Читать книгу Writers & Lovers - Lily King - Страница 7

I have a pact with myself not to think about money in the morning. I’m like a teenager trying not to think about sex. But I’m also trying not to think about sex. Or Luke. Or death. Which means not thinking about my mother, who died on vacation last winter. There are so many things I can’t think about in order to write in the morning.

Adam, my landlord, watches me walk his dog. He leans against his Benz in a suit and sparkling shoes as I come back up the driveway. He’s needy in the morning. Everyone is, I suppose. He enjoys his contrast to me in my sweats and untamed hair.

When the dog and I are closer he says, ‘You’re up early.’

I’m always up early. ‘So are you.’

‘Meeting with the judge at the courthouse at seven sharp.’

Admire me. Admire me. Admire judge and courthouse and seven sharp.

‘Somebody’s gotta do it.’ I don’t like myself around Adam. I don’t think he wants me to. I let the dog yank me a few steps past him toward a squirrel squeezing through some slats at the side of his big house.

‘So,’ he says, unwilling to let me get too far away. ‘How’s the novel?’ He says it like I made the word up myself. He’s still leaning against his car and turning only his head in my direction, as if he likes his pose too much to undo it.

‘It’s all right.’ The bees in my chest stir. A few creep down the inside of my arm. One conversation can destroy my whole morning. ‘I’ve got to get back to it. Short day. Working a double.’

I pull the dog up Adam’s back porch, unhook the leash, nudge him through the door, and drop quickly back down the steps.

‘How many pages you got now?’

‘Couple of hundred, maybe.’ I don’t stop moving. I’m halfway to my room at the side of his garage.

‘You know,’ he says, pushing himself off his car, waiting for my full attention. ‘I just find it extraordinary that you think you have something to say.’

I sit at my desk and stare at the sentences I wrote before walking the dog. I don’t remember them. I don’t remember putting them down. I’m so tired. I look at the green digits on the clock radio. Less than three hours before I have to dress for my lunch shift.

Adam went to college with my older brother, Caleb—in fact, I think Caleb was a little in love with him back then—and for this he gives me a break in the rent. He shaves off a bit more for walking his dog in the morning. The room used to be a potting shed and still has a loam and rotting leaves smell. There’s just enough space for a twin mattress, desk and chair, and hot plate, and toaster oven in the bathroom. I set the kettle back on the burner for another cup of black tea.

I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.

At nine thirty I get up from the chair and scrub at the sirloin and blackberry stains on my white pleated shirt, iron it dry on the desk, slip it on a hanger, and thread the hook of the hanger through the loop at the top of my backpack. I put on my black work pants and a T-shirt, pull my hair into a ponytail, and slide on the backpack.

I wheel my bike out of the garage backward. It barely fits because of all the crap Adam has in here: old strollers, high chairs, bouncy seats, mattresses, bureaus, skis, skateboards, beach chairs, tiki torches, foosball. His ex-wife’s red minivan takes up the rest of the space. She left it behind along with everything else except the kids when she moved to Hawaii last year.

‘A good car go to waste like that,’ the cleaning lady said one day when she was looking for a hose. Her name is Oli, she’s from Trinidad, and she saves things like the plastic scoops from laundry detergent boxes to send back home. That garage makes Oli crazy.

I ride down Carlton Street, run the red at Beacon, and head up to Comm. Ave. Traffic thunders past. I slide forward, off the bike seat, and wait with a growing pileup of students for the light to change. A few of them admire my ride. It’s an old banana bike I found at a dump in Rhode Island in May. Luke and I fixed it up, put on a new greased-up chain, tightened the brake cables, and shimmied the rusty seat shaft until it slid up to my height. The gearshift is built into the cross bar, which makes it feel more powerful than it is, as if there’s a secret engine somewhere. I like the whole motorcycle feel of it, with the raised vertical handlebars and the long, quilted seat and the tall bar in back I lean against while coasting. I didn’t have a banana bike as a kid, but my best friend did and we used to swap bikes for days at a time. These BU students, they’re too young to have ridden a banana bike. It’s strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore. I’m thirty-one now, and my mother is dead.

