Maine Squeeze (5 page)

Yes, we were bored.

Personally, my favorite Bobb's item was the fried haddock sandwich. Whenever a customer asked, “What's good here?” I'd tell them to get the sandwich. Then they'd say, “I'll have the fried clam basket.” Somehow I wasn't convincing in my pitch, but oh well, that left more haddock for me.

At Bobb's we didn't use computers. Everything was shorthand, abbreviations, or had a nickname. We used white notepads to take orders. “You're actually writing this down? How quaint,” tourists would say when they saw me jotting on the notepad.

Quaint
was a top-ten tourist word. Some of the others were:
clam chowdah
, which they loved pronouncing in a bad fake accent; and
gift shop
. Trudy had even started selling Bobb's T-shirts and ball caps because customers kept asking for them. She sold two tees with goofy slogans, but luckily our uniform tees just had a logo on the front and a red lobster on the back.

We had an old cash register, too—not a computer, just a big, fat calculator with a cash drawer attached. “It works. Why replace it?” Trudy would say.

That was the philosophy of a lot of people on the island. For instance, my parents and this twenty-five-year-old Volvo with 200,000 miles on the odometer that I now drove. There was no point replacing something that still worked because you'd probably have to leave the island to find whatever it was you wanted. And then you'd have to haul whatever you didn't want
off
of the island, or else find someone else on the island who wanted your old stuff. Which was weird, when you saw someone walking down the road pushing the very stroller that you, Colleen Templeton, once graced, wearing your old baby clothes. I'm all in favor of recycling everything we can, but it's still strange to see your past walking around with a new identity.

Anyway, Trudy put a lot of money into having good food at the restaurant, the best and freshest seafood catches, along with some cool, old standard family recipes.

There were old wooden booths near the windows, and long tables in the middle of the restaurant for large groups. There was also a “banquet room,” where people had private parties for weddings, birthdays, promotions … basically, any excuse would do. There were little lamps fashioned after lighthouses on each table. For a while the salt and pepper shakers were shaped like lobster claws, but they were so cute that people kept stealing them, so Trudy went back to using plain glass ones. One of my jobs when I was fifteen used to be Salt and Pepper Girl, which was nothing at all like the groundbreaking rap hip-hop group Salt-N-Pepa. It involved refilling and pouring and wiping off greasy fingerprints.

There used to be a lobster tank near the salad bar, but it caused too much confusion because some people didn't understand why the lobsters were dark blue-green instead of red. They only turn red when they're cooked, which I think is a very good metaphor—I know
I
turn red when I'm cooked, figuratively.

So anyway, back to the Bobb's language. Here were some of the order nicknames: fried clams were rubberneckers; a tuna sandwich was shark on toast; sea scallops were bottomfeeders; a fried seafood basket was a frantic Atlantic; lobster stew was floating fish; a lobster roll was a rock 'n' roll.

This didn't make sense to me at first because the nicknames were just as long as the actual order names, but Trudy explained that it was part of the restaurant culture, that having nicknames made us close as a team, because we had our own language. So, okay. But you definitely didn't want the out-of-town customers to hear you calling out some of your orders in the kitchen. For one thing, some of them didn't sound all that appetizing. For another, they'd probably say, “How quaint!”

“They should say ‘How
Maint
,' not ‘How quaint,'” Sam had said last summer.

“We're not quaint. We're Maine-ahs,” one of the cooks said.

“Did you hear that accent? How
quaint
!” Sam had teased him.

Despite the goofy names, the food at Bobb's
was
incredibly good. We always had people waiting for tables, crowding the dock outside, mingling, and sipping drinks in plastic cups while they waited, and once or twice falling into the water.

You didn't want to fall in, not out there. The water near Bobb's and the marina was not only as cold as the rest of the ocean could be, and full of seaweed, but it was also tainted with boat engine fuel run-off, scraps of fish, etc. It was rather disgusting, if you really stopped to look at it.

Cats roamed around the docks; kittens lounged on the docks in the sun. They lived for, and on, the fish that escaped from nets being hauled in, bait that was dropped out of buckets, and of course, dropped fried shrimp and clams. They had to compete with some very fast seagulls, the pigeons of the ocean.

I stepped around a couple of cats now, as we walked into Bobb's.

“You know, some places you can be away from for months, and then as soon as you see them again, it's like you never left. Know what I mean?” Sam commented. “I swear, this same loop of rope was lying here when I left last August.”

“That's because we don't actually do anything in the off-season,” I said. “We wait for the tourists like you to come back before we actually—”

“Tourists like me? Excuse me, but I worked side by side with you last summer,” Sam replied. “I'm no tourist.”

“So define what you are exactly,” I teased.

“She's a part-time resident,” Erica said.

We were arguing about how to define a Maine native—which, technically, I wasn't, since I hadn't been born here, which meant I too was “from away”—when we walked into the kitchen and I lost my breath completely. It wasn't the smell of bleach, from everything being disinfected to the umpteenth level of cleanliness for opening day. It wasn't the onions on the chopping board, or the tomato bisque simmering on the stove.

It was Evan.

What in the world was he
doing
here? Was this a mirage? I exchanged panicked looks with Sam and Erica. No, it couldn't be Evan.

But it was.

He was sitting on top of the stainless steel ice cream freezer. He had a semi-scruffy look, like he hadn't shaved in a day or two. He could make stubble look good. I hated that about him.

He was wearing a faded yellow long-sleeved T-shirt with a hole in it, and long khaki shorts. His long legs nearly stretched down to the floor.

I found myself staring at his legs, at his feet. So he had nice ankles. So what? How could I be so shallow as to fall for someone because of his
ankles
? Ankles didn't mean anything. They just held you up. Shinbone connected to the anklebone connected to the footbone, etc.

