Adrienne took a white napkin off her plate and unfolded it on her lap. She lifted the fork; it was heavy, beautiful silver. And the charger-she flipped it over. Limoges. She replaced the plate quickly-this was the restaurant equivalent of checking someone’s medicine cabinet. Before she could inspect the pedigree of the stemware, Thatcher was back with two glasses of juice.
“Fresh-squeezed,” he said. “The last of the blood oranges.” He set the glasses down then disappeared again.
Adrienne eyed her glass. “The last of the blood oranges,” she whispered. The juice was the fiery pink of some rare jewel. Was it okay to take a sip before he got back? Adrienne listened for noises from the kitchen. It was silent. She took a deep breath. The air smelled like something else now: toast. Hunger and thirst, she thought. They’d get you every time. Thatcher hurried out of the kitchen with two plates and set one in front of Adrienne with a flourish, as though she were someone very important.
It was the best omelet Adrienne had ever eaten. Perfectly cooked so that the eggs were soft and buttery. Filled with sautéed onions and mushrooms and melted Camembert cheese. There were three roasted cherry tomatoes on the plate, skins splitting, oozing juice. Nutty wheat toast. Thatch had brought butter and jam to the table. The butter was served like a tiny cheesecake on a small pedestal under a glass dome. The jam was apricot, homemade, served from a Ball jar.
Adrienne dug in, wondering where to start in the way of conversation. She decided the only safe thing was to talk about the food.
“This jam reminds me of when I was little,” Adrienne said, spreading a thick layer on her toast. “My mother made jam.”
“Is she a good cook?” Thatcher said.
“Who?”
“Your mother.”
Adrienne paused. Rule Two: Do not lie about past! But it was hard when someone hurled a question at her like a pitch she couldn’t hit.
“Yes.”
For Adrienne, the silence that followed was studded with guilt. She should have just said, “She was,” but then, by necessity, there would be tedious personal explanations about ovarian cancer and a motherless twelve-year-old that she was never in the mood for. She would rather talk about her felonious ex-boyfriend and her empty Future. It’s okay, she thought. She would never see this guy again after today and she vowed she would tell the truth to the next person she met. Her mother was dead.
“Well,” Adrienne said. “This is the most delicious breakfast I’ve ever had in my life.”
“I’ll tell Fee,” he said. “She likes to feed people.”
Adrienne ate every bite of her eggs and mopped up the tomato juices with her bread crust and drained her juice glass, thinking to herself-Manners, manners! Turn the fork upside down on the plate when you’re finished, very European. If nothing else, this would make a great e-mail to her father. Her first morning on Nantucket she ends up eating a breakfast of champions in a restaurant that wasn’t even open.
She collapsed in her chair, drunk with food, in love with this restaurant. If she ever caught up enough to pay off her credit cards and refund her father with interest, she’d come here for dinner and order the foie gras. “Why is it your last season?” she asked.
“Ahhh,” Thatcher said. He pushed away his plate-half his omelet remained and Adrienne stared at it, wondering how audacious it would be to ask if she might finish it. Thatcher propped his elbows on the table and tented his fingers. Even his fingers, Adrienne noticed, were freckled. “The time has come.”
The time has come? That was a noncommittal answer, an art form Adrienne wished she could perfect. So she, too, had asked a tricky question. In the interest of changing the subject, Adrienne offered up something else.
“I just got here last night.”
“You’ve never been to the island before?”
“Never.”
“You came straight from Aspen?”
“I did.”
“I’m intrigued by the Little Nell. They say it’s the best.”
“One of. Relais and Chateaux and all that. They gave me housing.”
“In the hotel?”
“Yes.”
“That must have been sweet.”
“It was okay,” Adrienne said. She and Doug had lived in a studio apartment with his retriever, Jax, even though pets weren’t allowed. No pets, no drugs, no stealing from the rooms!
“Did you go out at night?” Thatcher asked.
“Sometimes.”
“My bartender here, Duncan, works at the Board Room in Aspen all winter. You ever go there?”
“Sometimes.”
“So you know Duncan?”
Adrienne tried not to smile. She knew Duncan. Every single woman between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-nine who had been in Aspen for more than five minutes knew Duncan from the Board Room. There had actually been a picture of him in Aspen magazine making an espresso martini. Kyra had been dying to sleep with him, and so she dragged Adrienne to the Board Room during the week when she guessed the bar would be less crowded-but it was three deep from après ski until close. It drove Doug crazy. He not only disliked gourmet, he disliked popular. Still, Adrienne and Kyra went so often that Duncan began to remember their drinks-a cosmo for Kyra and a glass of champagne for Adrienne. He knew everyone’s drinks.
“He works here?”
“He’s the best bartender on the island,” Thatcher said. “Maybe in the whole country. All the men want to get him for golf and all the women want to get him into bed.”
“That sounds right,” said Adrienne.
“Where else have you worked?” Thatcher asked.
“All over,” she said. “The Princeville in Kauai, the Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. The Chatham Bars Inn. And I spent a year in Thailand.”
“Thailand?”
“Koh Samui,” she said, thinking of Kip Turnbull, another one of her poor companionship choices. “Chaweng Beach. Have you ever been there?”
“I haven’t been anywhere,” he said. “But that will change. As soon as we close this place, I’m taking Fee to the Galápagos. She wants to see the funny birds.”
“Is she your wife?”
Thatcher drained his juice glass then spun it absentmindedly on the table. Maybe he hadn’t heard her. Maybe it was another trick question. Or maybe it was like when her father’s patients asked Adrienne if Mavis, the hygienist, was her mother. Not worth answering. Adrienne noticed Thatcher wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
“So you came here for a job,” he said. “But you have no restaurant experience. None? Not even Pizza Hut?”
“Not even Pizza Hut,” she said. She envisioned herself with a tray piled high with dishes and food, glasses and drinks. She would drop it. “I don’t know what I was thinking.” She had been thinking of money, of Rule One: Become self-sufficient. But she didn’t belong here; she belonged down the street, at the hotel. The hotel front desk was the right place for Adrienne. The pay wasn’t great, but housing was almost always included. It wasn’t loud or messy or hot. And the transience of a hotel suited her. All through high school she had worked as a receptionist in her father’s dental offices (three offices in ten years and now he was somewhere new again-the eastern shore of Maryland). She had attended two high schools and three colleges. Since her mother died, Adrienne’s life had been like a hotel. She checked in, she stayed for a while, she checked out. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. This place is lovely and the food is amazing. I’ll come back for dinner once I have some…”
“Money?” Thatcher said.
“Friends,” she said.
Thatcher poked the uneaten portion of his omelet with his fork. “We open next week,” he said. “We’ll be booked solid for two seatings every night in July and August. Maybe, maybe, on a Monday night in June you can get a table without a reservation. By eleven o’clock every night the bar is full and I have to put someone at the door. I have to hire a bouncer, here, at a high-end bistro because there is always a line out into the parking lot. People get in fistfights over cutting in line, like they’re in fifth grade. I try to tell the people, ‘It’s just a cocktail.’ Ditto for dinner reservations. ‘It’s just a dinner. Just one night in the landscape of your whole life.’ But what I have grown to realize is that it’s more than just a cocktail and more than just dinner. They want to be a part of the scene. And how can I deny them that? This place…” He swept his arm in a circle. “Has magic.”