The Blue Bistro (39 page)

“The guests are taking things,” she said. “Silverware, plates, wineglasses. The matches, my pencils, the menus. They’re stealing.”

Thatcher looked upon her with weary eyes. Of everybody up front, Thatcher seemed the most exhausted. And not only exhausted but sad. The sign that hung in the kitchen seemed to speak straight from his heart. His world was ending in twenty-five days. “Can you blame them?” he said. “We close in three and a half weeks. Whatever they took, that’s all they’ll be left with.”

August thirteenth: two hundred and fifty covers, twenty-one reservations on the wait list. Special: oven-roasted tomatoes with garlic and thyme, served with grilled peasant bread.

Thatcher and Fiona went to mass at St. Mary’s and were not expected in the restaurant until after first service started.

“Is everything okay?” Adrienne asked Thatcher when he told her he was going to church.

“She wants to see Father Ott,” he said. “She wants to take communion.”

“Could you go tomorrow morning?” It was bold of Adrienne to ask, but the restaurant business did not lend itself to five o’clock mass on Saturday.

“She wants to go tonight,” Thatcher said.

After family meal but before service, Adrienne snuck into pastry. Mario had the ice cream machine running (special tonight: blackberry sherbet); he was melting Valrhona chocolate over a very low flame and reading
Sports Illustrated.
He had a garish red-purple mark on his neck the size of a quarter.

“Really,” Adrienne said. “A hickey?”

“Girl I met last night at the Muse,” Mario said without lifting his eyes from his magazine. “She was crazy about me. Said I looked like Antonio Banderas.”

“Well, you don’t.”

“Okay, thanks,” he said. He stirred the chocolate with a wooden spoon. “What do you want?”

“They’re at church.”

“Who?”

“Thatch and Fiona.”

“So?”

“So, do you think that’s bad?”

“No.”

“Do you think it means she’s getting worse?”

“Hospital means she’s getting worse,” he said. “Church just means . . .” He looked up for the first time, slapping the magazine down on the marble counter. “It means she wants religion. It’s August, for God’s sake.”

“Twenty-two days until the end of the world,” Adrienne said, and suddenly she felt like she was going to cry. Even if they were the longest three weeks of her life, it wouldn’t be long enough. “What are you going to do when it’s over?” she asked Mario. “Will you and your cousins try to open your own place?”

“We’re talking about it,” he said.

This answer saddened her even more. They were making plans without her. Everyone was: That morning, Adrienne had heard Caren on the phone with a Realtor in Providence, Rhode Island.

“Providence?” Adrienne had said when Caren hung up, only slightly cowed by the fact that she’d been eavesdropping. “What happened to St. Bart’s?”

“That part of my life is over,” Caren said. “It’s time to move on. I have to get a real job. I have a degree in biology, you know. I could work in a lab.”

“You’re a scientist? I thought you did ballet.”

“I’m too old for ballet now. I’m almost thirty-three. I have to get some structure in place. Some health insurance.”

“What about Duncan?” Adrienne said.

“He’ll be in Providence, too,” Caren said. “Providence is not a place I would have chosen on my own.”

“What’s he going to do in Providence?”

“Work for Holt Millman,” Caren said.

“As a bartender?”

Caren laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

So Caren and Duncan were off to Providence and the Subiacos were talking about opening their own place. Henry Subiaco had his root beer. Spillman and Red Mare were moving to Brooklyn; they were going to work for Kevin Kahla at Craft and start trying to have a baby. To avoid being stranded out in the cold, Adrienne told herself she could always go to Telluride with Kyra and the painter—or she could put her finger on the map and pick a new place. But what Adrienne really wanted was to go where Thatcher went and do what he did. He had cancelled the trip to the Galápagos, but no plans appeared in its place. Adrienne was left to speculate: He would ride it out with Fiona, whatever that entailed.

While Adrienne was lost in this train of thought, Mario picked up his magazine and started reading again.

“I should get back to work . . .” Adrienne said, but he didn’t answer. He wasn’t listening.

Adrienne returned to the front to find Doyle Chambers pacing by the podium. Adrienne steeled her resolve, then breezed around him as if he weren’t there. She checked her running watch, which she kept inside the podium: five fifty-five, three feet above sea level. She rechecked the reservation book.

“Adrienne,” Doyle Chambers said.

