The Blue Bistro (47 page)

“I don’t know about this,” Phil says.

“Come on,” Thatcher says.

When they walk into the side door of the Kemps’ kitchen, Sharky’s bark announces their arrival. Much to Thatcher’s relief, Fiona is alone in the kitchen, wearing her apron, drying dishes. Thatcher is looking at her, but Phil, with his skateboard
tucked under his arm, and Jimmy, with his hair sticking up in sixteen permanent cowlicks, are looking at the kitchen table. In the center, where the fruit bowl usually is, the cheesecake rests on a pedestal. It’s beautiful—perfectly round and smoothed, creamy white with chocolate swirls on a chocolate cookie crust, sitting in a pool of something bright pink.

“You didn’t make that,” Phil challenges.

“Sure I did,” Fiona says.

“What is it?” Jimmy asks.

“Chocolate swirl cheesecake with raspberry coulis.” She holds up the June issue of
Gourmet
; the very same cake is pictured on the cover.

The three of them stare at the cake like it’s an alien spaceship landed on the table. Thatcher feels enormously proud of Fiona. He wants to hug her, but then he remembers Phil’s words in the parking lot and he tightens his expression.

Dr. Kemp saunters into the kitchen in his professor’s clothes—brown suit, bow tie, half-lensed reading glasses,
South Bend Tribune
tucked under one arm. He has an imposing academic look, but really, he’s very friendly.

“What do you think of that cake, boys?” he says. “Isn’t it something else?”

Phil and Jimmy nod nervously. Thatcher thinks how “something else” is exactly the right phrase. He can’t believe that someone he knows has made such a cake.

“Um, I have to go,” Phil says.

“Me, too,” Jimmy says.

They are frightened by the cake, maybe, or by Dr. Kemp, or by Fiona. They leave abruptly, the screen door banging behind them.

“Do you want a slice, Thatch?” Fiona asks.

Dr. Kemp rinses out a coffee mug in the sink. Thatcher does want a slice, and in the years since his mother left, there has been no one to stop him from eating dessert before dinner. And yet, he hesitates. He’s worried by how much he wants to taste the cheesecake, by how he craves it, craves Fiona’s eyes on him as he brings the first bite to his lips; he’s
worried that what he really craves is Fiona. He feels himself reddening as Fiona gazes at him expectantly, awaiting an answer, and then Dr. Kemp looks at him from the sink. Suddenly the pressure of the question—Does he want a slice?—is more than he can bear.

Thatcher turns toward the door. “I have to go, too,” he lies.

Labor Day, 1984. They are fifteen now, about to be sophomores in high school. Fiona left home by herself for the first time over the summer, to a culinary camp in Indianapolis, but Thatcher knows she’s also interested in the things other fifteen-year-old girls are interested in. She spends whole days sunning herself on the roof of her house; she has rigged the telephone so that the cord reaches her perch. Sometimes, if the wind is right, Thatcher can hear her from his front porch four doors down: Fiona, deep in conversation with her friend Alison.

Thatcher has spent the summer working at his father’s carpet store—mostly moving the big-ass Persian rugs off the trucks into the showroom. As his father says, the Persians sell like winter coats on the day hell freezes over, and so there are always rugs to move. His father also has him steam-cleaning the two-by-three-foot samples of wall-to-wall, deep pile, and shag, because nothing ruins sales like a dirty sample. Thatcher moves Persians and steam-cleans samples and makes coffee and runs errands and stands around smiling so that his father can drape an arm over Thatcher’s shoulder and say to his customers, “This is my youngest son, Thatcher. Big help to his old man.” Thatcher hates carpet, hates wood flooring and linoleum and tile, and he really hates Persian rugs. His brothers hate it, too. His two oldest brothers, Monroe and Cal, work as lifeguards at the community swim club and his brother Hudson, just two years older, is a musical genius (drums) and has spent all summer at a music camp in Michigan. For Thatcher, Labor Day comes as a huge relief; school starts the next morning.

