Elin Hilderbrand - The Blue Bistro

“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.”