Page 141 of Neap & Spring

Vivienne

The bar is wide open to the water.

I was expecting something dark and dingy with sticky-floors. Some place that smells like spilled beer and cigarettes, where the lighting is bad and everything feels vaguely damp. But Westerly Point keeps surprising me. Scuppers is beautiful in its own rough-edged way. There’s a mounted marlin above the bar that has clearly been there since the nineties, and the walls are covered in so many neon signs and old surfboards and framed fishing photos that you can’t find the actual wall anymore. And one whole side is just open to the ocean. Fishing boats knock softly against the dock below. A few people are still out on the waterfront despite the weather rolling in. The lights from a few boats out on the water are starting to reflect on the surface, making it seem like the whole harbor is breathing.

I almost didn’t come.

I’d been sitting on the edge of the cottage bed for twenty minutes after I got home, still in the black dress, hands in my lap, trying to figure out if my legs worked. They did. They just didn’t feel like mine yet. That happens sometimes. After. Everything goes a little distant and feels a little borrowed. Kind of like I’m operating myself from slightly outside my own body.

Frannie had texted three times. The third one just said do you know what a scupper is? and then a fish emoji, and I didn’t know what that meant, but it was enticing enough that I put my shoes back on anyway.

I’m glad I did. I’m sitting here now on my second glass of wine with the warm pre-storm air moving through the open side of the bar, and Frannie is talking with her hands about something that happened during service last month. I’m still a little shaky around the edges. I can feel it if I pay close enough attention to that low tremor that lives in my chest for a few hours after. But nobody’s looking at me like I’m breakable. Nobody’s tiptoeing around me. Frannie is talking. Cora is listening. Iris has her feet up on the booth and is picking the olives out of her drink one at a time.

Normal. Just completely, unremarkably normal.

I hadn’t known how much I needed that until right now.

There’s a storm coming. I can feel it heavy in the air. The wind blowing off the water is electric, making the back of my neck prickle. Out on the horizon, the clouds are stacking up, lit from underneath by flashes of lightning out over water. But here, right now, it’s still warm enough that I left my jacket on the back of my chair an hour ago and haven’t thought about it since.

“Okay but what did you say?” Frannie asks. She’s leaning forward on her elbows now, chin in her hands, fully invested.

“I said, ‘I appreciate the offer, but I think you might be confused about what a restaurant consultant does.’”

Iris sets her drink down. “You did not.”

“I absolutely did.”

“To his face?”

“That’s generally where you say things to people.”

Cora makes a sound that is almost a laugh. She’s got her arms crossed on the table, losing a fight against smiling.

“He thought you were a food critic?” Frannie asks, eyebrow raised.

“He thought I was a food critic who was also available for private dining events.” I take a sip of wine. “In his home.”

“Was he at least attractive?” Iris asks, giggling.

I think about the guy in question. A restaurant owner in Cleveland two jobs ago, who had worn an ascot un-ironically and referred to his open kitchen as a “theater of gastronomy.”

“In a very specific way that stopped working the moment he opened his mouth,” I say. “He had very strong opinions about his backsplash.”

“His what?” Frannie and Iris say at the same time, their voices overlapping.

“Tile,” I clarify. “Handmade. Imported from somewhere in Italy. He showed me photos of it before he even showed me the menu.”

All three of them lose it at the same time. Frannie drops her head to the table. Iris covers her mouth, but it doesn’t help, the laugh escaping anyway. Even Cora, who I’ve come to understand laughs at approximately nothing, is laughing. It’s loud enough that the guys at the pool table look over.

Across the bar, the jukebox kicks into something low and brassy, and someone whoops in recognition.

“How many of these jobs have you done?” Iris asks. She’s tucked into the corner of the booth, her blonde hair loose, looking more relaxed than I’ve ever seen her outside of our dinners in Crescent Bay. She’s on her second martini and looks slightly delighted by the ascot guy.

“Twenty, maybe? Twenty-five?”

Iris sits up straighter, her eyes widening. “In five years?”

“I’m very fast.”