It’s Phil St. Clair’s idea to sneak out that night and meet at the playground of the elementary school, and it’s Thatcher’s idea to invite Fiona and convince his brother Monroe, now a junior at IUSB and still living at home, to buy them a six-pack of beer. Thatcher calls Fiona from the carpet store; he pictures her sitting on her roof in her powder-blue bikini. She’s all for the plan. Thatcher’s next call is to Jimmy Sosnowski, who suggests Thatcher ask for two six-packs. He does, Monroe extorts a price of thirty dollars, which Thatcher pays from his savings of the summer, and at ten o’clock that night, Thatcher walks out the front door of his house with twelve beers in his backpack. Thatcher wishes it could have been more like sneaking, but his father isn’t home yet and when he does get home, he won’t check on Thatcher; he never does.

Phil is already at the playground when Thatcher arrives. Phil sits on one of the swings. His whisper cuts through the darkness.

“Hey, did you get it?”

“Yeah.” Thatcher shifts the backpack; there’s a promising clink.

“Jimmy can’t get out,” Phil says. “His parents are having a barbecue and they’re staying up late.”

“That sucks.”

“Truly,” Phil says. “Give me a beer.”

Thatcher’s experience with beer is limited, and he panics because he hasn’t thought to bring an opener, but the beer Monroe bought, Budweiser, are twist-offs. Thatcher gives one to Phil, then opens one for himself and drinks. The beer is lukewarm (after Monroe brought it home, Thatcher hid it from his other brothers in the closet) but it tastes good anyway. It tastes adult.

“Sophomores tomorrow,” he says.

Fiona’s voice catches him so by surprise that he chokes on his second swallow, sending a spray of beer down the front of his shirt.

“Hey, you guys!” she says. She laughs at Thatch. “Amateurs.” She plucks a Budweiser from Thatcher’s backpack,
flips the top off, and chugs half the bottle. Thatcher is impressed; Phil just shakes his head.

“Fiona, what are you doing here?”

“Thatch invited me.”

Phil glares at Thatcher. Thatcher shrugs.

Fiona says, “Get over it.”

“It was supposed to be a guy thing,” Phil says.

“We didn’t decide on that,” Thatcher says.

“We didn’t decide on it, but . . . I mean, when you’re sneaking out to drink beer the night before school starts, that’s a guy thing.”

Fiona expertly polishes off the rest of her beer and belches. “Excuse me.”

“Do you want another one?” Thatcher asks.

“In a minute.” She climbs to the top of the slide and comes flying down. She’s wearing some kind of one-piece terry-cloth sun suit. Next to Thatcher, Phil huffs.

“Dude . . .”

“Relax,” Thatcher says. “She’s lots of fun.”

“Whatever,” Phil says. He stands up from the swing and sets his nearly full beer down on the asphalt. “I’m going home. This beer isn’t even cold.”

“Come on,” Thatcher says. “Don’t be a dope.”

“You’re the dope,” Phil says, nodding his head toward Fiona. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” He strolls away.

Fiona climbs back up to the top of the slide. “Where’s he going?” she says.

“Home.”

Fiona coughs. Thatcher holds his breath; he hates it when she coughs. He drinks down his beer, then he’s overcome with a loose, tingly feeling. He’s happy that Phil’s gone.

“I’m coming up after you,” he says.

“Do what you want.”

He climbs the ladder of the slide, hands over feet. When he’s almost at the top, Fiona slides down and runs back to the ladder. Thatcher slides down. By the time he’s made it to the bottom of the slide, she’s at the top of the ladder. They
chase each other like this for a while. Fiona’s breath is labored; Thatcher can hear it, and he slows down on purpose. Then he climbs the ladder and she doesn’t slide down. She sits at the top and he sidles in next to her. It’s cramped, their thighs are touching but Fiona doesn’t move.

“Go ahead,” she says.

“You go ahead.”

“I don’t want to go ahead.”

“Me, either.”

Fiona turns her face, carefully it seems, to look at him. Is she thinking what he’s thinking? The beer emboldens him. He leans in to kiss her.

She puts her palm on his face and pushes him away.

“Don’t you dare.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t have you falling in love with me.”

“I won’t fall in love with you.”

“You will so,” Fiona says. “And I don’t want to break your heart.”

This, he realizes, is what she and Alison spend all day talking about: falling in love, breaking hearts. “You’re nuts,” he says.

“I’m going to die,” she says.

He sits with this for a second. Even when he first learned about her illness, it was never phrased this way. No one has ever said anything about dying.

“We’re all going to die,” he says.

