Charlie cast about for a way to change the subject: he asked about the girls, and about Rob. Then he said, “I keep telling Val that she’s going to have to get a cappuccino maker down to Val’s, to keep up with the competition over at The Cup.”
Val made a soft hissing sound and said, “Believe me, that place is no competition to me. And I don’t know of any fisherman who wants his coffee served up with a boatload of foamed milk, a sprinkle of cinnamon on top. No sir. Do you, Charlie?”
“No,” said Charlie. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “No, I don’t guess that I do.”
Val woke up each day even earlier than the fishermen, since she was the one who served most of them their breakfasts. By this time in the evening she always showed her fatigue. All the lobstermen (and two women, though they usually got called lobstermen too, that was the way they wanted it) were too; it was a funny life, up before dawn, in bed not too long after sunset, sometimes before.
But now Val looked more than tired. She looked like her body had been taken apart and then put back together haphazardly, with some of the pieces not tightened all the way. And if Eliza had to put Val’s expression into a single word, she might say that Val looked scared. Val, who wasn’t scared of anything.
She thought of her phone ringing at the club, Russell telling her she’d better come home, the ten seconds when she’d thought her father was gone.
Wait, was that today, the Bloody Marys at the club? It seemed like another world suddenly, to Eliza, like someone else’s life.
3
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Mary
Mary Brown wiped table four with the cloth. The cloth was bamboo and reusable, although she sometimes forgot the reusable part and had had to dig one out of the garbage more than once under the slightly kind, slightly judgmental eyes of Andi and Daphne, the café’s co-owners. Mary thought that it wouldn’t kill them every now and then to wave a hand and say, “Don’t worry, Mary, it’s only a silly cloth!” but they never did; they just let her keep on digging. That was the only part of Mary’s job she didn’t love.
Sometimes when she made mistakes like that she sang a little song to herself: Mary Brown, get out of town, Mary Brown, go upside down. It helped get her mind off the embarrassment. Mary embarrassed extremely easily. That was her cross to bear (an expression she inherited from her mother, as in: Single motherhood, that is my cross to bear).
One of Mary’s other crosses to bear was the fact that her name was the absolute plainest thing anybody could dream of. And yet at the same time so very easy to make fun of. Bloody Mary. Virgin Mary. Mary, Queen of Snots. Trevor Spaulding, awful boy, had come up with that last one in the fifth grade.
Mary’s own mother was named Vivienne, which was, in her own words, a name that turned out to be way too extravagant for the life she’d ended up in. A mother at eighteen, married at nineteen, divorced at twenty. Now she worked in a salon in Ellsworth called A Cut Above where she highlighted hair and waxed eyebrows. Mary’s mother had made lots of mistakes (in general, not with the hair and the eyebrows) and she liked to remind Mary about it. “Don’t screw up like I did, Mary.” “It’s not worth it, Mary.” “Five minutes of pleasure for a lifetime of pain, Mary.”
And then, realizing that she was talking to her own daughter, the result of the five minutes of pleasure, she tried to walk it back. “That’s not what I meant, Mary. I just meant: stay in school.”
No wonder Mary was so easily embarrassed.
“Table three needs a wipe-down!” sang Daphne from the other side of the café. “When you get to it.”
“Of course,” said Mary agreeably. She liked wiping down the tables—she found it very soothing and satisfactory. You could see where the work began and where it ended. Unlike most things.
Daphne and Andi were lesbians, and they were married. To each other. (Mary had to clarify the married part more than once for her mother, who tagged Daphne and Andi’s sexual preference at the end of their name like a suffix, always with Andi’s name first: Andi and Daphne, the Lesbians.)
Mary didn’t care a nickel about what people did together in bed—she was really very open-minded. Not exactly adventurous (her boyfriend, Josh, said) but definitely open-minded. Even so, sometimes she did have to fight back a giggle when Daphne and Andi used the word wife to describe each other, only because of how proudly they said it, how they lifted their chins a fraction of an inch as though saying, Go on, challenge us, we dare you. We have a marriage certificate and we file our tax returns jointly.
Honestly, Mary didn’t really know much about tax returns (she was seventeen), but Daphne and Andi talked about them like they were a very important marker of a real relationship.
“Earth to Mary!” said Andi now. Sometimes Andi snuck up on Mary like a ghost, startling her right out of her thoughts. Mary’s thoughts had a nervy habit of wandering. This had often been a problem at school, except in math. She didn’t even have to pay attention to the teaching in math, not really, she just looked at the work after and it made a sort of automatic sense; the numbers floated right where they were supposed to be. Her spelling, on the other hand, was atrocious.
Last year’s math teacher, Ms. Berry, had pulled Mary aside and asked her if she knew what an aptitude for math she had and if she understood how critical girls with good math skills were going to be to America’s ability to keep up with other countries.
“Just think about it, Mary,” Ms. Berry had said, two weeks before graduation.
Mary thought about it. But by then Mary already knew what her future held, and it wasn’t more math classes.
Her cell phone in her apron pocket buzzed and she stole a look at it. Josh: WHEN R U COMING?
“Customers, Mary, all hands on deck!” said Andi.
Mary put the phone back in her pocket and glanced out the window of the café—there were only two customers approaching, it was hardly an all hands on deck situation, but Andi and Daphne had relocated to Little Harbor from New York City and they liked to use nautical phrases whenever they could. Not that the fishermen Mary knew ever actually said all hands on deck. And Mary knew a lot of fishermen.
“I’m on it!” Mary called out. She took her place behind the counter, depositing the bamboo towel correctly in the to-be-washed bin, and waited for the door to open. “I am at your service,” she told Daphne. Under cover of the counter she slid her phone out and texted Josh back SOON, BABY. She felt a little thump of anticipation when the bell on the door jangled. The sound reminded her of Christmas, those first couple of minutes after you open your eyes and you think, Anything could happen today!
Vivienne said Mary was more optimistic than she had a right to be.