Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

“On the mend,” came Ed’s voice. “She ate her dinner without a fuss and took a good crap outside just now, no diarrhea. How was the flight?”

“Long. I treated myself to some wine. They make you pay for everything now. I had a salad, too. Kale.” They both laughed. They grew mountains of the stuff every year.

“It’s so quiet here,” he said. “When are you coming home, again?”

Home, Christine thought with a funny, fond internal quailing.

Ed Thorne was ten years older than Christine, slight and handsome, with a square jaw and a small nose and bright blue eyes in a long face. In the early days, when they’d first fallen in love, he’d been so passionate, he had surprised her with his lustiness, his excitement, his desires and sexual openness. But they had quickly become a pair of oxen, yoked together, a farmer and his wife. This past year, she’d been distracting herself from Ed’s yearning for kids with impossible fantasies about one of their apprentices, a local boy who slouched around the farm bare-chested in falling-down jeans that showed the waistband of his boxer shorts. He drove Ed nuts with his inefficiency while he drove Christine nuts in a wholly different way, with his pouty bee-stung lips and sculpted biceps.

“I’ll be back before you even notice I’m gone,” she said.

“Sure,” Ed said. “How’s the weather?”

“Weirdly warm. It feels wrong. But I love it.”

“How’s Valerie?”

“I haven’t seen her yet. She’s on a late flight from New York. Won’t be here until midnight or something. I’ll probably be sound asleep by then.”

She yawned and heard him yawning on the other end of the line. It was three hours later there, dark already, and he’d been awake since before dawn, as had Christine. She pictured him alone with the dogs, looking absently at his solitary reflection in the big window by the woodstove, the house creaking in the cold, settling in for the night.

After they rang off, she lay on the bed for a while, holding the warm phone in her hand. She stretched out luxuriantly. She wasn’t used to having a whole bed to herself. Ed flailed and twitched and rolled over in the night, waking her up, and then it always took a while to fall back asleep because she was nervous that he would jostle her again. She closed her eyes, sighing with tiredness. The mattress was nice and firm, and the pillowcases were starchy and fresh-smelling. Valerie wouldn’t be here for hours.

She was just falling asleep when her stomach growled loudly and woke her up. That airplane-issue kale salad had been hours ago. Suddenly hungry, she got up and slid back into her shoes and put her key card into her bag. Down in the lobby again, she found the bar, a scattering of mostly empty tables tucked into a corner on the other side of the escalators that went down to the restaurant. She chose a corner table on a soft banquette, lit by the evening sun. Her body told her it should be dark by now, and that she shouldn’t be hungry. She felt a pleasant jet-lagged sense of unreality.

The man sitting alone at the next table gave Christine a quick once-over; she could feel his stare although she wasn’t looking at him. To her relief, he looked away again, having evidently deemed her not worthy of interest. So she glanced back at him. She had the brief impression of a chesty, muscular body, a pugnacious nose, dark short hair. He looked like a stevedore, like he no more belonged in this fancy hotel than she did. No doubt he had reached the same conclusion about her.

She ordered a margarita, no salt, and fish tacos.

“Good choice!” said the waitress, who was so pretty and well built that Christine had to take her in in sections: sleek muscular upper arm, aquiline nose, silky highlighted long hair, starfish eyelashes.

“Great,” said Christine, smiling up at her.

The air felt liquid with permanent warmth. The people seemed liquid too. The bar felt like an aquarium. Inland Maine was all granite and hemlocks and interesting weather; its people were rugged workers, private, without artifice. Here, languid bodies displayed themselves openly. People spoke and laughed as if cameras were following them.

Her next-table neighbor was looking at the waitress too, but more pointedly, in a way that suggested intention.

“Are you going on that cruise?” the waitress asked Christine. “The Queen Isabella ?”

“How could you tell?” Christine asked with a laugh.

“Lucky guess,” said the waitress.

“I’m going on that cruise,” the man next to Christine said. He had an accent similar to her cabdriver’s, Eastern European undergirding fluent English. “I was just called in at the last minute.”

Christine turned to look at him, frankly this time, since he’d spoken: a knuckle of a nose, dark eyes, strong jaw, and a hungry expression.

But he wasn’t speaking to Christine. He was looking up at the waitress.

“Well lucky you too, then,” she said.

“May I have another beer, please?” he asked.

“Sure. Where are you from? Your accent.”

Wisconsin, Christine almost said.

But the man said, “Budapest. I’m Mick.”

“Laura,” the waitress told him.

Christine opened her book so she wouldn’t appear to be eavesdropping. It was some long, engrossing thriller she’d found in the used-book bin in her local supermarket, along with a few other mildly interesting-looking castoffs she’d stockpiled and managed to fit into her bursting luggage.

“So are you excited for the cruise?” Laura was saying to Mick.

“No. I’m a cook, so I spend the whole time down in the galley, I hardly get any air, and I don’t get to talk to people much. It’s basically a long lonely time at sea for the workers on board.”

“That sounds hard,” Laura said. “Wow. I hope they pay you well.”

Christine heard genuine warmth in her voice and wanted to warn her: Don’t tempt a starving man with raw meat.

Sure enough, Mick succumbed. “Maybe you’d like to have a drink with me later, that would be great.”

“Oh,” Laura said. “Thanks, but I can’t.”

She took his empty glass and began to move off.

“Also, I’d like a hamburger,” he said.

“And how would you like that?”

“Very rare, please.” He held her there by the force of his eye contact. Christine could feel it without even looking at them. “I just arrived from another cruise,” he said. “I thought I was going on vacation. Then the office calls and says, ‘Hey Mick, the other guy can’t do it, you gotta help us out, it’s a special, a one-off, we need our best chef.’ ”

His American accent was spot-on. It made Christine wonder whether the Hungarian thing was fake, to impress Laura.

“Well, that sucks,” said Laura. “I hate it when I have to cover for someone and I’ve made plans already. But you know, it’s the job, right?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” said Mick. “You really can’t have a drink later? Just a quick one. I have to be at the docks at four.”

“I have plans already,” said Laura, the warmth drained from her voice, shading into formality. “But thank you.”

“Yeah,” said Mick, “I should have figured.”

“Well, I’ll be right back with your beer and burger. And your margarita!” she said to Christine as she walked off.

“Thanks,” said Christine, glancing up and looking quickly back down at her book. Mick sat very still, staring after Laura. She could feel how fixed his mind was. Maybe he was drunk. Of course he was drunk. She hoped Laura would be careful when she got off work.

After a while, a different waitress, this one dark and small and tough-looking, brought an enormous round white plastic tray and lowered it onto the table in front of her: the tacos. The steam rising from the hot fish made Christine ravenous.