by Ashley Ream
With the first course, the waiter had brought out wine to go with the food and had explained to her about it as he poured. It had been a short pour, which was fine. But after three, it became clear that he intended to do this with every dish. After the first few, Tilda had begun restricting herself to a small sip from each one just so it didn’t all go to waste.
Finally, they’d made it to dessert, of which there were three. One of them had been a cookie that, when she picked it up and placed it into her mouth, crackled and zinged. She’d immediately removed it, unbitten, and stared for the two seconds it took her brain to retrieve memory of the candy Juno had eaten as a child. Pop Rocks. There were Pop Rocks in the cookie. If it had been meant to wake her from the food-induced stupor, well, she couldn’t say it had been entirely successful, but it was a very good effort.
She was, at the moment, retreating into a shot of espresso, a drink she didn’t enjoy, just for the stimulant effect. If she thought they offered it, she might have asked for TUMS. She even had some in her day bag, a sure sign of age, but they didn’t fit in the small clutch she’d taken with her that night.
Tilda finished her espresso, and the cup was removed. In fact, everything had been removed, including her napkin. As a final service, the waiter took out a small scraper to clean up any crumbs before retreating for good.
There she was, alone at an enormous table without even a single piece of cutlery to fiddle with. The cooks went on with their business, feeding whatever diners were left in the main room beyond her sight. She looked at her watch. It was after ten o’clock, an unheard of hour for a restaurant on the island, or at least it had been when she’d lived there. During her days, everyone would be at home watching Law & Order reruns by then.
Tilda had no idea what the protocol for this was. Did she wait for Tip to come out to chat? Did she just leave? Could she interrupt one of the cooks and ask? She regretted not asking the waiter, and now he had no reason to return, not even for crumbs. She let out a sigh and then felt guilty about it. We should all have such problems.
“Oh, crap.”
Tilda had almost forgotten to leave a tip. She pulled out her wallet and then stared at the money inside. She had no idea what her meal would have cost and, therefore, no idea how much to leave on the table. She pulled out a twenty and set it on the otherwise empty white cloth. It looked a little obscene lying there. So conspicuous.
“Hi.”
Tilda jerked. “Where did you come from?”
Tip showed his dimples. “The kitchen. That’s where we make the food.”
He was wearing black pants that fit a little too loosely and a white coat with Brasserie, the name of the restaurant, embroidered on the breast. His hair was covered with a light blue bandana that tied in the back and reminded her of a pirate.
“I didn’t see you come out.”
“You looked a little lost in there.” He pointed to his own head.
“I was trying to figure out how much of a tip to leave. Do you think that’s enough?” She gestured to the money on the table.
“I do.”
Tilda wasn’t comforted by this. He probably would’ve said that even if she’d left three singles. She pulled a ten from her wallet and laid it on top of the twenty.
“Thank you,” she said. “That was a wonderful meal. It was very kind of you to do that.”
“It was my pleasure,” he said, making a little bow, his hands clasped behind his back. “I hope you’ll convey my goodwill to your husband.”
“Ex-husband.”
“Of course.”
They looked at each other for a moment, and Tilda felt pressure to say something else. “I couldn’t even tell that croquette was made of carrots.”
“I’m sorry?” Tip said.
The desire to backpedal was intense, but there were no U-turns on compliment road.
“It was very meaty. Dense. Well, not dense like heavy, but dense like—” Tilda could feel the blush running up her neck. “Substantive. That’s what I meant. It was substantive. And unexpected. For produce.”
That hung in the air for a count of three, which was enough time for her to pray the building would catch on fire before this conversation could continue.
“Is ‘thank you’ the correct response here?” Tip asked when the moment had passed.
Tilda sagged against the back of her chair. “I really have no idea,” she admitted. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“I have those days,” Tip said.
“This has been going on for a while.”
“If you give me a second to change,” he said, “we can go get a nightcap, and you can tell me about it.”
He was walking away before she could answer. A younger version of herself might have found his self-assurance attractive. This version was older and wasn’t so easy to impress. He had shown her a great kindness, but she was tired and didn’t want a nightcap. There had been fifteen kinds of wine already. She didn’t want to be rude, but it might be too late for that.
14.
Tilda had ordered coffee at the tavern, which turned out to be a mistake that could only be corrected with three packets of sugar and a whole pitcher of creamer. Still, she liked the place. In fact, she’d liked it for years. The Galley had been old and worn out even when Tilda had been local.
All the drinkers from the original island families sat at the bar or stood when the seats ran out. The men wore flannel shirts with their jeans and ball caps, and the women wore the same without the hats. Banana clips and scrunchies still held back their hair like 1985 had never left. Tilda’s ivory sweater had no place at The Galley. Tip had done better but just, trading in his chef’s coat for a pair of jeans and a blue oxford shirt. In the years Tilda had lived there, she’d never worked up the nerve to join the people at the bar, even when she could’ve matched them beer for beer. Tip must have felt the same because he steered her toward a booth.
