Elin Hilderbrand - The Blue Bistro

Adrienne looked at Thatcher. He seemed on the verge of a smile.

“It’s not funny,” she said. “The guy gave me a hard time about the doughnuts. He said if he wanted to eat at Krispy Kreme he would have stayed in New York.”

“That’s an old one,” Spillman said. “I hear that one every year.”

Thatcher checked the reservation book. “The reservation was made four weeks ago by his secretary.” He scribbled a note in the book then pointed the eraser end of his pencil at Adrienne. “Okay, that’s the last time we take a reservation from a secretary. Except for Holt Millman. His secretary is a great lady named Dottie Shore. Not only did I give her the private number, I gave her my home number. But nobody else makes a reservation through a secretary. If they want to eat here, they have to call us themselves. It’s a little late in the game to be making up new rules. However”-Thatcher turned to Spillman-“we’ll offer the wine by the glass as a special. Twenty dollars a glass, only six glasses available and that’s a bargain. We’ll take a hit on the bottle. Adrienne, I want you to offer table twelve a round of cocktails on the house.”

Adrienne gasped. “Why?”

“The guy obviously had an unhappy childhood. He’s angry for whatever reason, he wants something from us. We could send him out the caviar, but we don’t like him. So we’ll give him drinks. And I’m going to let you be the hero.”

“I’d rather not go over there again,” Adrienne said. “Spillman can do it.”

Spillman had already walked away; Adrienne watched him present the bottle to Duncan at the bar.

Thatcher took Adrienne’s shoulder and wheeled her toward the dining room. “I’m going to let you be the hero,” he said. “Old-fashioned service. You said you knew all about it.”

Adrienne straightened the seams of her dress and tried to straighten out her frame of mind as she headed to table twelve. She put her hand on the back of Dana’s wicker chair; she couldn’t bring herself to touch him and she wasn’t sure she was supposed to. “We’re sorry about the bottle of wine,” she said. “We’d like to buy you a round of drinks on the house.”

“Lovely,” the woman in lavender glasses murmured. For the first time, Adrienne noticed the other couple at the table. They were in their fifties, distinguished-looking, Asian.

“Thank you,” the Asian man said, dipping his head at Adrienne.

But Adrienne was waiting to hear from the man named Dana. She was the hero and she wanted him to acknowledge as much. He said nothing, and after a second Adrienne realized that he was one of those people who didn’t have anything to offer unless he was angry or upset. He deserved an old-fashioned kick in the balls.

In two seatings, only one person ate at the bar-a man in his midthirties who wore a red sailcloth shirt over a white T-shirt. He smiled at Adrienne every time she passed by. Red Shirt chatted with Duncan and drank a glass of Whale’s Tale Pale Ale. Then a huge portion of chips and dip came out. So the guy was a VIP. He was wearing jeans and driving moccasins. He had brown hair receding a very little bit and nice brown eyes. He looked kind and responsible, no flashy good looks, no whiff of creepy lying bastard. Rule Three: Exercise good judgment about men!

Red Shirt’s appetizer was the beet salad. Adrienne liked men who weren’t afraid to order a salad. When she wandered up to the bar to have her champagne glass refilled she actually bent her leg at the knee to show off her new shoes. Rex played “Waltzing Matilda,” and Adrienne said, to no one in particular, “Oh, I love this song.” Duncan introduced Red Shirt to Delilah, but Adrienne didn’t catch his name. Introduce me! she thought.

Adrienne ran appetizers for Joe, she retrieved three bottles of wine from the wine cave, she replaced the toilet paper in the ladies’ room, she delivered two checks and got a lesson on the credit card machine from Thatcher. When she found a second to float by the bar again, Red Shirt was eating the lobster club, the entrée Adrienne herself most wanted to try. She approached Thatcher at the podium.

“Nine bottles of Laurent-Perrier tonight,” he said. “Our experiment is really working. I still have to teach you how to use the wine key. When you can open wine, that will free me up. And champagne. There’s a nice quiet way to open champagne. I’ll show you.”

“Who’s that sitting at the bar?” she asked.

Thatcher didn’t even look up. “Jasper Zodl.”

“Jasper Zodl?”

“JZ. He drives the delivery truck. He comes every morning at ten.”

“Will you introduce me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Conveniently, the phone rang.

The phone had been ringing all night. Half were reservation calls, half were inquiries about the bar. Was tonight, as rumor had it, first night of bar? This call was about the bar.

“The bar is open tonight until one,” Thatcher said.

When he hung up, Adrienne said, “I heard about this huge bar scene, I heard about you hiring a bouncer and a line out into the parking lot, and yet, the only person at the bar is the delivery driver who is so undesirable you won’t even introduce me.”

“He’s not undesirable,” Thatcher said. “He’s a very nice guy. As for the bar, you just wait. Wait and see.”

Adrienne would have been just as happy if nobody had shown up. At the end of second seating, there was a problem with one of the guests’ credit cards. She ran it and ran it, and each time the machine informed her that the card was unacceptable-but Adrienne wasn’t about to tell the guest this when she had only learned the credit card machine that night, and it could just as easily have been she who was unacceptable. So she kept Joe waiting, as well as the guests, who had told Adrienne that they wanted to get home and pay the babysitter. She didn’t take the problem to Thatcher primarily because she thought it was time she worked through a crisis by herself, but also because he had refused to introduce her to JZ.

Joe, whom Adrienne had initially characterized as heavyset now just seemed big and soft and rather handsome-his skin a chocolaty brown, distinct from the deep-fried russet color of the Subiacos. But even Joe, so polite and gentlemanly, had his limits. He glared at her as she ran the card again, punching the numbers in one by one.

“What the fuck is taking so long?” he said.

Adrienne brandished the card. “It’s no good. I’ve run the card six times, three times manually, and I can’t get a bite. You’re going to have to tell them.”

“And jeopardize my tip? No way, sister. You tell them.”

Adrienne peered over Joe’s shoulder at the table. The lovely dark-haired wife was sitting sideways in her chair; she was all wrapped up in her pashmina like a present, her Louis Vuitton clutch purse in her lap. The husband had his pen poised. There would be no lengthy calculations with the tip, forty, fifty, a nice round number on the generous side, a dashed off signature, and these people were out the door.

“Okay, I’ll tell them,” she said.

Joe studied the card, “Tell them it’s expired,” he said. “This card expired in May. Today is the second of June. Didn’t Thatch tell you to check the expiration first thing?”

Of course he had. Adrienne hurried the card back over to the couple, explained the problem, and the man, with apologies, offered her an identical card with a different expiration, and Adrienne ran it without incident. Sixty seconds later the couple was breezing past her with a happy, rushed wave.

Thatcher in the meantime had asked Joe what the problem was-he had seen Joe and Adrienne conferring by the credit card machine as he chatted with one of the fondue tables out in the sand-and Joe had tattled.