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Maggie
They have driven all the way down to Amagansett—back past River Ranch Road and through Montauk town center, through the dunes off the highway, gated entrances leading to small, one-wine vineyards: WALKING TOURS AVAILABLE, Georgia going seventy, eighty miles per hour until they approach a restaurant and she hits the brakes, makes a sharp right into the circular driveway. It is a lovely restaurant in a white clapboard house—a rectangular white and black sign the only thing to distinguish it from the other houses around it, to let people know that it is a restaurant as opposed to a residence:
Maggie is quiet, looking back and forth between the sign and the restaurant. She is afraid to ask the first question that she knows the answer to.
Before she hears the answer out loud, she can still pretend there is another explanation: that Georgia is hungry and wants to get something to eat, or that she just wants to use the bathroom, and this is the first public place to stop. It is a nice bathroom—Maggie can guess, even from just peeking through the front door into the mahogany bar, candlelit, a fire already going.
“Tell me you have to pee,” Maggie says.
“I do.”
“Oh, thank God. For a second, I thought you were going to say this is Ryan’s restaurant.”
“This is Ryan’s restaurant.”
Maggie’s chest drops. It is her fear—it is the possibility that she feared most confirmed. “Ryan’s a chef?”
Georgia nods. “Ryan’s a chef.”
Why does this feel like the worst news there could be, the most threatening? Maggie isn’t sure yet, but she knows it will come to her and that will be worse. Maggie’s eyes focus back on the sign. The date of 1993, shining out at her. Nate told her that he lived here for a few years after high school. She had asked him why, and he had said something about not being ready to leave yet. Not being ready to leave yet: since when is that shorthand for because insteadof going directly to college I got married and opened a restaurant with my first wife, the one who came before you?
“And Nate opened this place with her? This is his place too?”
Georgia runs her fingers along the steering wheel, the dashboard clock.
“Georgia?”
“You know, you’re pretty good at figuring this all out. Maybe there is no need to go inside and talk to her.”
“There’s a need,” she says, wondering how old Ryan had been when this place opened. If she was opening a restaurant already, she had to be older than Nate, probably significantly older. It reminds her of a conversation she had with Nate early on, an innocent conversation, when she asked him how he decided to be a chef, and a look came over his face. An awful look that he immediately tried to hide with a story that didn’t ring true— something about watching his mother cook for the family when he was little—and a feeling Maggie tried to push down that he wasn’t being honest. That she was being crazy, oversensitive. Because what reason would he possibly have had for not telling the truth about that? Here was her answer.
“I am going to have to call Nate when you go inside,” Georgia says. “Just to tell him we’re here. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know how to fix this, and maybe he will.”
Maggie thinks about that—about all the ways she lets Nate fix everything, about all the ways she has believed that he can. “Be my guest,” she says. “The last thing we need is another secret.”
She looks down and realizes that her hand is on the door handle. She realizes that she is frozen there. She doesn’t open the door because when she does, she will start to have the answers to all of her questions, and maybe the only one that matters: did he not tell Maggie because it mattered so little to him or so much?
“It’s not his anymore. I don’t think she officially bought him out, but he has no association with the place. It’s not like he’s sneaking back here to cook with her or whatever.”
“Now there’s a relief,” Maggie says.
Maggie gets out of the car and gives Georgia a smile. Then she walks up to the restaurant’s front door, steps inside, before she can think about it.
It is closed still—most of the house lights off. Plants are everywhere and a smell that Maggie can’t exactly make out, woodsy, like dried cherries, or pine trees, or a weird combination of the two.
Maggie takes the whole place in, and feels relief that it doesn’t look like their restaurant in Red Hook. Nate hasn’t tried to re-create exactly what he has left behind. That has to be a good thing, she thinks. Only then she can’t help but
notice that The House looks—a little disturbingly—like the exact opposite of the restaurant in Red Hook. It is full of things Nate was adamant that he didn’t want for their restaurant: the brick wall and the fireplace, a granite bar, the dark walls. Is that just as bad?
“Can I help you?
She looks up to see a woman behind the bar, wiping down a Scotch glass. The woman is wearing a bandanna on her head and a blue tank top, her arms covered with tattoos. Beautiful dolphins and birds, clouds in the background. Thin, thin arms. Flat stomach. She looks both strong and frail, as she leans on her elbows, as though she were used to it—never moving toward anyone, letting them come to her.
“We’re not open until six,” she says.
“Oh, I’m not here to eat.”
“Then we’re definitely not open,” she says.