He was wearing the same Birkenstock sandals he wore last summer.

Last summer
. The last time I'd seen Evan, we'd stood outside on the docks at five
A.M.
, shrouded in fog, hugging each other, and I was crying because summer was over and he was catching the ferry and leaving the island to go back to Philadelphia.

It was like something out of my grandmother Templeton's favorite movie,
Casablanca
, which I must have watched with her at least ten times. Instead of the ferry, there should have been an airplane whirring its propeller blades behind us. We should have been in black-and-white, not color. And Evan should have been wearing a fedora hat and a trench coat, instead of a T-shirt and shorts and Birkenstocks, and talking about our problems not amounting to a hill of beans.

What is a hill of beans, anyway?

A hill of blueberries I could understand.

Anyway, whenever I thought about that awful morning, I remembered Evan's faded blue T-shirt, and pressing my face against his chest, how soft the cotton shirt was and how it smelled.

I used to think Evan wore this really cool cologne, because he always smelled so good, no matter what. But it turned out to be his Ultimate Endurance antiperspirant.

I could have used some Ultimate Endurance right about then.

“What—what are you … doing here?” I stammered.

“Hey, you.” He slid off the freezer and wrapped his arms around my waist.

And there it was. What it had taken me so many months to forget. That feeling. That scent. Us. Lying on the beach together. Swimming together. Walking together. Being together.

“Are you … working here?” I finally managed to get out. “Or something?” My voice came out as a pathetic whisper, as if the words
or something
could ever be sultry.

Without answering me, he stepped back and spotted Samantha standing behind me. “Hey you, too.” He gave her a quick hug, and she playfully kicked up her leg behind her as if this was her prom, or an end-of-World-War-II V-Day photo. Evan dipped her, lowering her toward the freezer, and they both laughed.

Why was their hug more romantic than ours? No fair.

Erica acknowledged him with a shy nod. “Hi.”

“Hey, Erica. How's it going? What's up?” Evan replied.

He had the nerve to ask what was
up
. How about my
pulse
, buddy?

“So. Are you working here?” I asked. “Nobody said you were working here.” I can be a bit blunt when I'm feeling cornered.

“What, am I required to file papers with the government?” Evan joked. “The island's cracking down on outsiders?”

No,
I thought,
but maybe they should be
.

“Funny, we were just talking about that,” Sam started to tell him.

“But …
are
you working here?” I asked again.

Evan raised his eyebrows.

“Because, I mean, Trudy said you weren't working here.” In fact, I think I asked her to swear to it in blood, like something out of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. We had a pact, or at least I did. Since when did Trudy lie to me? I'd been working here for four years, and I couldn't ever remember her lying to me. Well, except for that one time when she told me Saturday nights would not be “all that busy.”

Evan shrugged. “I changed my mind. My other plans fell through—”

“What other plans?” I asked.

I couldn't help feeling angry to see him again. He'd blown me off. He'd dropped me. Completely. Sure, we were hundreds of miles apart, and maybe it
was
pointless to have a long-distance relationship. But he could have kept in touch. He could have warned me he'd be here again. Not to mention the fact that Trudy and Robert could have warned me when I asked them, repeatedly, whether they'd heard from him and whether he'd be back. I was furious with Trudy and Robert, I decided. I'd quit if I didn't like working here so much.

Not, I guess, that I would have planned my summer any differently if I'd known Evan was returning. I wanted to be here with my friends—and with Ben. This could be the last time it'd be so easy for us all to be here together. If I'd known Evan was coming, I wouldn't have run off to, say, Europe or something. At least not without seriously thinking it over first and deciding it was the best possible move.

“So. When did you get here?” I asked Evan.

“Well, I got in last night—but it was dicey,” he said.

About as dicey as this is, right now?
I just stared at the freezer, wishing it wasn't as newly cleaned as it was, that it was the end of the season, not the beginning, and that I couldn't see my distorted reflection on its side. Was my hair seriously going to look that bad on the day I saw him, after nine months of perfect hair and not seeing him? (Maybe the two things were related. He really was evil.)

“Dicey?” I finally said. “How?”

“I was supposed to catch a ride with a friend heading up north to work at a summer camp,” he said. “But his car broke down outside Boston.” Evan laughed. “It was such a rust heap that we took out our bags, and he just sold it to a junkyard for twenty-five bucks. They towed it away and we just stood there on the side of the highway. Then it started raining. Not just raining, actually—pouring. With lightning flashing and these huge cracks of thunder. So it was impossible to hitch a ride when we were crouched down, holding our backpacks over our heads.”

What an amusing little story, I thought. But I was dying inside, dying. I'd never had heartburn in my life, so I wasn't sure if that nauseous churning in the pit of my stomach was heartburn or just disgust.

Soon Evan had Sam, Erica, and the rest of the summer crew laughing at his tale of hitching a ride from a police officer to the train station, getting as far as they could with what little money they had, then camping at a New Hampshire rest area, and finally finding a ride the next day with two nuns and mistakenly swearing as they got into the car because Evan's friend hit his head on the door.

“So, anyway, I made it, safe and sound. Someone was looking out for me, I guess,” Evan said.

Darn that someone.

“Technically, I was supposed to be here three days ago,” he said.

And what a loss for all of us that you weren't, I thought. I was so (a) angry at the nuns, which is horrible, I know; (b) angry at his attitude; (c) angry at the way he was telling this long, drawn-out story that really only illustrated his stupidity and poor planning. When a random nun has to save your butt—I'm sorry, but you're really counting on luck or divine intervention.