Elin Hilderbrand - The Blue Bistro

“Someone else took those.”

“Can you tell me where to look?”

Fiona stormed away. Adrienne watched Eddie construct the lobster club sandwich; she was hungry again. Someone spoke up from behind the pass. “You’d better go with her, girlfriend.”

Adrienne hurried after Fiona’s braid, her slides clomping even worse in here with the cement floor. Fiona, Adrienne noticed, was wearing black clogs. They stepped into a huge refrigerator. “This is the walk-in,” Fiona said. She used the overly patient, patronizing voice of a teacher speaking to a very stupid pupil. “The sauces are parceled out and kept in here.” She handed Adrienne four bowls that comprised a lazy Susan that went around the fondue pot. “Cocktail, goddess, curry, horseradish. Please identify the sauces when you put them on the table.”

“Yes, chef,” Adrienne said. Then wondered if that sounded snide. She took the bowls from Fiona. “Thank you for your help.” She wanted to say something to save herself. “Your cooking is the best I’ve ever tasted. You probably hear that all the time.”

Fiona shook her head, said nothing.

On the way back to the hot line, Adrienne spied Mario standing at a marble-topped table in a back enclave of the kitchen. He wore surgical gloves and was blasting the top of a crème brûlée with a blowtorch. He was listening to something on a Walkman that was making him dance. When Adrienne and Fiona walked by, he whistled.

“That’s enough, Romeo,” Fiona called out. “I know you’re not whistling at me.”

“You got that right, chef,” he said.

Adrienne was too embarrassed to breathe.

Back at the pass, the tickets had multiplied in the thirty seconds that they’d been gone. Adrienne had belly flopped with Fiona, and now she had to worry about how to lift the fondue pot to get the sauces in place.

Someone from the line called out, “Eighty-six the sword.”

“Damn it!” Fiona shouted, so loudly and angrily that Adrienne nearly dropped the sauces. “How did that happen?”

“We’re out of ripe avocados,” the cook said. “I thought there was a whole other crate, but I just checked them and they’re hard as rocks. You want to put a different sauce on the fish?”

“No,” Fiona said. She yanked a ticket down and studied it. “Hey, Adrienne! You want to fly to California and get us some ripe avocados? If you need an escort, Mario will happily join you.”

The guys on the hot line hooted. Adrienne smiled weakly. She was being teased. Adrienne took it as a possible sign of improvement.

She ran the sauces to Cat at table twenty, she fetched a bottle of Laurent-Perrier from the wine cave for Bruno, she checked in with the table of women-all enjoying their appetizers. The local author’s table was on their third round of cocktails; they’d decimated two baskets of pretzel bread and one of the doughnuts, but hadn’t ordered a thing. Caren was growing frustrated. “They’re not getting their fucking chips until they order,” she growled in Adrienne’s ear. “And if the kitchen runs out of beluga, it will serve them right.”

As Adrienne walked by Holt Millman’s table, Drew Amman-Keller flagged her down. She stopped, confused. He indicated that she should bow to him.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I’m glad everything worked out,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“For you. With the job.”

Drew Amman-Keller’s voice was melodious, like a radio announcer’s. She didn’t remember that from the ferry ride.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you for suggesting it. It’s only my first night, but…” Okay, wait. She wasn’t supposed to be talking to this guy. If Thatcher found out she already knew him, he might fire her. Before Adrienne could escape, Drew Amman-Keller pressed some money into her hand.

“One is for you,” he said. “And one is for Rex.”

“Rex?”

“The piano player. Would you ask him to play ‘The Girl from Ipanema’?”

Adrienne nodded and turned away. She hid behind a pillar and checked the bills. Two hundreds. Adrienne stared at the money for a few silly seconds. What to do? She clomped over to Rex.

“ ‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ please,” she said. “For Holt Millman’s table.”

“As ever,” he said wearily.

Since he didn’t have a cup out, Adrienne left one of the hundreds on the ledge above the piano keys. Rex eyed her quizzically. Was there another place she was supposed to put it? It did look crass, a hundred dollar bill laid out on the piano. She picked it back up. “I’ll give it to you on your break?” she said. He nodded. She put the two bills from Public Enemy Number One in her pocket. Rex played “The Girl from Ipanema.”

By the time desserts went out, coffee, and after-dinner drinks, it was midnight. Adrienne went to the ladies’ room and nearly fell asleep on the toilet. How would she keep this up all summer? It felt like she’d been here seven days, not seven hours. And even worse-she was starving! The steak frites at family meal was another lifetime ago. Back when she was young, naïve, and… poor. She had two hundred dollars in tips now and eight hours of work would bring two hundred more. It was all going right into the bank. At this rate, she could pay her father back by the end of the week.

She emerged from the ladies’ room as some tables were leaving. Thatcher bid everyone good-bye and Adrienne took her place next to him at the podium, the two of them waving like Captain Stubing and Julie McCoy from The Love Boat.

“We’re lucky tonight because there isn’t any bar business,” Thatcher said. “Tomorrow night the bar will be mobbed.”

“Great,” Adrienne said.

“I’m going to do a sweep,” Thatcher said. “See if I can get table eighteen to move things along.” That was the author’s table. They had only now received their entrées. “You stay here.”

The author’s table were just cutting into steaks, and two tables out in the sand were still eating fondue. If these tables ordered dessert, they had a good forty minutes left. Everybody else was paying the bill or close to it.

Holt Millman’s party stood up to leave. Adrienne kept her eyes on Drew Amman-Keller. Thatcher had made it sound like he might try to sneak into the kitchen, but he simply slid on his blazer and meandered toward the door with the rest of Holt’s contingency. Adrienne murmured good-byes. Drew Amman-Keller ushered everybody out the door ahead of him in a way that seemed very polite. Then he turned to Adrienne and handed her a business card.

“Good to see you again,” he said. “Call me if you ever want to talk.”

Adrienne was so startled that she laughed-“ha!”-sounding just like Thatcher.

Drew Amman-Keller disappeared out the door.

Adrienne checked out his card, but then the husband-wife Realtor team was on top of her, and so Adrienne slipped the card into her pocket with her tips. Cat and her husband followed on the Realtors’ heels.

“The fondue was phenomenal,” Cat said. “Is Fiona coming out to take a bow?”

Adrienne laughed, like this was a joke. “I’ll tell her you said hello.”

A second later, Thatcher reappeared. “Where’s your champagne?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Go to the bar,” he said. “Right now. That’s an order.”

Huck Finn, fascist dictator, she thought as she limped toward the bar. She wanted a blue granite gravestone. The entire waitstaff was crowded around the bar and she could barely wedge her way in. They were eating from two baskets. The crackers. They were eating the crackers. Adrienne had no hope of getting even a crumb; she was the runt at the trough. But then Joe, whom she barely remembered in the blur of new faces, turned around and gave her a handful.