Elin Hilderbrand - The Blue Bistro

Caren said, “Who calls at this hour?”

Adrienne had a funny feeling and she snapped up the phone.

“Hello?” she said.

“Adrienne?” It was Thatcher, but something was wrong with his voice. Then she realized he was crying.

“Thatcher?” she said.

The line clicked. She held a dial tone. She called Thatch back on his cell phone but it went to his voice mail. “It’s me,” she said. “Call me back.”

Caren glanced up from the Pottery Barn catalog. She and Duncan were talking drapes.

“Thatch?” she said.

Adrienne managed a nod.

“Did he say anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Want a glass of wine?” Caren said.

“Yes,” Adrienne said.

She didn’t sleep. She finished the bottle of wine and opened another, then she sat at the kitchen table and listened to the muted sounds of Caren and Duncan’s lovemaking. She called Thatcher three more times-all three calls went to his voice mail, but she didn’t leave a message. Caren came out to use the bathroom and when she saw Adrienne sitting at the table, she offered her a Percocet. Adrienne took it. It made her loopy and vague, but it didn’t put her to sleep. At five thirty, the sun rose. Adrienne watched the light through the leaves of the trees in the backyard, and when she couldn’t wait another second, she hopped on her bike and rode to the restaurant.

The red Durango was in the parking lot. Mario was in way too early for work. The door to the Bistro was swinging open; when Adrienne stepped through, she saw him sitting at the bar with a drink, a Scotch. He looked at her.

“She’s dead?” Adrienne said.

He tossed back the last of his drink, then brought the glass down so hard that it cracked in his hand. He left the damaged glass on the bar and walked toward Adrienne. Adrienne was numb; she had no thoughts.

“There’s something else you have to know,” Mario said. He hugged her.

“What’s that?” Adrienne asked. Her fingers and toes were tingling. She pressed her tongue into the fibers of Mario’s cotton shirt. She wanted to taste something.

“Thatcher married her yesterday afternoon. Father Ott was there. He married them in the hospital chapel at two o’clock. Fiona slipped into a coma at nine. She died at two this morning.”

“Thatcher married her?”

“He married her.”

Adrienne waited to feel something. She thought of Thatcher carrying Fiona toward the phosphorescent ocean, carrying her the same way a groom carries a bride over the threshold. Adrienne had been so jealous then, so typically sorry for herself, as she wondered, Who is going to carry me? But now she didn’t feel jealous or sad or lonely. She didn’t feel anything.

She sat next to Mario on a bar stool and rested her cheek on the cool blue granite. Her eyes fell closed. She felt her mind drifting away.

When she awoke, with a crick in her neck and a flat spot on her face, it was because the phone was ringing. She went to the podium. Line one. Adrienne checked her watch: nine o’clock. Reporter, she thought. Drew Amman-Keller. She hadn’t told him anything. In the end, she hadn’t told him a thing.

She pushed open the kitchen door. It was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerators, and it was clean. The floors had been mopped the night before, the pass buffed to a shine, the trash had been emptied, there was a stack of clean side towels on the counter. Adrienne picked one up and pressed it to her face. This was Fiona’s kitchen without Fiona. Fiona was dead.

Adrienne found Mario in pastry, surrounded by his usual tools: the mixing cups, the measuring spoons, the stainless-steel bowl that was as big as a wagon wheel. He had flour out, baking powder, butter, and a brick of Gruyère cheese. “Good, you’re awake,” he said. “You can help me.”

“You’re cooking?”

“I want to make crackers.”

“Crackers.”

“We have to call the staff in at eleven,” he said. “We have to tell them the restaurant is closing. I want to have the crackers. You know, as something nice.”

“The restaurant is closing?” This, somehow, pierced her. No more restaurant. Dead, like Fiona.

“Oh, honey,” Mario said. He patted a high stool where she sat like a child to watch Mario work. He measured flour, grated the Gruyère with his microplane rasp until the brick was a fluffy mound, cut in the butter, mixed up a dough. He rolled the dough into three logs, wrapped them in plastic, and put them in the reach-in to chill. He made Adrienne an espresso, which she threw back joylessly. That, she vowed, would be the last espresso of her life.

“How do you make yourself do it?” she asked him. “Cook at a time like this. Aren’t you sad?”

“Sad?” he said. “My compadre, my mentor, my friend, she’s dead. I’m more than sad, honey. I’m something else, something I don’t even have a word for. But cooking saves me. It’s what I do, it’s who I am. I stop cooking, I’m the one who dies.”

“I want something like that,” Adrienne said. “I want something to do, someone to be. I don’t have that. I’ve never had that.”

“You’re good at being beautiful.”

She knew he meant this as a compliment, but it only proved her point. She was nothing. She had nobody.

Mario retrieved the dough from the walk-in and sliced the logs into thin discs, then laid them out on three cookie sheets. He handed Adrienne a jar of dried thyme and showed her how to lightly dust the crackers, then he put the cookie sheets in the oven.

“I’m going to have a cigarette,” he said.

“You don’t smoke,” she said.

“I do today. You want to come?”

“I’ll stay here,” she said. She sat on the stool and felt the heat rise from the oven; minutes later, pastry was filled with the smell of the cheese and the thyme. Mario reappeared. He pulled the cookie sheets out of the oven. The crackers were crispy and fragrant. Ninety-nine percent of the world think that crackers only come out of a box …

Mario offered her one and Adrienne let him place it on her tongue like a Communion wafer.

“This,” he said, “was the easy part.”

As Adrienne returned to the dining room, the Sid Wainer truck pulled into the parking lot. She hoped and prayed for the blond kid, but no such luck. JZ walked in. The phone rang, Adrienne ignored it. She was frightened when she looked at JZ. He was filled with something and about to burst from too much of it. Grief, rage, and the something else that nobody had a word for. She stepped out from behind the podium and hugged him.

“I’m so sorry, JZ.”

“No one is as sorry as I am.” Adrienne let him go. His eyes were watering and Adrienne held out the side towel, but he just stared at it. “You’re closing?” he said.

“Yes.”

He picked up the bowl of matches and Adrienne feared he might smash it against the wall, but he just held it for a few seconds, then put it back down. “I bought that bowl for her in Boston two years ago,” he said. “She was at Mass General then and I went to visit her. We’d just started dating.”

“I can’t imagine how awful this must be for you,” Adrienne said.

“She wouldn’t let me come this time,” he said. “I didn’t get to see her.”

“JZ…”

JZ stared into the bowl. “Thatcher married her.”

“I know.”

“She really wanted to be married. I should have done it a long time ago.”

“I would have liked that better,” Adrienne said.

“But I couldn’t. My hands were tied.”

“So you’ve said.”

“She never believed that.”

“I’m sure she understood.”

“She said she did, but she didn’t. And now she’s dead.”

Adrienne nodded.