The light changes, and I get back on the seat, cross the six lanes of Comm. Ave. and pump up and over the BU Bridge to the Cambridge side of the Charles River. Sometimes I don’t make it to the bridge before cracking. Sometimes it starts on the bridge. But today I’m okay. Today I’m holding it together. I glide down onto the sidewalk on the water side of Memorial Drive. It’s high summer, and the river seems tired. Along its banks a frothy white scum pushes against the reeds. It looks like the white gunk that collected in the corners of Paco’s mother’s mouth by the end of a long day of her incessant complaining in the kitchen. At least I don’t live there anymore. Even Adam’s potting shed is better than that apartment outside Barcelona. I cross at River Street and Western Ave. and veer off the concrete onto the dirt path that runs close to the river’s edge. I’m all right. I’m still all right, until I see the geese.

They’re in their spot near the base of the footbridge, twenty maybe thirty of them, fussing about, torquing their necks and thrusting their beaks into their own feathers or the feathers of others or at the few remaining tufts of grass in the dirt. Their sounds grow louder as I get closer, grunts and mutterings and indignant squawks. They’re used to interruptions on their path and move as little as possible to get out of my way, some pretending to nip at my ankles as I pedal through, a few letting their butt feathers swish through my spokes. Only the hysterical ones bolt for the water, shrieking as if under attack.

I love these geese. They make my chest tight and full and help me believe that things will be all right again, that I will pass through this time as I have passed through other times, that the vast and threatening blank ahead of me is a mere specter, that life is lighter and more playful than I’m giving it credit for. But right on the heels of that feeling, that suspicion that all is not yet lost, comes the urge to tell my mother, tell her that I am okay today, that I have felt something close to happiness, that I might still be capable of feeling happy. She will want to know that. But I can’t tell her. That’s the wall I always slam into on a good morning like this. My mother will be worrying about me, and I can’t tell her that I’m okay.

The geese don’t care that I’m crying again. They’re used to it. They chortle and squall and cover up the sounds I make. A runner approaches and veers up off the path, sensing I don’t see her. The geese thin out by the big boathouse. At the Larz Anderson Bridge, I turn right, up JFK toward Harvard Square.

It’s a purging of sorts, that ride, and usually lasts me a few hours.

Iris is on the third floor of a building owned by a Harvard social club, which began renting out the space a decade ago to pay off nearly a hundred thousand dollars in back taxes. There aren’t many students around in the summer, and they have a separate entrance on the other side of the big brick mansion, but I hear a few of them rehearsing sometimes. They have their own theater where they put on plays in which men dress up as women and their own a cappella group that flashes in and out of the building wearing tuxes day and night.

I lock my bike to the metal post of a parking sign and climb the granite steps and open the big door. Tony, one of the headwaiters, is already halfway up the first flight, his dry cleaning draped over his arm. He gets all the good shifts, so he can afford to have his uniform professionally cleaned. It’s a grand staircase, covered with a greasy beer-stained carpet that must have once been a plush crimson. I let Tony reach the top and circle around to the next set of stairs before I start up. I pass the portraits of the presidents who have been members of the club: Adams, Adams, Roosevelt, Roosevelt, and Kennedy. The second flight is narrower. Tony is moving slowly, still only halfway up. I slow even more. The light from the top of the stairs disappears. Gory is coming down.

‘Tony, my man,’ he shouts. ‘How’s it hanging?’

‘Long, loose, and full of juice.’

Gory cackles. The staircase shakes as he comes toward me.

‘You’re late, girl.’

I’m not. It’s what he says to women instead of a greeting. I don’t think he knows my name.

I feel the stair I’m on sink when he passes me.

‘Busy night ahead. One eighty-eight on the books,’ he says over his shoulder. Does he think it’s the afternoon already? ‘And the on-call just called in sick.’

The on-call is Harry, my only friend at Iris. He isn’t sick, though. He’s on his way to Provincetown with the new busboy.

‘Strap on your long iron,’ he says.

‘Never leave home without it,’ I say.

Somehow in my interview he wheedled the golf stuff out of me. He plays croquet, it turned out. Not at garden parties but professionally, competitively. He’s supposedly one of the best croquet players in the country. He opened Iris after a big win.

Below me, he sniffs loudly three times, hacks it up, swallows, gasps, and goes out into the street with all the cash from last night in a pouch with CAMBRIDGE SAVINGS BANK in big letters. Someone has pressed a Post-it to his back that says: ‘Mug Me.’

