*
It takes twenty-five minutes to get to his office and that’s despite knowing all the shortcuts. The strip center is his last commercial property. Twelve stores, a parking lot, a wedge of Route 40 that gets a little seedier every year. His office is modest, as are his clothes, his car. But he paid cash to send his children to college and he’ll help to send his grandchildren to college, too. A widower for almost a year now, he’s a catch, make no doubt about it. The single women at his synagogue, when he deigns to go, make eyes at him. But there was only one woman for him and she’s gone.
And, yes, one afternoon, for about fifteen minutes, he thought a young shiksa fancied him. He thought he was going to be her savior.
He’ll settle for being her ruination.
25
“What are you thinking about?” Polly asks Adam.
They are in bed, looking at the ceiling. She is probably hurt because he doesn’t feel like spooning tonight. But Polly would never say anything as needy as that. Polly doesn’t push when a man retreats. She pulls back even further. She, too, is lying on her back, hands folded across her chest. Until she spoke, he assumed she was asleep. Her breath, since he rolled off her, has been steady and soft. She won’t ask the question again if he doesn’t answer. Polly seldom repeats herself. It’s odd enough for her to ask what he’s thinking.
Adam is thinking about rice. More specifically, he is thinking about risotto. It’s a tricky dish in a place as thinly staffed as the High-Ho, but there’s a variation that’s particularly nice in the fall, with mushrooms and squash, lots of cheese and butter. But risotto requires too much attention in a kitchen where he has only one helper, Jorge, who also has to run the dishwasher, bus the tables. No, he doesn’t want to add risotto to the menu at the High-Ho. But he would like to make it for Polly one night. Only when? The restaurant is closed Mondays, but the bar is open and Polly has to work every day but Tuesday. Mr. C has brought in a new girl to help on Fridays and Saturdays, which continue to be semibusy, but he’s trying to get by without another full-time waitress until next summer. He doesn’t believe the business will stay strong through the off-season. Adam doesn’t, either.
Yet Polly has persuaded Mr. C to make subtle changes to the dining room. Nothing fancy. She’s too smart to put lipstick on a pig. If anything, she’s putting more pig on the pig, leaning into the jointness of the joint, playing up its retro features. The jukebox, long broken, has been refurbished, but Polly kept the tunes that were in there, so it’s a nice little time warp, 1965–1985.
She also got Mr. C to replace the tables and chairs, but with what appears to be an eclectic jumble of wooden and Formica and one, just one, metal-top table, practically the twin of the one she lost in the fire. Things are cleaner, brighter, but not too bright. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but the High-Ho is now a place where people might like to linger. She has worked with the liquor supplier to find a few small, affordable wines to offer by the glass, three reds and three whites, all Italian, very drinkable, good with food. “How did you know about vermentino?” he asked her.
“You don’t have to go to Italy to have tasted Italian wine,” she says, a little affronted.
“I know, but—” He stops himself from saying what he’s thinking. But you’re just a Dundalk girl. The farthest you’ve ever been from home is the beach. The beach, or that women’s prison in Frostburg. But she never told him where she served time. She never tells him anything about her past, not since the last day in August, the day before the fire, when she presumably told him everything.
Adam has been trying to assemble her life story on his own. He can’t ask her because he’s scared of screwing up, revealing that he knows things she’s never told him. He doesn’t want to ask Irving if there are other secrets he withheld when he hired Adam because then Irving might figure out the extent of Adam’s betrayal. But an old journalist friend has managed to pull together a pretty complete dossier on Polly Costello Ditmars Smith Hansen, whose current legal name is Pauline Smith Hansen. Married at seventeen, a mom at twenty-one. The state has custody of that girl—inevitable, given that her mother was in prison and the father was dead. Adam knows firsthand that she had another kid and abandoned her. She never speaks of her children, never. Sometimes, he catches her with a sad, faraway look on her face, but who knows what that’s about.
She’s mentioned that they could stop using condoms, but he keeps using them. She’s insulted, suspicious. “I can go on the Pill, it’s 99 percent.” He says only, “I don’t think birth control pills are good for women. I won’t tell you what to do with your body, but you should rethink all those hormones.” God, he sounds like his own mother, but the world finally caught up with her, didn’t it? A free spirit who may or may not have had a fling with Neal Cassady, Lillian Bosk would now blend in comfortably with most suburban moms. Adam grew up eating good food, admiring his mother’s painting, listening to his father play tenor sax. Work to live, don’t live to work, that was his parents’ motto.
And yet their son has somehow ended up putting in fourteen-hour days in a roadside Delaware restaurant, whose main distinction is that it’s too good for most of the people who eat there, but not good enough to get people to drive up from Salisbury or down from Wilmington. What’s he going to do, get a Michelin star in Belleville, Delaware? There was a reason he left cooking behind after that season on the yacht. PI work also has its fourteen-hour days, but it pays much better. Then there are the long fallow seasons when he travels. He should be in New Zealand or Argentina right now, watching the world edge into spring instead of fall.
He should be alone. Except he can no longer imagine being any place without Polly and this seems to be where she wants to be.
He argues in his head: There’s no money, Irving. There can’t possibly be any money. No one with money would be here, in Belleville, in this garage apartment she found a week ago.
She seems to love it.
But would someone kill to keep this life? Did she kill Cath?
Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, he says to his own thoughts, then reaches for her hand.
“Did you say something?” he asks. He’s not even sure if she’s still awake.
When she replies, her voice is clear and measured, not the least bit sleepy. But also without the edge that most women use when asked to repeat themselves. She is capable of a stillness he has never found in another woman. Stillness. He thinks about hunting. Deer season will be starting soon. Do they have deer in Delaware? Is there a place for him to go and sit in a tree with his bow and arrow? Is there time? Tonight at work, doodling on a pad, he found himself sketching a stick figure being pulled underwater by an anchor. The anchor is the High-Ho. The anchor is this town, this life. But not Polly, unless—
“I asked what you were thinking about.”
“Rice,” he says.
26
Polly asks Adam to borrow his truck. Doesn’t say why, doesn’t offer to tell him where she’s going. Let him show some curiosity, she has answers ready if he wants them. But he doesn’t ask. He’s terrified to ask her anything, she realizes. He can barely ask her, How are you? or, when they’re eating breakfast, Could you pass the butter?