“Yes,” she says. “But I’m going to die first.” And then, with a great big breath, she pushes off and swoops down the slide. She disappears into the dark.

Adrienne doesn’t cry about Fiona and she doesn’t cry about Thatcher. One day, a gust of wind catches the screen door of her cottage and it whacks her in the side of the face, surprising her, stinging her. A different day, she orders a BLT from Something Natural and after a fifteen-minute wait in the pickup line, a college-age Irish girl tells Adrienne they’ve lost
her order. The Irish girl flips to a fresh page on her pad. “What was it you wanted again, love?” These things make her cry.

Adrienne throws away the Amtrak napkin with her three rules on it. They didn’t protect her. Her bank account has five digits in it for the first time in her life, but she doesn’t care. It is almost impossible to believe that when she got here money was her only objective. Now money is nothing. It’s less than nothing.

She gets a new job working at the front desk of the Nantucket Beach Club and Hotel. She can’t believe she ever enjoyed hotel work. It’s ho-hum eight-to-five stuff: check the guests in, check the guests out, run American Express cards, send the bellmen to the rooms with more towels, an ironing board, a crib. Adrienne works alone, while Mack pops in and out of an office behind the desk. There are hours when it is just her, the opera music, the wicker furniture, the quilts, and the antique children’s toys in the lobby. She starts bringing a book so she won’t think about Thatcher or Fiona. She tells herself that her mind is a room, and Thatcher and Fiona aren’t allowed in.

Caren pays her rent through the fifteenth of October, but she and Duncan leave a week after the restaurant closes and so Adrienne lives alone in the cottage. Caren is kind upon leaving, offering to hook Adrienne up with her connections in St. Bart’s:
You could rent my villa,
she says.
You could get a job. My friend Tate, you know, owns a spa, you could work for him maybe . . .
But Adrienne isn’t ready to commit to winter plans, not when it’s still so hot and sunny and heart-breakingly beautiful on Nantucket.

Adrienne goes out at night, though not to any of the places she went with Thatch. She favors the Brant Point Grill at the White Elephant because it’s spacious and on certain nights has a jazz combo, and because she found it herself and she likes the bartender. He’s older than Duncan and more seasoned, more refined. He doesn’t act like he’s doing her a favor to pour her a drink. She orders Triple Eight and tonics because they pack a quiet punch—three, four, five of
those and something light off the bar menu, and for hours she floats around in a state of near-oblivion. She loses the haunting pain where she feels as though the best time of her life has come and gone in three short months.

One night she sees Doyle Chambers at the end of the bar, but he pretends not to recognize her. Ditto Grayson Parrish who comes in with a rotund, florid-faced woman whom Adrienne guesses is Nonnie Sizemore. But one awful night, she feels a hand on her shoulder, which shocks her. She realizes at that moment that she has gone weeks without anyone touching her. She turns around to see Charlie, Duncan’s friend, wearing the marijuana leaf necklace. His face is stripped of his usual smugness. He looks as lonely as she feels.

“Hey,” he says, and that one word conveys a sense that they are the two lone survivors from some kind of fallout.

“Hey.”

“Have you seen Caren?” he asks. “Or Duncan?”

“They moved,” Adrienne says, surprised that Charlie isn’t aware of this fact, as chummy as he was with Duncan. “They live in Providence now. Duncan works for Holt.”

Charlie takes a sip of beer and looks Adrienne over. “And what are you doing?”

“Working,” she says. “At the Beach Club.”

“Oh.” Charlie reaches for his gold marijuana leaf and moves it along its chain wistfully, like a teenage girl. “Do you miss the restaurant?”

“Not really,” she says.

“No,” he says. “Me neither.”

The next day on her way to work, Adrienne stops by the Bistro. An excavator is out on the beach tearing down the awning skeleton; it is as awful as watching somebody break bones. A Dumpster sits in the parking lot, filled with boards from the deck. Adrienne runs her hand over one and imagines she feels divots from her spike heels. Then she peeks in the front door. The restaurant is empty. The tables and chairs have been taken to the dump; Thatcher donated the dishes and silverware and glasses to a charity auction. The piano
and the slab of blue granite have been moved to storage until the Elperns are ready for them. Someone has dragged the dory away, but its ghost remains: a boat-shaped patch of dry brown dirt.