‘Casey fucking Kasem,’ Dana says when I get to the top of the stairs. ‘No one’s fired you yet?’ She’s bent over Fabiana’s hostess podium, making the seating chart. It’s barely legible and guaranteed to be unfair.

I go down the hall to the bathroom and change into my white shirt and wrangle my hair into the required high tight bun. It makes my head hurt. When I come back, Dana and Tony are moving the tables around, putting the large parties in their sections, making sure everything is to their advantage, the big tables, the regulars, the restaurant’s investors who don’t pay but tip astronomically. I don’t know if they’re friends outside of the building, but they work every shift together like a pair of evil skaters, setting each other up for another dastardly deed, then preening around the room when it comes off. They definitely aren’t lovers. Dana doesn’t like to be touched—she practically broke the new busboy’s arm when she said she had a crick and he reached up to knead her neck with his thumb—and Tony never stops talking about his girlfriend, though he paws at all the male waiters through every shift. They have Gory and Marcus, the manager, completely snowed or at least compromised. Harry and I suspect it’s the drugs that come through Tony’s brother, a dealer who is in and out of jail and who Tony talks about only when he’s wasted, demanding vows of silence as if he’s never told you before. We call Dana and Tony the Twisted Sister and try to stay out of their path.

‘You’ve just taken two tables out of my section,’ Yasmin says.

‘We have two eight-tops,’ Tony says.

‘Well use your own bloody tables. These are mine, you fucks.’ Yasmin was born in Eritrea and raised in Delaware, but she’s read a lot of Martin Amis and Roddy Doyle. Unfortunately she doesn’t stand a chance against the Twisted Sister.

Before I can band with Yasmin, Dana points a finger at me. ‘Go get the flowers, Casey Kasem.’

She and Tony are the headwaiters. You have to do what they say.

Lunch is amateur hour. Lunch is for the new hires and the old workhorses working doubles, working as many hours as management will give them. I’ve waited tables since I was eighteen, so I went from new server to workhorse in six weeks. The money at lunch is crap compared to dinner unless you get a group of lawyers or biotech goons celebrating something with rounds of martinis that loosen the bills from their wallets. The dining room is filled with sunlight, which feels unnatural and changes all the colors. I prefer dusk and the windows slowly blackening, the soft orange light from the gilt sconces that masks the grease stains on the tablecloths and the calcium spots we might have missed on the wineglasses. At lunch we squint in the blue daylight. Customers ask for coffee as soon as they sit down. You can actually hear the music Mia, the lunch bartender, is playing. It’s usually Dave Matthews. Mia is obsessed with Dave Matthews. Gory is often sober and Marcus is mellow, doing whatever he does in his office and leaving us alone. Everything at lunch is backward.

But it’s fast. I get slammed with three deuces and a five-top before the clock in Harvard Yard strikes noon. There isn’t time for thought. You are like a tennis ball knocked from the front of the house to the back over and over until your tables are gone and it’s over and you’re sitting at a calculator adding up your credit card gratuities and tipping out the bartender and the bussers. The door is locked again, Mia is blasting ‘Crash Into Me,’ and after all the tables are broken down, glasses polished, and silverware rolled for tomorrow’s lunch, you have an hour in the Square before you clock back in for dinner.

I go to my bank next to the Coop. There’s a line. Only one teller. LINCOLN LUGG, the brass plate reads. My stepbrothers used to call poop Lincoln Logs. The youngest one used to pull me into the bathroom to show me how long he could make them. Sometimes we all went in there to look. If I ever see a therapist to talk about my childhood and the therapist asks me to remember a happy moment with my father and Ann, I’ll talk about the time we all gathered round to gaze at one of Charlie’s abnormally large Lincoln Logs.

Lincoln Lugg doesn’t like my expression of amusement when I step up to the counter. Some people are like that. They think anyone’s amusement must be at their expense.

I put my wad of cash in front of him. He doesn’t like that, either. You’d think tellers could be happy for you, especially after you’d graduated to dinner shifts and doubles and had $661 to put in your account.

‘You can use the ATM for deposits, you know,’ he says, picking up the money by the tips of his fingers. He doesn’t enjoy touching money? Who doesn’t enjoy touching money?

‘I know, but it’s cash and I just—’

‘No one is going to steal the cash once it’s inside the machine.’

