The Blue Bistro

13

Last Call

Because he is twelve, and in middle school, and because Fiona is a girl, Thatcher always takes friends along when he stops by Fiona’s house, and most of the time these friends are Jimmy Sosnowski and Philip St. Clair. This particular day in May, Fiona has slipped Thatch a note in the hallway between history and music class, a scrap of paper that says, simply, “cheesecake.” Last week, she passed him notes that said “quiche” and “meatballs,” and the week before it was “bread pudding” and “veal parmigiana.” Most of the time the word is enticing enough to get him over right after school-for example, the veal parmigiana. Thatcher and Jimmy and Phil sat at Fiona’s kitchen table throwing apples from the fruit bowl at one another and teasing the Kemps’ Yorkshire terrier, Sharky, while Fiona, in her mother’s frilly, flowered, and very queer-looking apron, dredged the veal cutlets in flour, dipped them in egg, dressed them with breadcrumbs, and then sautéed them in hot oil in her mother’s electric frying pan. The boys really liked the frying part-there was something cool about meat in hot, splattering oil. But they lost interest during the sauce and cheese steps, and by the time Fiona slid the baking pan into the oven, Jimmy and Phil were ready to go home. Not Thatcher-he stayed until Fiona pulled the cheesy, bubbling dish from the oven and ate with Fiona and Dr. and Mrs. Kemp. His father worked late and his brothers were scattered throughout the neighborhood (his two older brothers could drive and many times they ate at the Burger King on Grape Road). Thatcher liked it when Fiona cooked; he liked it more than he would ever admit.

So cheesecake. Thatcher figures it will be easy to get Jimmy and Phil to come along for a dessert, but Phil has gotten a new skateboard and so, after school, two hours are spent in the parking lot of the Notre Dame football stadium with the three of them trying stunts (none of them particularly impressive). Every twenty minutes or so, Thatcher reminds Jimmy and Phil about the cheesecake. He knows Fiona will be, at these very minutes, making it. Her cooking fascinates him. She is the only twelve-year-old Thatcher knows who has her own subscription to Gourmet magazine. Cooking is something Fiona does, Mrs. Kemp told him once, because Fiona is sick. Really sick, the kind of sick that puts her in the hospital in Chicago for weeks at a time. Fiona’s illness makes Jimmy and Phil uncomfortable, on top of the fact that she’s a girl. They don’t want to catch anything. How many times has Thatcher told them? “She doesn’t have anything you can catch. She was born sick.”

“You know,” Phil says, front wheels of his skateboard in the air. “I think you like Fiona. Really like her.”

“I think so, too,” Jimmy says.

“Shut up,” Thatcher says. He is sweating. It’s a true spring day, where even the air in the asphalt parking lot smells like cut grass and forsythia. “I’m just hungry.”

They reach the Kemps’ house at five o’clock, dangerously close to dinner time, and making the situation more precarious is Dr. Kemp’s brown Crown Victoria in the driveway.

“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.

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.

She spends a lot of time thinking about the summer before her mother died, her summer at Camp Hideaway. She had grown to love the smell of her cabin, and the soft flannel lining of her sleeping bag. She loved the certainty of flag raising and oatmeal with just-picked raspberries and Pammy Ipp who was her partner in everything from canoeing to late-night trips to the bathhouse. The summer at Hideaway was an escape to a place where the rules for the real world didn’t apply. Her mother wasn’t sick-her mythical brother was. But Adrienne had realized even then that it wouldn’t last forever. The bubble would pop: She would leave behind the days of swimming in the cold green water of Lake Sherwood and sitting around the campfire singing “Red River Valley” as the very cute Nick Boccio strummed his guitar. She would confess the truth to Pammy Ipp and return home to spend August watching General Hospital in the air-conditioned dens of her regular, at-home friends, and visiting her mother in the hospital. In many ways it was as though Camp Hideaway had never happened, except it had, and now, so many years later, she was still thinking about it with longing and regret.