She held up a finger—
One minute
—with the authority (she hoped) of the conductor of an orchestra. Doyle Chambers worked on Wall Street. He was intense, he was fastidious, he was busy. He and his mousy wife, Gloria, rented a house in Quaise, and flew to Nantucket on their jet every weekend. Doyle never requested reservations so much as demanded them. Adrienne had sat him at least six times over the course of the summer and each time he had made her feel increasingly menial. The world was Doyle Chambers’s servant. But not tonight.

“I called you three times and left three messages on your cell phone,” Adrienne said. She glanced up to see Gloria, wearing a fringed shawl like a rock diva of a certain era,
slinking around by the front door. “I made myself clear. Call back to reconfirm or I give away your table.”

“Adrienne.”

“It wasn’t like you,” Adrienne said. “But you didn’t call me back.”

“A reservation is a reservation,” he said. “Do you understand the meaning of the word? I
reserved
a table.”

“It’s the middle of August, Mr. Chambers,” Adrienne said. She breathed in through her nose and if she could have breathed out fire, she would have. “I gave away your table.”

“No!” he said. His voice reverberated through the restaurant. Adrienne turned around. It was empty except for the servers who looked up from their polishing and straightening, startled. When they saw it was just Doyle Chambers releasing testosterone, they resumed work.

In response to his raised voice, Adrienne lowered hers. “Yes,” she said. “Those, I’m afraid, are our rules. However, since you’re here early, you’re more than welcome to sit at the bar.”

“Sit at the bar?” he said. “Sit at the bar like I’m someone who doesn’t have enough
pull
to get a real table?”

Adrienne wished she could blink herself back into pastry with Mario, love bite, indifference, and all. She could watch the ice cream machine churn liquid into solid. She peeked out the window, hoping that Thatcher and Fiona had skipped the last hymn and Thatcher’s silver truck would be pulling into the parking lot any second. Doyle Chambers never spoke like this to Thatcher; he only bullied women. Caren had refused to serve him years ago.

“
Pull
has nothing to do with it,” Adrienne said, her voice practically a whisper. “If you’d like a table, you have to make a reservation, then reconfirm. It’s a Saturday night in August. I have a twenty-one-reservation wait list. I called your cell phone three times. You did not call me back. I waited until two o’clock, which is, incidentally, two hours past the deadline, then I gave away your table.”

Doyle Chambers snatched a pack of matches out of the
bowl and whipped them sidearm at the wall behind Adrienne’s head. Gloria Chambers slipped out to the parking lot. Adrienne felt someone by her side: Joe.

“I can’t believe this!” Doyle Chambers shouted. “What is the point of making a reservation if it doesn’t reserve you shit!”

“Hey, man,” Joe said. “Lower your voice. Please. And stop throwing things at the lady. She’s just doing her job.”

Doyle Chambers glared at Joe and took a step toward him.
Fight,
Adrienne thought. Duncan rushed over from the bar and grabbed Doyle Chambers’s arm in a good-natured, break-it-up way.

“Doyle,” he said. “Dude, you have to chill. I’d be happy to set you up at the bar.”

Doyle Chambers shrugged Duncan off. “I’m not eating at the bar,” he said. “I’m eating in the dining room. I have a reservation.”

“You
had
a reservation,” Adrienne said. She was shaking, but it felt good to be enforcing the rules, especially with a cretin like this. He beat his wife; there wasn’t a doubt in Adrienne’s mind.

Doyle Chambers looked at the ground and said nothing. His face and neck were red, the part in his sandy blond hair was red. Adrienne thought he was collecting himself. She thought maybe he would apologize and maybe he would agree to sit at the bar. Duncan, who prided himself on being a man’s man, would buy him a round of drinks and put in a VIP order. But when Doyle Chambers raised his head, Adrienne could see nothing of the sort would happen. He lifted his hand and Adrienne thought he was going to strike her, but what he did was more devastating. He grabbed Adrienne’s reservation book and ripped out the page for that night, crumpling it in his fist. “No!” Adrienne cried. But before she or Joe or Duncan could comprehend the full meaning of his action, Doyle Chambers was out the door, pushing past a party of eight that was on their way in. Adrienne darted out from behind the podium and made it to the doorway
in time to see Doyle and Gloria Chambers tear out of the parking lot in their convertible Jaguar.