‘I just want to make sure it goes into my account and not someone else’s.’

‘We have a strictly regulated systemized protocol. And it’s all recorded on videotape. This, what you are doing right here, is much less secure.’

‘I’m just happy to be depositing this money. Please don’t rain on my picnic. This money is not even going to be able to take a short nap before it is sucked out by federal loan sharks, so just let me enjoy it, okay?’

Lincoln Lugg is counting my money with his lips and does not respond.

I’m in debt. I’m in so much debt that even if Marcus gave me every lunch and dinner shift he had, I could not get out from under it. My loans for college and grad school all went into default when I was in Spain, and when I came back I learned that the penalties, fees, and collection costs had nearly doubled the original amount I owed. All I can do now is manage it, pay the minimums until—and this is the thing—until what? Until when? There’s no answer. That’s part of my looming blank specter.

After my encounter with Lincoln Lugg, I weep on a bench outside the Unitarian church. I do it somewhat discreetly, without noise, but I can no longer stop tears from drizzling down my face when the mood strikes.

I walk to Salvatore’s Foreign Books on Mount Auburn Street. I worked there six years ago, in 1991. After Paris and before Pennsylvania and Albuquerque and Oregon and Spain and Rhode Island. Before Luke. Before my mother went to Chile with four friends and was the one who didn’t come back.

The store seems different. Cleaner. The stacks have been rearranged and they’ve put the register where Ancient Languages used to be, but it’s the same in back where Maria and I used to hang out. I was hired as Maria’s assistant in French literature. I’d just moved back from France that fall and had this idea that even though Maria was American we’d be speaking French the whole time, speaking about Proust and Céline and Duras, who was so popular then, but instead we spoke in English, mostly about sex, which I suppose was French in its way. All I remembered now from eight months of conversation with her is a dream she had about Kitty, her cat, going down on her. Her rough tongue felt so good, she’d said, but the cat kept getting distracted. She’d lick a bit then move on to her paw, and Maria woke herself up screaming, ‘Focus, Kitty, focus!’

But Maria isn’t in back. None of them are, not even Manfred the cynical East German who went into a rage when people asked for Günter Grass, because Günter Grass had been in strong opposition to reunification. We’ve all been replaced by children: a boy in a baseball cap and a girl with hair to her thighs. Because it’s Friday at three, they’re drinking beers, Heinekens, just like we used to do.

Gabriel comes out from storage with another round. He looks the same: silver curls, torso too long for his legs. I had a crush on him. He was so smart, loved his books, dealt with all the foreign publishers on the phone in their own language. He had a dark, dry humor. He’s handing out the bottles. He says something under his breath, and they all laugh. The girl with the hair is looking at him the way I used to.

I wasn’t broke when I worked at Salvatore’s. Or at least I didn’t think I was. My debts were much smaller and Sallie Mae and EdFund and Collection Technology and Citibank and Chase weren’t hassling me yet. I sublet a room in a house on Chauncy Street with friends, eighty dollars a month. We were all trying to be writers, with jobs that got us by. Nia and Abby were working on novels, I was writing stories, and Russell was a poet. Of all of us, I would have bet that Russell would stick with it the longest. Rigid and disciplined, he got up at four thirty every morning, wrote until seven, and ran five miles before he went to work at Widener Library. But he was the first to surrender and go to law school. He’s a tax attorney in Tampa now. Abby was next. Her aunt convinced her to take a realtor’s exam, just on a lark. Later she tried to tell me she was still using her imagination when she walked through the houses and invented a new life for her clients. I saw her last month outside an enormous house with white columns in Brookline. She was leaning into the driver’s window of a black SUV in the driveway and nodding profusely. Nia met a Milton scholar with excellent posture and a trust fund, who handed her novel back after reading fifteen pages, saying first-person female narratives grated on him. She chucked it in the dumpster, married him, and moved to Houston when he got a job at Rice.