One night at the Brant Point Grill, a very quiet Monday night, Adrienne drinks too much. She received an e-mail from her father about his wedding, less than three weeks away, and she realizes she has to make a decision. Her lease at the cottage ends the day after Columbus Day. What is she still doing here? She’s passing the time, filling up hours, waiting. The thought of not waiting, of going to Maryland or St. Bart’s or some other place panics her. So she drinks her vodkas steadily and evenly, with purpose. She forgets to order food. It’s the regular bartender’s night off, and there’s a young brunette woman in his stead. This girl pours with a smile so fake that Adrienne orders more often just to study her insincerity.

Next thing she knows, she’s in the bartender’s arms, inhaling the wholesome Aveda scent of her hair.

“Here we go,” the bartender directs. “Toward the door.”

Adrienne stares down at her feet (she is wearing a pair of red suede driving moccasins, a holdover from Aspen). She’s doing some kind of dance step-stumbling, weaving, buckling.

“We’re almost there,” the bartender says. “I called you a cab, though you might need an ambulance.” This is said with concern, probably more for her job than for Adrienne’s well-being, though maybe not. The bartender’s arms are strong and she handles Adrienne firmly but carefully, like she’s a child.

“Do you have children?” Adrienne hears herself ask.

The bartender nods. “Three.”

Adrienne tries to say something about how she hardly looks old enough but her words come out slurred and mangled and there isn’t time to start the thought over because a cab whips into the circular driveway. The cabbie, who looks familiar somehow, accepts Adrienne from the bartender and pours her into the backseat of the cab.

She wakes up at four in the morning with her face stuck to the linoleum floor of the kitchen, but she’s powerless to move. At seven thirty, when the sun comes up, she crawls to the phone and calls Mack.

Not coming in today, she says. Too sick to work.

Two days later, she agrees to work a double as penance. Tiny, the night desk person, wants a break, and Adrienne volunteers to cover for her. In addition to getting Adrienne out of the doghouse with Mack, it will keep her away from the bars. She has promised herself she will never drink again, and she wonders how long it will be until she wants to.

Adrienne has never worked the night desk before and she finds that she likes it. Between six and seven o’clock, the hotel guests meet cabs out front or walk into town for dinner. All the other great places are still open: Club Car, Boarding House, 21 Federal, American Seasons, Company of the Cauldron, Le Languedoc, Blue Fin, 56 Union, the Pearl, Cinco. Then, when most of the guests have wandered out, Adrienne puts on some opera and makes herself a cup of tea and enjoys the fire.

She is a person with a broken heart. That hardly makes her special. It happens to everyone. She herself broke Michael Sullivan’s heart less than three years earlier. How does she think he felt banging around Chatham after she fled for Hawaii? He probably felt like she does now. Adrienne considers calling him up to apologize. Then she thinks about calling Pammy Ipp.

St. Michael’s might not be so bad, she thinks. It’s another charming resort town that probably needs help through Christmas. She can attend her father’s wedding and simply stay with him and Mavis in their new home. In January, she can try St. Bart’s, maybe, if she feels up to it. Then in the spring she might join Kyra and the landscape painter in Carmel. So there it is: An entire year of possibility. Adrienne feels better than she has since Fiona’s collapse. She feels clean and right-headed and warm, in her new sweater in front of the fire. Her heart is broken, but it will heal. That’s what hearts do.

And then, she feels a blast of cold air. The door opens and Mario walks in.

At first, Adrienne mistakes him for a late check-in: a handsome, dark-haired man in a black silk shirt, jeans, tweed blazer. Her newfound optimism blooms, because maybe what she needs is a mild flirtation to carry her even farther from her sadness. But as the man approaches, Adrienne’s mind whispers, Mario. Is it him? No. Yes, it is. No. It is so. It’s him.

She stands perfectly still, her left hand wrapped around the now-cold mug of tea. She wonders if he’s heard about her poor showing at the Brant Point Grill. (She finally figured out that the cabbie who drove her home that night was the same one who had picked her up from the Subiacos’ first party, because she didn’t remember giving him her address, and yet she arrived home safely.) Maybe Mario is here to suggest AA. Or maybe he’s come to declare his love for her, and how will Adrienne feel about that? Will she be able, in the face of all her pain and rejection, to turn him down? She takes a shallow breath. Maybe he’s here to ask her again about working at his new restaurant, or to show her the piece that has finally been run in Vanity Fair (Adrienne has the issue at home but can’t bring herself to read it). Or maybe he’s just here to catch up because they had, after all, been friends. But his stride is purposeful and his black eyes are intent and Adrienne is petrified. She clenches the mug. He doesn’t try to kiss her or hug her; he doesn’t even greet her. But he does, with two swift words, cut the rope that ties Adrienne to the heavy load of her uncertainty. She’s finished waiting.