Both the table and the cushions were cracked, and the condiments were displayed in a salvaged Heineken six-pack holder. The walls were decorated with ancient beer neon and taxidermy. Wagon wheel chandeliers hung from the ceiling, and plastic clothing hangers were hooked in the spokes, displaying the bar’s logo T-shirts for purchase. More T-shirts were stacked on the pool table, rendering it unplayable, which was fine. Tilda had never seen anyone play it. An Oklahoma Thunder basketball game was on the television, but no one was watching.
The only thing new in the place was the cook Tilda glimpsed through the pass window behind the bar. She was a young woman just on the verge of not being so young, mid-thirties maybe. She wore heavy bangs and thick-framed glasses and had tattoos up both arms. She looked like she’d double-majored in women’s studies and philosophy, and Tilda wondered how she’d come to work here where everything on the menu was passed first through the deep fryer and came with tartar sauce.
Tip was hungry. He’d spent all night cooking other people’s food, including Tilda’s, and had had almost nothing for himself. He ordered the fish and chips, which came out fast and was piled into a precarious mountain of golden batter on the plate. He offered Tilda some, but the idea of more food nauseated her. She waved him off, and he dug in. Tearing up the cod into bite-size pieces that still steamed and must have burned his fingers, he shoved the bits into paper cups of white sauce before chasing them with a handful of fries and a deep swallow of beer.
It was nice to see he wasn’t a snob about his food, Tilda thought.
Over his shoulder, one of the local women sat at the corner of the bar with three or four of the available men standing around her. They were hovering like seagulls over a fisherman gutting a catch. She’d been there awhile. Tilda could tell by the looseness in her arms and the brashness of her speech. Whatever the woman said, she said it again and again, louder and louder until someone acknowledged each whiskey-soaked piece of wisdom.
“You can’t tell you lost weight,” she was saying to one of the older women. “You know what you need? You
know what you need? You need to go shopping. You should go to the mall where they have the Chico’s. You know the Chico’s? You know it? They have good stuff. You get yourself some shirts and some pants. Chico’s. C-H-I-C-O.”
The older woman patted her on the back until she stopped talking, and the men went right on hovering. It made Tilda’s heart hurt to watch.
When her mind came back to her table, Tip was watching her watch the woman.
“Seven-to-one no one tries to take her keys when she leaves,” he said.
Tilda didn’t want to talk about the woman. It was too uncomfortable. Instead she said, “How’s the fish?”
“Better than you’d think. You sure you don’t want some?”
Tip and Tilda stayed until all the food on his plate was gone, along with two beers for him and half the cup of coffee for her. Tip had been right. The woman had left, giving hugs to everyone at the bar on the way out, and everyone let her go, including them.
“You want to see my house? The inside of it, I mean,” Tip asked when they got up to pay at the bar.
* * *
The wine had run off with more of her inhibitions than Tilda might have guessed. She was taking more liberty than she had any right to, giving herself a tour of the first floor of Tip’s house. She left him to trail behind her, as though he were a Realtor and she were thinking of buying the place. She did everything but open the closets and test the faucets.
There were no planned developments on Olloo’et. Each piece of property had been purchased by an individual, who saw to it that a well could be dug and a septic system installed, and then the family built their own four walls in whatever configuration occurred to them at the time. It was the architectural version of a crazy quilt, which is to say that Tip’s house looked nothing like Harry’s, which looked nothing like any of the others, and some of them looked nothing like anything that should have been built at all.
There was a sliding glass door in the living room that opened onto a deck. With the lights on inside, the glass was a dark mirror revealing little of the outside but reflecting back to her the room, Tip, and her own full-length self. Her fingers itched to fuss with her hair, but Tip was watching her. So instead she cupped her hands around her face and pressed her nose to the glass.
She could see the green light from the Miracle. It was brighter in some places than others, less a continuous ribbon that night than a tie-dyed swirl. She could see the white tents on the beach all lit up and the scientists shrunk to the size of dragonflies by the distance, busying themselves with whatever it was that scientists did.
Tilda flipped down the little latch and pulled the sliding door open.
“Jesus.” She sucked air in through her teeth and crossed her arms over herself. Had it been that cold earlier? She stepped outside to get a clearer look at things, and when she did a young woman crossed right below her, right below the deck she was standing on, walking at an angle toward the yellow caution tape and then under it and toward the commotion. Just then someone else stepped out of the shadows of Tip’s deck, a dark-haired, darker-skinned man.
Tilda recognized the woman from Jake’s, which wasn’t so surprising. By the end of the week, any number of the scientists were bound to start looking familiar. Even if she never learned their names, she might give them nicknames, so she could discuss them with Harry. She would say things like, “That one over there, the one who looks like Ichabod Crane, certainly seems excited about something.” And from then on they would call him Ichabod.
But the thing that was surprising was that the woman’s trajectory made it seem for all the world that she had come from Harry’s deck, just there to Tilda’s left. Tilda felt a smidgeon of protectiveness, whether over Harry or his property she wasn’t sure. Either way, it was her job to take care of things for him.
“Anything interesting going on out there?” Tip stepped outside and stood beside her.
“I think that woman was just at Harry’s,” Tilda said, nodding at her retreating form, already almost another indistinguishable Gor-Tex–clad dragonfly like the others. The man, who had been close on her heels, had peeled off and stopped to talk to someone nearer the water.