I didn’t get it. I didn’t get any of them then. One by one they gave up, moved out, and got replaced by engineers from MIT. A guy with a ponytail and a Spanish accent came into Salvatore’s looking for Barthes’s Sur Racine. We spoke in French. He said he hated English. His French was better than mine—his father was from Algiers. He made me a Catalan fish stew in his room in Central Square. When he kissed me he smelled like Europe. His fellowship ended, and he went home to Barcelona. I went to an MFA program in Pennsylvania, and we wrote each other love letters until I started dating the funny guy in workshop who wrote gloomy two-page stories set in New Hampshire mill towns. After we broke up, I moved to Albuquerque for a while, then ended up in Bend, Oregon, with Caleb and his boyfriend, Phil. A letter from Paco found me there, and we resumed our correspondence. Enclosed in his fifth letter to me was a one-way ticket to Barcelona.

I poke around in the Ancient Greek section. That’s the next language I want to learn. Around the corner, in Italian, the only other customer sits cross-legged on the floor with a small boy, reading him Cuore. Her voice is low and beautiful. I started speaking a little Italian in Barcelona with my friend Giulia. I come to the long wall of French literature, divided by publishers: rows of red-on-ivory Gallimards, blue-on-white Éditions de Minuit, dime-store-like Livres de Poche, and then the extravagant Pléiades, set apart in their own glass case, leather bound with gold print and thin gold stripes: Balzac and Montaigne and Valéry, their spines glistening like jewels.

I shelved copies of all these books, cut open the boxes, stacked them on the metal storage racks in back, and brought them out a few at a time, usually arguing with Maria all the while, about À la recherche, which I adored and she said was as boring as Middlemarch. She had to give herself eighteen hand jobs, she told me, to get through Middlemarch the summer she was seventeen. That book made my nethersphere sore, she said.

I see a copy of Sur Racine, which we didn’t have the day Paco came looking for it. I had to special order it for him. I touch the bit of glue at the top of the spine. I don’t ever cry about Paco. Those two years with him rest lightly on me. We went from French to a sort of hybrid of the Catalan and Castilian that he taught me, and I wonder if that’s part of the reason I don’t miss him, that everything we ever said to each other was in languages I’m starting to forget. Maybe the thrill of the relationship was the languages, that everything was heightened for me because of it, more of a challenge, as I tried to maintain his belief in my facility with languages, my ability to absorb, mimic, morph. It was a trick no one expected of an American, the combination of a good ear, a good memory, and an understanding of the rules of grammar, so that I appeared more of a prodigy than I was. Every conversation was a chance to excel, to frolic, to amuse myself and to surprise him. And yet now I can’t remember what we said to each other. Conversations in foreign languages don’t linger in my head like they do in English. They don’t last. They remind me of the invisible-ink pen my mother sent me for Christmas when I was fifteen and she had gone, an irony that escaped her but not me.

I slip out before Gabriel recognizes me or one of his employees comes out from behind the reference desk to assault me with help.

I didn’t mean to move back to Massachusetts. I just had no other plan. I don’t like being reminded of those days on Chauncy, writing stories in my dormer window on the third floor, drinking Turkish coffee at Algiers, dancing at the Plough and Stars. Life was light and cheap, and if it wasn’t cheap I used a credit card. My loans got sold and sold again, and I paid the minimums and didn’t think about the ballooning balance. My mother had moved back to Phoenix by then, and she paid for my flights to see her twice a year. The rest of the time we talked on the phone, talked for hours sometimes. We’d pee and paint our nails and make food and brush our teeth. I always knew where she was in her little house by the noises in the background, the scrape of a hanger or the chime of a glass being put in the dishwasher. I’d tell her about people at the bookstore, and she’d tell me about people at her office in the state house in Phoenix—she was working for the governor then. I’d get her to retell some of her stories from Santiago de Cuba, where she grew up with her American-born, expat parents. Her father was a doctor, and her mother sang show tunes at a nightclub. Every now and then she’d ask if I had done my laundry or changed my sheets and I’d tell her to stop being maternal, it wasn’t in her nature, and we’d laugh because it was true and I had forgiven her for that. I look back on those days and it feels gluttonous, all that time and love and life ahead, no bees in my body and my mother on the other end of the line.

Up on the street the heat pools just above the hoods of the parked cars, making the brick buildings squiggly. The sidewalks are packed now, packed with out-of-towners creeping along with their crêpes and iced lattes, their children sucking down milkshakes and Mountain Dews. I walk in the street to avoid them and cross over to Dunster and back up to Iris.