Mario’s voice is low and husky, barely audible over the crackling fire and the Andrea Bocelli.

“Thatcher’s back,” he says.

Fiona hasn’t been off the vent for more than an hour at a time since they got to the hospital, and when she does come off, the nurses have warned her not to talk-talking uses up too much oxygen. The corners of Fiona’s mouth are cracked and bleeding from all the times she’s been intubated. Her O₂ sats are very low, the new drug has failed; Fiona won’t be getting any better. The doctors suggested Thatcher call Fiona’s parents. They’re on their way. This is it-Thatcher knows it and Fiona knows it and yet neither of them can speak.

All along, Thatcher has had a plan: Marry her. He’s talked about it with Father Ott. For months, they’ve gone over the sticky emotional territory. Fiona yearns to be married, and what she really wanted was to marry JZ. But JZ is already married; he had a chance to make things right with Fiona and he blew it. So that leaves Thatcher, who wants to make a pledge of his devotion to this person-his friend, his partner, his first love. She is more his family than his own family. He has planned to marry her all along and she agreed to it only by saying, “At the very end. If nobody else wants us.”

How ironic, and awful, that this was the summer Thatcher fell in love. He didn’t think it was possible-at age thirty-five, as solitary as he liked to be, as devoted to his business and Fiona, as impermeable to romance-and yet, one morning, just as he was wondering where he was going to find the kind of help that would enable him to make it through the summer, there she was. Adrienne Dealey. Beautiful, yes, but he loves Adrienne not because she is beautiful but because she is different. He has never known a woman so free from conceit, vanity, ambition, and pretense. He has never known a woman so willing to show the world that she is a human being. He has never known a woman with such an appetite-a literal appetite, but also an appetite for adventure-the places she’s been, unafraid, all by herself. Thatcher loves her in a huge, mature, adult way. He loves her the right way. Now he has to hope that God grants her patience and understanding and faith. Whenever he prays these days, he prays for Adrienne, too.

He calls the hospital chapel and reserves it for two hours. He orders flowers from the gift shop near Admitting. They aren’t prepared to outfit a wedding, but they can put together a bouquet. One of the nurses in oncology plays the piano; Thatcher discovers her lunch hour is from one thirty to two thirty. He phones Father Ott who is staying at the rectory of St. Ann’s, then he takes Fiona’s hand. Her hands are so important to her for chopping and dicing and mixing and blending and stirring and rolling and sprinkling, and yet she’s always been so self-conscious about her swollen fingers and her discolored fingernails that he’s never been allowed to touch them. There’s a scar across her left palm from the day she picked up a hot sauté pan without a side towel. She went to the emergency room for that burn, and for the stitches she got when she cut herself while boning a duck breast-fifteen stitches across the tips of her second and third fingers. There are other marks and scars that Thatcher can’t identify; if he could, he’d ask her about each one.

She’s off the vent but her eyes are closed.

“Fiona,” he says.

She opens her eyes.

“We’re getting married at two o’clock.”

The words terrify him, because he knows that she’ll know what they signify. At the very end. If nobody else wants us.

Fiona’s lips are cracked and bleeding, and although it must hurt, she smiles.

In this ward of the hospital there isn’t much in the way of good news, but everyone is excited about a wedding. Thatcher goes back to his room at the hotel to shower, shave, and change, and he spends a full, precious five minutes considering the telephone.

Call Adrienne? And say what?

When he returns, the nurses have put Fiona back on the vent-just until she’s ready to go-and they have changed her into a fresh white johnny and brushed her hair so that it flows down over the top of the sheet. The gift shop has done a beautiful job with the bouquet of roses and Fiona holds it as they unhook her from the ventilator and wheel her down the corridor toward the chapel. Thatcher tries to be present in the moment, he tries not to peer behind the half-open doors they pass, he tries not to listen to the dialogue of the soap operas on TV. The attending nurse, a woman named Ella, chatters about her own wedding twenty-eight years earlier at the steepled Congregational Church in Acton.