“A tryst, perhaps,” Tip said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Tip shrugged. “You never know. Women are very into the brooding artist type.”
“She’s young enough to be his daughter.”
“Don’t knock it until you try it.” He was smiling and flashing his dimples at her.
Tilda rolled her eyes and went back inside, giving one last good shiver in the relative warmth of the living room. Tip shut the sliding glass door and clicked the little lock shut.
“You haven’t remodeled,” Tilda said. “It looks just like when the Feinsteins lived here.”
“Feingolds,” Tip corrected.
“Feingolds.”
“That’s because they still do,” Tip said, stepping around her.
Tilda followed him to the kitchen. He opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of beer, a microbrew that Tilda didn’t recognize, which didn’t mean anything at all. The Pacific Northwest had begun growing breweries like it grew moss. It seemed every man between the ages of twenty-seven and forty-five owned one. He tipped it toward Tilda in offering, and she took it. It was important to support the local economy.
Tilda twisted off the cap and left it on the counter, which, she noticed, had a circular red stain like someone had overflowed a glass of cherry Kool-Aid.
“Do you rent it from them?” Tilda asked. “The Feingolds, I mean.”
“No,” he said. “I inherited it after my parents died.”
“The Feingolds died?”
He swallowed his pull of beer. “Well, just the two of them.”
“Oh, my God.” The memory came from behind and slapped into the back of Tilda’s knees, threatening to take them out from under her. “I remember you. You were a little boy, and you had a cat.”
“Goldie,” Tip provided. “She got hit by a car.”
“What happened to your parents?”
“Dad had a heart condition. We’d known about it forever, but his going was sudden. He was in Cincinnati when it happened. I had to fly his body back. That was just a year after Mom died. She had cancer.”
“I’m so sorry,” Tilda said, because she was. It was sad to be an orphan no matter how old you were, and he was not old enough to expect it. “They were my age.”
“No.” Tip shook his head. “They were definitely older.”
“Not that much older.”
Tilda decided not to provide a date to prove her point, and Tip didn’t follow up, so they stood in his deceased parents’ kitchen looking at each other. He didn’t need alcohol to make him bold. He had youth and testosterone, which seemed to Tilda like walking around half bombed anyway. She saw that unsteady swagger in her son as he struggled with the powers that had been bestowed upon him.
Tip was older than Juno. Maybe as much as ten years. His swagger was more controlled. He’d had a little more time to get a grip on things but not so much that he was looking down at the slide ahead of him. It was something of a golden moment for him, and Tilda wondered if he appreciated it. Probably he didn’t. No one ever does.
“Would it ruin the mood,” Tip interrupted, “if I made us a bowl of ice cream? I’m still hungry.”
“What mood?” Tilda asked.
“Well, I thought, if I worked at it a little, you might let me kiss you. But then my stomach might start growling, and you would hear it, and that might be awkward. So I’m hoping that if I stop to make a bowl of ice cream, you won’t leave, and you’ll let me keep looking at you a little more because I’m really enjoying that.”
It was more than cold, it turned out, that could make her cross her arms over herself. “That’s rather bold of you,” Tilda said.
“It was, but in my defense, I’ve been doing all of my best stuff. It didn’t seem to be working.”
“That was probab
ly a sign.”
“I surrender,” he said, holding up his hands, “and offer this microwaved fudge sauce as an offering of peace.”
“I’m never eating again. That was, what, twenty, thirty courses?”
“I wanted to impress you.”
Tilda pulled out a kitchen chair, knocked a few stray crumbs off the table in front of the seat, and let herself plop onto the gingham cushion. She was suddenly aware of how tired she was.
“You may have bit off more than you can chew,” Tilda said. She wanted to kick off her shoes but didn’t.
“I’m starting to see that.” His upper half disappeared into the fridge, and he came back out with a jar of maraschino cherries and a can of whipped topping before taking a gallon of vanilla ice cream from the freezer.
Tip opened the lid and waggled the carton at her. “Last chance.”
“Never again,” she reiterated.
Tilda felt like a boa constrictor that had choked down a rabbit and needed to find a dark, warm place to digest for the next week before horking up a pile of bones and fur. It was time to go home. At home, she could take off her shoes.
“Well,” she said. “Thank you very much for the dinner. You’re very talented.”
Tip didn’t stop scooping. “It’s really the only thing I’m good at,” he said.
Someone else, someone not Tilda, might have opened her mouth and revealed that she, too, knew that feeling, the feeling of having one good skill and nothing else to fall back on. But such a person was not in the room.
“I’m sure that’s not true,” she said instead.
She shifted her weight to the edge of the chair, ready to push up to standing, a sort of punctuation on these last few good-night pleasantries.
“Oh, it’s true. Ask anybody. Without the restaurant, I’d be selling ladies’ shoes at some department store on the mainland. I’d be fetching those little flesh-colored footsies for the customers and carrying huge stacks of shoe boxes back and forth to the stockroom.”
“How do you know about flesh-colored footsies?” Tilda asked.