I go up the stairs, past the presidents, directly to the bathroom even though I’m already wearing my uniform. It’s empty. I catch myself in the mirror over the sink. It’s tilted away from the wall for people in wheelchairs so that I’m at a slightly unfamiliar angle to myself. I look beat up, like someone who has gotten ill and aged a decade in a few months. I look into my eyes, but they aren’t really mine, not the eyes I used to have. They’re the eyes of someone very tired and very sad, and once I see them I feel even sadder and then I see that sadness, that compassion, for the sadness in my eyes, and I see the water rising in them. I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person. And then I feel sad for that person who has so much compassion because she’s clearly been through the same thing, too. And the cycle keeps repeating. It’s like when you go into a dressing room with a three-paneled mirror and you line them up just right to see the long narrowing hallway of yourselves diminishing into infinity. It feels like that, like I’m sad for an infinite number of my selves.

I splash my face and pat it down with paper towels from the dispenser in case someone comes in, but as soon as I get it dry my face crumples up again. I put my hair back into the tight bun and leave the bathroom.

I’m late by the time I enter the dining room. The Twisted Sister is back in action.

Dana glares at me. ‘Deck. Candles.’

The deck, past the bar and through the French doors, is humid and smells of roses and lilies and the peppery nasturtiums the chefs use to garnish the plates. All the flowerpots are dripping dirty water and the floorboards around the edges are soaked. It smells like my mother’s garden on a rainy summer morning. Helene, the pastry chef, must have just watered. This rooftop oasis is her creation.

Mary Hand is in the far corner with a tray of tea lights, a water pitcher, and a trash can, knifing out the old wax from the night before.

‘The three and fourpence,’ Mary Hand says. She has her own vernacular. She’s been waiting tables at Iris longer than anyone else.

I sit down beside her. I pick up the rag on the tray and wipe out the insides of the glass holders she has voided, pour a few drops of water in each, and drop in a fresh tea light.

It’s hard to know how old Mary Hand is. She’s older than I am but by three years or twenty? She has straight brown hair without a fleck of gray, which she pulls back with a beige elastic, a long face, and a spindly neck. All of her is long and lean, more colt than workhorse. She’s the best waitress I’ve ever worked with, flat calm but fast and efficient. She knows your tables as well as she knows her own. She saves you when you forget to fire the entrées for the six-top or you leave your wine opener at home. At the height of the night, when everyone’s losing their shit, when your plates have been left so long under the heat lamp they’ve gotten too hot to carry even with a cloth and the sous chefs are slandering you and the customers are waiting for their apps, their checks, their water refills, their extra jus, Mary Hand will be speaking in a slow drawl. ‘Simple as toast and jam,’ she might say, loading up every one of your entrées along her long arms without flinching.

‘C’mon, little homunculus,’ Mary Hand coos at a burned-down tea light. No one ever calls her just Mary. She twists the knife and it comes out with a satisfying pop and a spray of wax water that hits us both, and we laugh.

The deck is pleasant like this, empty of customers, the sun behind the tall maples dappling the tables with light but not much heat, raised up high above the hot, loud chaos of Mass. Ave., Helene’s plants, hundreds of them, in boxes along the short stone walls and in planters on the ground and hanging from trellises, all flowering, the leaves dark green and healthy. The plants all seem satisfied, thriving, and it makes you feel that way, too, or at least that thriving is a possibility.

My mother had a green thumb. I want to tell Mary Hand this, but I haven’t mentioned my mother at the restaurant yet. I don’t want to be the girl whose mother just died. It’s bad enough that I’m the girl who’s just been dumped on her ass. I made the mistake of telling Dana about Luke during my first training shift.

‘Is it like this every year, so fecund?’

‘Mmmm hmmm,’ Mary Hand says. I can tell she likes the word ‘fecund.’ I knew she would. ‘She has a gift.’ She pronounces it gyift, very slowly. She means Helene. ‘A gyift for flora.’

‘How many years have you been here?’

‘Since about the Truman administration.’

She’s squirrely about the details of her life. No one knows where she lives or with whom. It’s just a question of how many cats, Harry says. But I’m not sure. The story is that she used to go out with David Byrne. Some say it was in high school in Baltimore; some said it was at RISD. Everyone says he broke her heart, that she never recovered. If the Talking Heads ever come on when the music is cranked before or after service, whoever’s closest to the stereo at the bar will switch stations fast.