“Do you have rings?” Ella whispers to Thatcher.

He has rings, expensive rings purchased that morning from Shreve, Crump & Low. As Ella and Thatcher wheel Fiona’s gurney into the chapel, he checks his shirt pocket for their delicate presence-two circles wrapped in tissue paper. The chapel is a brown room, dimly lit, with sturdy, functional-looking wooden benches and a large plain wooden cross hanging over the carpeted stairs of the altar. Father Ott waits there, all six foot six of him, in his flowing white robe. Oncology nurse, Teri Lee, a diminutive Korean woman, waits for Thatcher’s signal, and then she starts to play Pachelbel’s Canon in D. On this piano, in this chapel, under these circumstances, the music is plaintive. A third nurse named Kristin Benedict is sitting in the first row; she has spent a great many hours caring for Fiona, and what makes her even more special is that she’s eaten at the Bistro (in the summer of 1996, while she was on vacation with her husband). Thatcher has asked her to be a witness. Kristin is a crier; she sobs quietly as Teri plays the piano, as the gurney moves down the aisle, Thatcher on one side, Ella on the other. Once they reach the altar, the music subsides, Thatcher takes Fiona’s scarred hand and Father Ott raises his arms and proclaims in his resonant voice: “We gather here today in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Thatcher crosses himself and out of the corner of his eye, he sees Fiona lift her hand and cross herself. She is smiling.

Father Ott leads them, briskly, through the age-old wedding vows. He is hurrying, Thatcher suspects, because no one knows how long Fiona will last without oxygen. Thatcher tries, tries, to stay present in the moment, and not to think of how Father Ott will, at some point, give Fiona the sacrament of Last Rites, he will anoint her with oil, he will whisper Psalm 23 into her deaf ear. Fiona’s parents are to land at Logan at six o’clock. Thatcher offered to pick them up but Mrs. Kemp doesn’t want Fiona to be alone, even for a second. Thatcher is shaking. Fiona will die, she will be cold to the touch, gone from Thatcher in every human sense, even though she is alive now-she is alive and he is marrying her and she is marrying him. They are getting married, honoring the thirty years that they’ve been best friends-through the chocolate swirl cheesecake, and the beer on the playground, and the day they bought the restaurant, and every moment in between and since.

Fiona is smiling. She takes a deep breath and whispers, “I do.” Thatcher slips a ring on her finger. It’s way too big and he’s crushed because he wants her to take the ring with her when she goes. She holds it in place with her thumb. Thatcher puts on his own ring; he swears he will never take it off. Father Ott bestows a blessing and they cross themselves again, but not Fiona; her eyes are glazing over, she’s checking out. But not yet! Not yet!

“You may kiss the bride,” Father Ott says. Teri Lee starts in with the piano and Kristin Benedict sobs and Thatcher kisses Fiona, his new wife, on her cracked lips. For the first time ever, he kisses her.

Adrienne doesn’t sleep.

She was able to wheedle only the most basic information out of Mario before he checked his watch and claimed he was late meeting Louis and Hector at the RopeWalk and left. The basic information was this: Thatcher was back, Mario had bumped into him at the airport, Thatcher asked if Mario had seen Adrienne and Mario said no. Thatcher asked Mario to find Adrienne and let her know that he, Thatcher, wanted to talk to her.

Talk to me about what? Adrienne asked.

He didn’t say.

This is not something she bargained for: Thatcher, here, on Nantucket, looking for her. The restaurant is gone, Fiona is dead, and Adrienne is most comfortable placing Thatcher in a similar category: disappeared, vanished, nonexistent. Easier that way to banish him from her mind. Not so easy now that she knows he is asleep (or not) on this tiny island.

She gets home from work at eleven thirty and sits in her kitchen with all the lights off contemplating a glass of wine. But no, she’s promised herself, no. She tries to read, she tries turning off the light and closing her eyes. She gets up and looks out into her backyard-the one big tree is swaying. It’s windy, but not particularly cold. She throws on a fleece and goes outside. She feels better being outside.

