As soon as she’d disconnected from Eliza, the doorbell rang: there they were, live and in person, the three members of the decorating committee. “Hello!” Deirdre said, employing her gracious-hostess voice. “Hello, hello, come in!”
Once they were inside, the dining room seemed too small for the posters, the food, the people. Deirdre watched Sheila considering the posters. She tipped her head to one side and then to the other, as though this were the Met and she a discerning patron.
“What, Sheila?” asked Deirdre. She heard an edge in her own voice.
“It’s just—nothing,” said Sheila.
“What?”
Sheila sighed. “It’s just. Do you think we could get a different poster?”
“Why would we do that?”
“Maybe one where the children aren’t…so thin. I mean, it’s fine for them to look hungry, but too hungry? It might turn people off.”
“Of course they’re hungry,” Deirdre snapped. “In fact they’re starving. Literally.”
And Sheila rolled her eyes at Gabby Gardner; Deirdre could practically hear her say it: There goes Deirdre again. Overreacting.
“I’ll be right back,” said Deirdre. She clenched her hands into fists. “I just need to grab some seltzer—”
“I am so goddamn tired of salad,” she heard Sheila Rackley say cheerfully when she was out of the room. Then, sotto voce, “Do you think this salmon is wild?”
31
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Mary
Andi and Daphne stood together in the doorway, looking at Mary like a set of proud parents. They were dressed up in flowered summer sundresses—not identical, but very similar—and Andi was wearing an unfamiliar rosy-pink lip gloss.
“You sure?” said Andi for the nine hundred and forty-eighth time.
“Positive,” said Mary. “Go ahead, I got this.” Daphne’s parents were up from Connecticut and Andi and Daphne were having dinner with them at Fathom in Bar Harbor. Mary hadn’t been to Fathom, she probably would never go to Fathom, but she’d looked up the menu on her phone and seen items like Drunk Shrimp and Massaged Kale Salad and cocktails called Bluette and Dirty Pearl. She wasn’t sure why kale would get a massage (Mary would kill for a massage herself), but she knew that a menu like this was right up Daphne and Andi’s alley. They ate that stuff up, literally. They had to leave before the café’s closing time to get to Bar Harbor for a seven-thirty reservation, so Mary would be in charge of emptying the canisters of milk on the sideboard, locking up the cash register, turning off the lights, and so on.
She’d never closed the café by herself before, but Mary was looking forward to her new responsibilities. If things went well, maybe she’d be asked to close up again, then again, and perhaps soon she’d get a promotion, maybe even a raise. Surely Andi and Daphne would like to enjoy their summer evenings away from the café sometimes; if you made it through winter in Maine, the saying went, you deserved summer. Actually, it was the other way around: If you can’t stand winter, you don’t deserve summer. But close enough.
“Have so much fun,” said Mary now. They really did look very pretty, dressed up like that. One of them, she couldn’t tell which, was wearing a light perfume that smelled like lilacs. Maybe they were both wearing the same perfume. Must be nice to be able to share things that way, with your partner. Your wife. Must be nice to be in love like that, in a flowered dress, on your way to Bar Harbor for dinner.
“Fun is relative in this situation,” said Andi. “Daph’s dad still refers to us as ‘the gays.’?”
“No he doesn’t,” said Daphne. She rolled her eyes.
“Not us as in us,” Andi told Mary. “I mean us as in the community. Like he’ll say, ‘Did you see that the gays got that marriage thing through the Supreme Court?’?”
“He’s come a long way, though,” said Daphne. “You have to admit that.”
“Do I?” asked Andi. Then, back to Mary, “And Daph’s mom just puts her lips together and looks into the middle distance and you can tell she’s trying hard to think about her book club.” She pressed her own lips together in imitation. “She prefers to think of us as roommates who are just sharing the rent until we can figure out what we really want to do with our lives.”
“Okay, Andi, that’s enough,” said Daphne. “We can’t all come from enlightened West Coast families.” (Andi had grown up in Portland, Oregon.) But Daphne was laughing, and Mary saw her put her hand on Andi’s waist as they exited, and Mary thought, Isn’t that what love is supposed to look like?
There were only four customers in the café at that moment, sitting together at table seven, two tailored yachting couples with cardigans and summer tans, and while Mary watched over them and fiddled behind the counter she felt all of her usual worries swirling around in her mind. When was she going to tell Josh? When her belly swelled to the point where they couldn’t ignore it? When she needed money for an abortion?
I don’t have a nineteen-year-old kid, if that tells you anything, Eliza had said.
Would Josh even have money to help pay for an abortion? He was a terrible lobsterman, really hopeless, and things never seemed to get better for him. Maybe he had some money from the drugs, but she didn’t like to think about that—or the little baggie collecting dust at the back of her closet.
Mary herself had some money saved from her paychecks, of course. But every time she thought about calling the clinic in Bangor to make an appointment, every time she pulled the number up on her phone and got ready to hit the call button, something stopped her. And every time she thought about telling Josh, she remembered the look in his eyes that night when she’d worn the yellow dress, and then how swiftly he’d turned from easygoing to angry at The Wheelhouse, and the same something (or maybe a different something) stopped her.
Anyway, she still had two weeks and five days to decide.
The customers were all drinking wine, three Chardonnays, one Cabernet. If they ordered another round, of course, Mary would have to serve them, even though, technically, she was underage. She hoped that they did order another round.
One couple owned a home on the Point and one couple was visiting; Mary could tell this from the way one of the men said things like, “We contribute a handsome sum to the Lobster Festival every year, though of course keeping the local flavor is really the thing.”
Mary wanted to tell him that we did not do anything, that it was us against them in this town, in case he hadn’t noticed, that if he couldn’t stand the winter he didn’t deserve the summer, but then he caught her looking at him and flashed a smile that really did look friendly and sincere and she figured that he was probably just a guy doing his best, like most people. And in fact it was true: the summer people did contribute a lot to the Lobster Festival. Daphne was on the committee.
Mary tried to imagine what it might be like to be these people, sitting with their wine, fresh off their sailboat, taking a small and relaxing break before heading back to their gigantic summerhouses, where they’d drink more wine before putting on silk pajamas and climbing into oversized beds.