‘How’d you get this job?’ she says. ‘You’re not one of Marcus’s usual hires.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re more like us, the old guard.’ She means people hired by the previous house manager. ‘Cerebral.’

‘I’m not sure about that.’

‘Well, you know what cerebral means, so case in point.’

Tony comes out on the deck to give us the breakdown. Only one large table out here, a party of ten for an anniversary. Mary Hand and I push two tables together, cover it in several cloths, lining up the points of the corners of the top layer with the straight hem of the bottom. We do the same to the rest of the smaller tables, then set them, shining the silver and polishing the glasses with small cloths as we go. We put a candle on each table and get the flowers I arranged for lunch out of the walk-in. The chef calls us all to the wait station where he tells us the specials, explaining each preparation and ingredient. The chefs I’ve worked with before were high strung and volatile, but Thomas is calm and kind. He never lets things in his kitchen get out of hand. He doesn’t have a temper or a vile mouth. He doesn’t hate women, not even waitresses. If I make a mistake, even on a busy night, he just nods and takes the plate and slides back what I need. He’s good, too. We’re always trying to get our hands on an extra carpaccio or seared scallops or Bolognese. The high shelves in the wait station are full of finagled food, pushed to the back where Marcus can’t see and eaten surreptitiously throughout the night. I have to eat at the restaurant—I can’t afford more than cereal or noodles at the grocery store—but even if I weren’t broke I would sneak that food.

Thirty minutes later every seat in my section is filled. Mary Hand and I fall into a groove. The French doors to the deck have to be kept closed because the AC is on in the dining room, and when our meals are up and loaded we hold the door for each other. She brings my drinks to one of my fours, and I deliver salmons to her deuce when she’s opening bottles of champagne for the rowdy ten.

I like going from the hot kitchen to the cool dining room to the humid deck. I like that Craig is working the bar because no matter how many orders he has, he always makes it to your tables to talk about the wines. And I like the mindless distractions, the way there is no room to remember anything about your life except that the osso bucco goes to the man in the bow tie and the lavender flan to the birthday girl in pink and the side cars to the student couple with the fake IDs. I like memorizing the orders—aren’t you going to write it down, the older men will say—punching them in on the computer in the wait station, collecting my food in the window, stabbing the dupes, serving on the left, clearing from the right. Dana and Tony are too busy with their big tables to insult anyone and after I bring out Dana’s salads while she’s taking an order, she garnishes my vongoles.

I have a table from Ecuador and speak to them in Spanish. They hear my accent and make me say a few sentences in Catalan. The feel of that language in my mouth brings back Paco, the good parts, the way his whole face crumpled when he laughed and how he let me fall asleep on his back. I tell them one of our dishwashers is from Guayaquil, and they want to meet him. I get Alejandro, and he ends up sitting and smoking with them, talking about politics and grinning madly, and I get a glimpse of who he is when he isn’t engulfed in spray and steam and food waste. But things pile up in the kitchen and eventually Marcus storms out to the deck and sends him back to his station.

The only conflict comes at the second seating when Fabiana puts a deuce that was supposed to be Dana’s in my section.

‘She just got the five,’ Dana says. ‘What the fuck?’

Fabiana comes all the way around the wait station, a place she avoids for its chaos and potential for stains. She wears silk wrap dresses and is the only woman allowed to keep her hair down. She is clean and showered and never smells of salad dressing.

‘They asked for her, Dana. You’re getting the seven at eight thirty.’

‘The fucking teachers from Wellesley? Oh thanks. I’ll probably get a fiver off their ice water and the side salad they split three ways.’

I lean past the tall shelving to peer through the doors to the deck. A tall woman and a balding man. ‘You can have them. I don’t even know who they are.’

Marcus is coming toward us from the bar.

‘Why are you still here?’ Fabiana snaps at me for his benefit. ‘Get out there, Casey.’

I think they’ve started sleeping together.

I go out to the deck.

‘Casey!’ They both get up and give me tight hugs. ‘You don’t recognize us,’ the woman says. The man looks on benevolently, red cheeked and mellow, a few cocktails already in him. She’s large, boobs angled like the prow of a boat, a short gold chain with a turquoise stone around her neck. It looks like something my mother would wear.

‘I’m sorry.’