She rides her bike to Thatcher’s cottage, the cottage behind the big house in town. There is a light on. She feels like if she opens her mouth, something awful will come out. He’s right there, ten feet away, in that cottage, and she panics because she can’t face him, she can’t deal with closure; it will kill her, and those words are so wrong, so harsh in light of what he’s just been through, but they will kill her in a sense. Closure will destroy her fragile sense of okay-for-now. Seeing him will ruin every step toward healing that she’s made in the last month.

She rides her bike home and makes a decision. She has to leave. Tomorrow.

She spends the rest of the night packing up her clothes, her new pairs of beautiful shoes, the hand bell. Mack will not be happy that she’s leaving him with two weeks until the hotel closes for the season, but what else can she do? At first light, she writes out a note of apology and hops back on her bike. Cowardly girl, she thinks, quitting by note. She will never be able to use Mack or Thatcher as a reference. This is a summer that will be missing from her résumé. The summer that didn’t count. The summer that was a mistake.

Nantucket is too beautiful to be a mistake, however, especially this morning. The sun comes up and the sky is pale at first with the promise of that brilliant blue; the air is crisp and rich with smells of the water. She pedals down the road toward the Beach Club, trying to correct her thinking. Nantucket was not a mistake. She learned so much about food, about wine, about people, about herself. Because it is so early and she still has lots of time, she takes the turn in the road that she made the first day here-the stretch that leads to the spot where the Bistro used to be. From a hundred yards away, she sees the frame of the Elperns’ new house. It’s impressively large, as large as Holt Millman’s house. She is so amazed that something so tall and grandiose could be built in two short weeks that she doesn’t notice the silver truck in the parking lot until it’s too late. But then, once she does see the truck, right there, his truck, a strange thing happens: She keeps going, propelling herself closer to the very thing she’s running away from.

Thatcher stands in the parking lot wearing his red fleece jacket, his hands in his pockets, staring at the house. Adrienne has plenty of time to turn around, a more than good chance of leaving undetected. But she is drawn to him. She wonders what it feels like to be looking at the thing that is standing in the place where your life used to be. Is it awful? Is it a relief?

“Thatcher,” she says.

He whips around; she’s scared him. Good. She wanted to scare him. He stares at her a second, and she dismounts her bike. He squeezes her so tightly she cries out and then, before she knows it, they’re kissing. They’re kissing and Adrienne starts to cry.

“I’m sorry,” Adrienne says. “About Fee. I’m so sorry.”

He holds her face in his hands. She can feel his wedding band against her cheek.

“I love you,” he says. “I know you don’t believe it, but I do.”

She does believe it, but she’s afraid to say so.

“I wanted to call, but… it’s been so… I was in South Bend for three weeks… I wasn’t sure if you’d understand… I felt like, God, if I got back and you were still here…”

“I was going to leave today,” she says. She holds up the note, which she has been crushing in her palm since she left her house. “I was about to tell Mack and go.”

“Because of me?”

She nods; there are more tears. She can’t predict what’s going to happen: Is it good, is it bad? Will he come with her to her father’s wedding? And what on earth will they do after that? Another restaurant? Another business? Will he marry her and be a man who wears two wedding rings? Maybe he will. And since when is she the kind of person who needs so many answers?

While she was packing her bags she took a minute and inspected the hand bell that Duncan bequeathed to her, the one he rang each night for last call. Inside the bottom rim, she found an inscription: “To Thatcher Smith with appreciation from the Parish of St. Joseph’s, South Bend, Indiana.” It had alarmed her that she was taking Thatcher’s bell, but at the same time she felt she had a right to it; she felt she had earned that small piece of Thatcher. She is not sure she deserves more than that small piece; she is not at all sure she deserves what she has now: his whole self in her arms, declaring his love.

“I want to talk to you,” Thatcher says. “So I can tell you I love you. What time do you have to be at work?”

She crumples the note to Mack in her hand. “Eight thirty.”

“That’s in two hours,” he says, checking his beautiful watch.

“What should we do?” she asks.

Thatcher turns her so that she is facing the Elpern house; it will be a lovely house when it is finished. He takes her hand and leads her to his truck and he picks up her bike with one hand and lays it down in the back.

Adrienne doesn’t ask where they are going; she already knows.

They are going to breakfast.