the reservation book. One week left. That was it. She took a deep breath. Well, there was always Darla Parrish, who kept insisting she was going to accompany Adrienne into the next chapter. Adrienne couldn’t decide if that made her feel better or worse.

Her father came on the phone. “Honey, is everything all right?”

When Adrienne took a breath to answer, a sob escaped. She cried into the phone and imagined herself facedown on a childhood bed she had long forgotten—her father and her mother, too, smoothing her hair, patting her back, telling her not to worry, telling her everything was going to be just fine.

August twenty-seventh: two hundred and fifty covers, twenty-three reservation wait list. Special: whole ripe tomatoes cut into quarters and served with salt and pepper. Antonio decided on this simple preparation as a tribute to Fiona. A man at table two complained that it wasn’t fancy enough. “I’ve been hearing all about these tomato specials,” he said. “And this is what you give me?”

Adrienne removed his plate. “Don’t you get it?” she said. “The tomato is perfect as it is.”

He didn’t get it. He ordered the foie gras cooked through.

That night, at quarter to three, the phone rang. Adrienne had just gotten home. Caren and Duncan were opening a bottle of Failla pinot noir that they had stolen from the wine cave.

Caren said, “Who calls at this hour?”

Adrienne had a funny feeling and she snapped up the phone.

“Hello?” she said.

“Adrienne?” It was Thatcher, but something was wrong with his voice. Then she realized he was crying.

“Thatcher?” she said.

The line clicked. She held a dial tone. She called Thatch back on his cell phone but it went to his voice mail. “It’s me,” she said. “Call me back.”

Caren glanced up from the Pottery Barn catalog. She and Duncan were talking drapes.

“Thatch?” she said.

Adrienne managed a nod.

“Did he say anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Want a glass of wine?” Caren said.

“Yes,” Adrienne said.

She didn’t sleep. She finished the bottle of wine and opened another, then she sat at the kitchen table and listened to the muted sounds of Caren and Duncan’s lovemaking. She called Thatcher three more times—all three calls went to his voice mail, but she didn’t leave a message. Caren came out to use the bathroom and when she saw Adrienne sitting at the table, she offered her a Percocet. Adrienne took it. It made her loopy and vague, but it didn’t put her to sleep. At five thirty, the sun rose. Adrienne watched the light through the leaves of the trees in the backyard, and when she couldn’t wait another second, she hopped on her bike and rode to the restaurant.

The red Durango was in the parking lot. Mario was in way too early for work. The door to the Bistro was swinging open; when Adrienne stepped through, she saw him sitting at the bar with a drink, a Scotch. He looked at her.

“She’s dead?” Adrienne said.

He tossed back the last of his drink, then brought the glass down so hard that it cracked in his hand. He left the
damaged glass on the bar and walked toward Adrienne. Adrienne was numb; she had no thoughts.

“There’s something else you have to know,” Mario said. He hugged her.

“What’s that?” Adrienne asked. Her fingers and toes were tingling. She pressed her tongue into the fibers of Mario’s cotton shirt. She wanted to taste something.

“Thatcher married her yesterday afternoon. Father Ott was there. He married them in the hospital chapel at two o’clock. Fiona slipped into a coma at nine. She died at two this morning.”

“Thatcher married her?”

“He married her.”

Adrienne waited to feel something. She thought of Thatcher carrying Fiona toward the phosphorescent ocean, carrying her the same way a groom carries a bride over the threshold. Adrienne had been so jealous then, so typically sorry for herself, as she wondered,
Who is going to carry me?
But now she didn’t feel jealous or sad or lonely. She didn’t feel anything.

She sat next to Mario on a bar stool and rested her cheek on the cool blue granite. Her eyes fell closed. She felt her mind drifting away.

When she awoke, with a crick in her neck and a flat spot on her face, it was because the phone was ringing. She went to the podium. Line one. Adrienne checked her watch: nine o’clock.
Reporter,
she thought.
Drew Amman-Keller.
She hadn’t told him anything. In the end, she hadn’t told him a thing.

She pushed open the kitchen door. It was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerators, and it was clean. The floors had been mopped the night before, the pass buffed to a shine, the trash had been emptied, there was a stack of clean side towels on the counter. Adrienne picked one up and pressed it to her face. This was Fiona’s kitchen without Fiona. Fiona was dead.

Adrienne found Mario in pastry, surrounded by his usual tools: the mixing cups, the measuring spoons, the stainless-steel
bowl that was as big as a wagon wheel. He had flour out, baking powder, butter, and a brick of Gruyère cheese. “Good, you’re awake,” he said. “You can help me.”

“You’re cooking?”

“I want to make crackers.”

“Crackers.”

“We have to call the staff in at eleven,” he said. “We have to tell them the restaurant is closing. I want to have the crackers. You know, as something nice.”

“The restaurant is closing?” This, somehow, pierced her. No more restaurant. Dead, like Fiona.

“Oh, honey,” Mario said. He patted a high stool where she sat like a child to watch Mario work. He measured flour, grated the Gruyère with his microplane rasp until the brick was a fluffy mound, cut in the butter, mixed up a dough. He rolled the dough into three logs, wrapped them in plastic, and put them in the reach-in to chill. He made Adrienne an espresso, which she threw back joylessly. That, she vowed, would be the last espresso of her life.