The table behind them needs their check.

‘We used to work in Doug’s office. With your mom.’

It was her first job after she left my father, in a congressman’s office. The Doyles. That’s who they were. Liz and Pat. They hadn’t been married then.

‘She fixed us up, you know. She told Pat that I wanted him to ask me out. And she told me he was going to, even though he’d never said such a thing. The cheek! And here we are.’ She takes my hand. ‘We’re so sorry, Casey. We were devastated to hear. Just devastated. We were in Vero, or we would have been at the service.’

I nod. If I’d had some warning I might be able to handle it better, but this is a surprise attack. I nod again.

‘We wanted to write you, but we didn’t know where on the globe you were at that point. And then we ran into Ezra, who’d heard you were back here and at Iris!’ She puts a warm hand on my arm. ‘I’ve upset you.’

I shake my head, but my face betrays me and my eyebrows go all funny.

‘She gave me this necklace.’

Of course she did.

‘Excuse me,’ the man behind them says, waving his credit card.

I nod to him and to everyone who stops me on my way back to the wait station. I unroll a place setting from the lunch bin and put my face in the napkin as I print out the check.

‘Get a grip, will you,’ Dana says, but she puts the slip on a tray with chocolates and brings it out to my table for me.

I push through the swinging door into the kitchen. The cooks are busy, their backs to me and to the food that’s waiting for me under the heat lamp. I go into the walk-in. I stand in the dry cold, looking at the dairy shelves in back, the bricks of butter wrapped in wax paper and cartons of heavy cream. Cases of eggs. I breathe. I look down at my hand. Caleb let me have her ring. She wore it my whole life, a sapphire and two small diamonds. The sky and the stars we called it when I was little. Her friend Janet had thought to take it off her finger afterward. My hand looks like hers when I wear it. I can do this, I say to the glinting blue-black eye. And I go out to take the order of Liz and Pat Doyle.

When I bring their pinot grigios and their apps they’re still somber with me, but by the time their swordfish and risotto comes out Pat is talking animatedly, using words I don’t understand like equities and the Shiller PE, and by coffee they’re chuckling about someone named Marvin doing the hustle at their daughter’s wedding and have nearly forgotten they know me at all. They leave me their business cards, though, on the tray with their merchant receipt and cash tip. Sixteen percent. They both own their own businesses. Neither of them works in politics anymore.

Table by table, people vanish, leaving behind their soiled napkins and lipstick markings. The tablecloths are disheveled and crusted, wine bottles turned upside down in their watery holders, a sea of glasses and coffee cups and smeared dessert plates. Everything left for someone else to clean up. We work slowly now, getting the room and the deck back in order. Only Yasmin and Omar, who have dates waiting for them at the bar, are still moving quickly.

The last thing is drying glasses and rolling more silverware for lunch. Alejandro brings out the steaming green racks of glasses. At first they’re too hot to touch without a cloth. Omar and I do the roll-ups: napkin folded into a triangle, spoon on top of fork on top of knife laid alongside the long edge, two side points folded in then everything rolled to the pointed tip. Craig is laughing with Omar’s skinny date at the bar, so he’s rolling them faster and faster. We have to have a hundred of them in the bin before we can leave.

By the time I get on my bike, it’s nearly one in the morning. My body is depleted. The three miles to my potting shed feels far away.

The dark, the heat, the few people paired up on the sidewalks. The river and the moon’s quivering reflection. You taste like the moon, Luke said out in that field in the Berkshires. Fucking poet. On the path a few people are holding hands, drinking from bottles, lying in the grass because they can’t see all the green goose poop. He took me unawares. I didn’t have time to defend myself.

In the morning I ache for my mother. But late at night it is Luke I mourn for.

The BU Bridge is empty, silent. I arc up and over the water. There’s a tightness, a rasp in my breathing, but I do not cry. I sing ‘Psycho Killer’ in honor of Mary Hand. I reach Adam’s driveway, and I have not wept. This is a first. I roll my bike into the garage. This is a small victory.

Two past-due notices and a wedding invitation have been slipped under my door. A message is flashing on my machine. My blood leaps. Old reflex. It’s not him. It’s not him, I tell myself, but my heart slams anyway. I hit Play.

‘Hey.’ Pause. Long breath like a roll of thunder into the receiver.

It’s him.