But then.
Then a night comes when Mario doesn’t text when he gets home from work. Lizbet wakes up at three in the morning to use the bathroom, checks her phone, finds nothing. What? she thinks. She can’t fall back to sleep. The room is too hot; her mind is aswirl. Did something happen? Is Mario okay? Should Lizbet call him? Should she go to his cottage? She somehow knows she should do neither. She wonders then why Mario never asks to spend the night at her cottage. She lies awake until the birds start to sing, thinking that this was why Mario said they should be careful. (What he’d meant, of course, was that she should be careful.)
He was probably tired, she thinks. He forgot to text. So what?
The next day, Monday, Lizbet goes to the cottage for lunch as usual and everything is fine. The Blue Bar is closed on Tuesdays, and Mario asks if Lizbet can take the day or even just the afternoon off so they can spend it together.
It’s exactly what she’s craving, but the hotel has seventeen checkouts and seventeen check-ins, and Yolanda long ago requested every Tuesday off and Lizbet needs to be around to manage Warren, the fitness instructor who fills in, because he can be a little ditzy.
On Tuesday evening, the Blue Bar has a softball game against the Garden Group. After Lizbet finishes work, she drives out the long stretch of Milestone Road to the Tom Nevers Field to catch the last couple of innings. It’s a close game even though the landscapers are young and in shape and play like real athletes. Mario is wearing an old Ramones T-shirt and his White Sox cap and when he gets up to bat with the bases loaded, he winks at Lizbet. She flushes, feeling like she felt when she was sixteen and watching her boyfriend, Danny LaMott, play for the Minnetonka Skippers football team.
Mario strikes out swinging and Lizbet is almost relieved that he didn’t hit a home run and win the game, because she realizes she’s dangerously close to falling in love with him.
Yolanda is up next. As Lizbet is wondering why Yolanda is on the Blue Bar softball team—and then if the hotel should field its own team, and then who would work if they did field a team—Yolanda wallops a pitch over the centerfielder’s head and everyone on base scores. Lizbet is on her feet cheering along with the rest of the crowd when Yolanda crosses the plate, jumps into Mario’s arms, and gives him a kiss on the lips. Suddenly, Lizbet feels not only like an outsider but also really freaking jealous.
From that moment on, Lizbet becomes hyperaware of Mario and Yolanda. Yolanda has always made frequent visits to the Blue Bar kitchen, and Lizbet assumed that Yolanda needed frequent snacks to fuel her exercise. Yolanda often walked past the desk holding an acai bowl or chia pudding, neither of which was on the menu. The Wednesday after the softball game, Yolanda emerges from the Blue Bar holding a tiny pavlova on the flat of her palm like it’s a baby bird. She shows it off to Lizbet and Edie. It’s filled with rose-scented pastry cream and topped with candied rose petals. “Is this not the most exquisite thing you’ve ever seen? Mario made it for me.”
“Did he?” Lizbet says.
Yolanda strolls away, taking a lusty bite of the pavlova; she can eat whatever she wants and still maintain that slender, supple yoga body, which is reason enough to envy her. Zeke joins Lizbet and Edie in watching Yolanda descend the stairs to the wellness center.
“You know why she spends so much time in the kitchen, right?” he says.
“Why?” Lizbet and Edie say together. Lizbet gets the distinct feeling the bubble she has been living in is about to pop.
Zeke arches his eyebrows and takes a breath to say—what? But then a large party enters the lobby and Zeke, Edie, and Lizbet snap into guest-service mode.
A couple of days later, Lizbet is at Mario’s cottage for lunch. It’s too hot to cook, so Mario slices up a ripe, juicy melon and serves it with burrata and some salty prosciutto. They go for a swim and shower together afterward. Lizbet is delirious with happiness, thinking, Yolanda who? Yolanda what? Poor Yolanda has been mistakenly cast as the villainess in Lizbet’s mind. She’s going to let the Yolanda thing go.
While Mario is in his bedroom getting dressed, his cell phone on the kitchen counter, right next to where Lizbet is winding the last strip of prosciutto around the last crescent of pale green melon, dings with a text. The screen says Yolo. The text is printed in the alert: Hey, can you help me with a thing later? Followed by the winking-tongue-out emoji.
Lizbet feels the prosciutto repeat on her. She has to fight the urge to pick up the phone and check the text stream—Mario has no passcode, so she could easily do this, and then at least she’ll know what’s going on rather than stumbling around in a dark uncertainty—but at that moment, Mario calls out, “You getting ready to leave, HB? It’s ten of two.”
Lizbet doesn’t respond. Mario pokes his head out of the bedroom and says, “Everything okay?”
“Yes,” Lizbet says. “You got a text.”
Mario takes his time ambling across the room. He scoops up his phone, checks the text. There’s no change in his expression; he just slips the phone into the pocket of his houndstooth pants and heads for the door. He always walks her out the creaky dock back to her car. Lizbet tries to keep her panic on a very short leash. Hey, can you help me with a thing later? What kind of thing? Lizbet wonders. What kind of help? How much later? What about that emoji? It’s the lewd face, the wink and lolling tongue. It can only mean something naughty. And what’s up with “Yolo”? Has Lizbet ever heard anyone call Yolanda this? No. Lizbet is so consumed with these thoughts that she doesn’t speak, and when Mario squeezes her hand and asks again if everything is okay, she lies and says yes.
The following Tuesday, Lizbet can’t take off because the plumber is coming to fix a leak in the laundry room, and the water throughout the hotel has to be shut off for ninety minutes. Lizbet needs to be there to field the inevitable complaints.
Mario goes to Nobadeer Beach with his staff and when he comes to pick Lizbet up for their dinner date that night—they’re going to the Pearl—he’s not only deeply tan, he’s a little drunk.
Lizbet teases him about it and he says, “I played beer die on the beach with some of the kids from the kitchen. It was a good day. And man, Yolanda can really surf.”
“Oh,” Lizbet says. “Yolanda was there?”
“She was shredding like Alana Blanchard.”
“I don’t know who that is,” Lizbet snaps.
Mario doesn’t notice her tone because they have entered the tranquil garden setting of the Pearl chef’s table. It seats ten but Mario has reserved it for just the two of them, a lavish gesture. Lizbet has sat at this table before with JJ and some of the staff of the Deck and she’s eager to replace those memories. Mario pulls out her chair. He’s here with her, she reminds herself. Not Yolanda. She orders a passion-fruit cosmo.
The magic of the chef’s table is that dishes just appear—lobster rangoons, tuna martinis with wasabi crème fra?che, the sixty-second steak topped with a quail egg, the wok-fried salt-and-pepper lobster. Because Mario is, in this world, Super Mario, each course comes with a pitch-perfect wine pairing. Lizbet drinks a little more robustly than she probably should, but who can blame her? Yolanda made it clear when the hotel opened that she wanted Tuesdays off. Is that merely a coincidence? Yolanda is only twenty-nine years old, nearly ten years younger than Lizbet, nearly twenty years younger than Mario. She’s not only beautiful with a perfect body but she has the kind of luminous personality that draws people in. Why wouldn’t Mario be attracted to Yolanda?