“How do you make yourself do it?” she asked him. “Cook at a time like this. Aren’t you sad?”

“Sad?” he said. “My compadre, my mentor, my
friend,
she’s dead. I’m more than sad, honey. I’m something else, something I don’t even have a word for. But cooking saves me. It’s what I do, it’s who I am. I stop cooking, I’m the one who dies.”

“I want something like that,” Adrienne said. “I want something to do, someone to be. I don’t have that. I’ve never had that.”

“You’re good at being beautiful.”

She knew he meant this as a compliment, but it only proved her point. She was nothing. She had nobody.

Mario retrieved the dough from the walk-in and sliced the logs into thin discs, then laid them out on three cookie sheets. He handed Adrienne a jar of dried thyme and showed her how to lightly dust the crackers, then he put the cookie sheets in the oven.

“I’m going to have a cigarette,” he said.

“You don’t smoke,” she said.

“I do today. You want to come?”

“I’ll stay here,” she said. She sat on the stool and felt the heat rise from the oven; minutes later, pastry was filled with the smell of the cheese and the thyme. Mario reappeared. He pulled the cookie sheets out of the oven. The crackers were crispy and fragrant.
Ninety-nine percent of the world think that crackers only come out of a box
. . .

Mario offered her one and Adrienne let him place it on her tongue like a Communion wafer.

“This,” he said, “was the easy part.”

As Adrienne returned to the dining room, the Sid Wainer truck pulled into the parking lot. She hoped and prayed for the blond kid, but no such luck. JZ walked in. The phone rang, Adrienne ignored it. She was frightened when she looked at JZ. He was filled with something and about to burst from too much of it. Grief, rage, and the something else that nobody had a word for. She stepped out from behind the podium and hugged him.

“I’m so sorry, JZ.”

“No one is as sorry as I am.” Adrienne let him go. His eyes were watering and Adrienne held out the side towel, but he just stared at it. “You’re closing?” he said.

“Yes.”

He picked up the bowl of matches and Adrienne feared he might smash it against the wall, but he just held it for a few seconds, then put it back down. “I bought that bowl for her in Boston two years ago,” he said. “She was at Mass General then and I went to visit her. We’d just started dating.”

“I can’t imagine how awful this must be for you,” Adrienne said.

“She wouldn’t let me come this time,” he said. “I didn’t get to see her.”

“JZ . . .”

JZ stared into the bowl. “Thatcher married her.”

“I know.”

“She really wanted to be married. I should have done it a long time ago.”

“I would have liked that better,” Adrienne said.

“But I couldn’t. My hands were tied.”

“So you’ve said.”

“She never believed that.”

“I’m sure she understood.”

“She said she did, but she didn’t. And now she’s dead.”

Adrienne nodded.

“I wanted to see her. But Thatch is taking her body . . .” Here, JZ paused, put his hands over his eyes. His left leg was shaking. “He’s taking her body back to South Bend. Her parents want a family-only service at their church.” He looked at Adrienne, tears falling down his face. “I can’t even go to her funeral.”

Adrienne held out the side towel again, but JZ didn’t take it. The phone rang. Line one. Adrienne wanted to smash the phone against the wall. She still had to call everyone on the staff and have them in here in an hour. The ringing phone seemed to keep JZ from careening into the abyss of his own sadness. He straightened, cleared his throat.

“I should go. I’m making deliveries today. Today’s my last day.”

“You’re quitting?”

“I need to be closer to my family. Shaughnessy.”

“That makes sense,” Adrienne said. Suddenly, she felt angry at JZ. She guessed being “closer to my family” meant that he would get back together with his wife. So Thatcher had been right. JZ had never risked anything for Fiona at all, not really. He was nobody’s hero. Sorrow flooded Adrienne’s stomach; she couldn’t even fake a smile. “I guess I’ll see you later?”

“No,” he said. “I’m never coming back.”

At eleven, the staff sat around table nine much as they had at the very first menu meeting of the summer: Delilah next to Duncan, Joe, Spillman, Elliott, Christo, Caren, Gage, Roy, Tyler. The Subiacos sat at the adjoining table—Antonio,
Hector, Louis, Henry, Eddie, Paco, Jojo. Bruno was in the kitchen brewing espressos and Adrienne stood with Mario holding the baskets of crackers. The place was silent. Everyone knew Fiona was dead, and yet Mario took it upon himself to announce it.

“Fiona died at two o’clock this morning at Mass General. Thatcher was with her.”

There was crying. The loudest crying was from Delilah, but the men cried, too—Spillman and Antonio and Joe. Adrienne didn’t cry and neither did Caren. Adrienne squinted at the ocean. It was an exquisite day, which seemed so wrong. Everything was wrong.

“Are we staying open?” Paco asked.

“No,” Mario said. “We’re closing.”

“So that’s it, then?” Eddie said. “It’s over?”

“It’s over.”

Mario had a sheaf of envelopes and he handed one to each staff member. Checks. Five thousand dollars for each year employed at the Blue Bistro. Caren’s check was for sixty thousand dollars; Adrienne’s was for five. Adrienne studied her name typed on the light blue bank check:
Adrienne Dealey
. She remembered back to her first morning, the breakfast. She had taken a gamble, and she had lost.
It’s okay if you don’t love me,
she thought. But it wasn’t okay.