“There goes my night,” Adrienne said. “Literally.
There goes my night.
” One of the men in the party of eight looked at her expectantly; she didn’t know who he was or where he belonged. Joe and Duncan stared at Adrienne with dumb, shell-shocked expressions. “What am I going to do?” Adrienne asked them. Joe retreated to the dining room to pass the bad news on to the other servers.

Duncan repaired to the bar. “Let me get your drink,” he said.

Adrienne returned to her post behind the podium. Her book was destroyed. In addition to Saturday, Doyle Chambers had ripped out half of Sunday. Adrienne tasted the grilled sausage she’d had for family meal in the back of her throat.

“I’m sorry?” said the man with the party of eight. “We have a reservation at six o’clock. The name is Banino. The Banino family from Oklahoma.”

A glass of Laurent-Perrier materialized at the podium and Adrienne felt Delilah give her arm a squeeze. She could do this. She remembered that there were three eight-tops first seating and Adrienne sat Mr. Banino at the best of the three, handed out menus, and said, “Someone will be your server tonight. Enjoy your meal.” On the way back to the podium she wondered if she could call the police and press charges against Doyle Chambers. Attempted assault with a pack of matches. First-degree rudeness.

Adrienne sat the restaurant as best she could on the fly. The local author and her entourage were one of the other parties of eight and the author told Adrienne, a bit impatiently, that Thatcher had promised her a table under the awning, the table that she had already given to the Oklahoma contingency. Adrienne was flummoxed; she nearly launched into the whole long story because an author would appreciate the drama. You couldn’t even put a character like Doyle Chambers into fiction. He was too awful; no one would believe him. But as Adrienne was short on time she
offered to put the author out in the sand at two of the fondue tables pushed together. This solved the problem temporarily. Adrienne just waited for those tables to show up and complain about being stuck inside on such a lovely night. Call Doyle Chambers, she would say.

Thatcher didn’t show up until everyone from first was down. When Adrienne saw his truck pull in, she checked her watch: six forty-five. What a night to be late. She tried to summon words poisonous enough to describe what had happened. She had quelled some of her rage by writing across the top of Sunday’s ripped page: “Doyle Chambers never allowed back.” Never in the next twenty-one days.
So there,
Adrienne thought. Take that. She would throw the remainder of her fury against Thatcher the second he walked in. He should have a computer like every other restaurant! He should make a backup copy of the book! But most of all, he should have been here where he was needed and not at church.

When he stepped through the door, he looked somber, verging on mournful. Fiona and Father Ott trailed him in. Fiona gave Adrienne a weary glance then vanished into the kitchen with Father Ott in her wake. Adrienne dropped her load. There was no one like Thatcher and Fiona to make her feel like the restaurant business really was not all that important.

“How was mass?” she said.

“Good,” he said dully. “Everything okay here?”

“Sure,” Adrienne said. “Doyle Chambers absconded with tonight’s page from the reservation book, but I got everybody down. It’s not perfect, but . . .”

“Looks fine,” he said, scanning the dining room with disinterested eyes. “Father Ott is going to sit with Fiona in the back office for a while. Her O
₂
sats are low and she’s afraid she’s getting another infection. She’s lost seven pounds since we got back from Boston. The doctors want her in the hospital.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

He flashed Adrienne a look she had never seen before. He was angry. “Well, she can’t breathe.”

This was enough to push Adrienne over the edge into hysteria. Doyle Chambers, the precarious state of her future: job, relationship, and all. And she was premenstrual. But Adrienne simply nodded. “Okay, I understand.”

Thatcher backed down. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just . . .”

“It’s all right,” she said.

“So let me see the book,” he said. He regarded Doyle Chambers’s damage, then whistled. “In twelve years, this has never happened to me.”

“He isn’t allowed back,” Adrienne said. “If you let him in, I’ll quit.”

“You’ll quit?”

“Yep.”

“Don’t want that,” Thatcher said. He squeezed Adrienne’s hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What do you mean?”

“We were invited to a party.”

“A party?”

“At Holt Millman’s house.”

Holt Millman’s house. Duncan had told Adrienne about this party a few mornings earlier over espresso. Holt Millman threw a legendary cocktail party every August. Two hundred guests, vintage Dom Pérignon, flowers flown in from Hawaii, a full-blown feast by Nantucket Catering Company, and a band from New York City. Every year people got so drunk that they jumped in the pool with their clothes on.