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Eve just smiles. “Come and help me inside for a little bit. I’m in the dining room, setting up some trays of prosciutto-wrapped asparagus. You can help me assemble.”
“I’m not very good at assembling.”
“It’s just ham and asparagus,” she says. “I’m really not worried about it.” She pulls open the screen door, giving Maggie room to walk through it.
“Okay then,” Maggie says.
She switches her bag to her other arm as they walk into the kitchen: a twelve-foot-tall ceiling, pipes running across the top, a beautiful stainless steel oven set—as high quality as any restaurant in the country. Plants everywhere.
Nate’s high school.
Awesome.
Two of Eve’s waiters are tending to something on the stove, another by the console putting the finishing touches on a tray of crabcakes—and Eve doesn’t say anything as they pass them, through a swinging door, and into the dining room, which reveals itself to be a strange combination of red Zen-inspired furniture and Scottish dolls behind a heavy glass case.
Eve motions to the case with her head, as she takes a seat at the long dining table, getting ready for the work at hand. “Rumor has it that the dolls are worth over two million dollars,” she says.
“Each?” Maggie asks.
“Man, I hope not.”
r /> Maggie puts her bag down and stares into the glass case. Is this what Nate stared at during high school? She notices it in the reflection of the glass: a picture of Murph on the mantel. She looks young—sixteen, seventeen—surrounded by a bunch of other kids. And in the corner of the picture, there is Nate. In jeans and a Mets baseball cap. Looking almost exactly as he does now. She doesn’t know if that is good news or bad news.
Maggie takes a seat catty-corner to Eve, a silver tray of the meat and vegetables between them. In a purposely exaggerated way, Eve gingerly picks up a stalk of asparagus, a small piece of the ham, and wraps them together before placing them on the serving tray.
“You think you’ve got that?” she says.
“You may have to show me again.”
Eve laughs, and they get to it, working silently at first, Maggie checking the clock in the corner every thirty seconds, like she can hurry it along: Tyler getting here. Her leaving. Her making the bus home. But soon, she gets into it—the easy preparation repetition, helping her get mindless.
“You talk a good game over there,” Eve says, after a while, pointing down at Maggie’s handiwork. “But you’re pretty good at that. It’s nice, the way you are setting them up—”
“I wouldn’t get carried away,” she says.
“No, really. It all looks good. You’ve got a knack for it. Are you planning to help Nate with food prep during the soft opening?”
“Not unless he makes me,” she says. But she bites her bottom lip thinking about it. How she had made a habit of that back in San Francisco, helping him prepare the food for the night: Nate turning on the record player to old Van Morrison, the two of them sitting silently, working together.
Then something occurs to her. “How did you know that? That we’re opening a restaurant?”
Eve hesitates, reaches for more vegetables. “Oh, Gwyn must have told me.” Then, as if thinking better of it, she shakes her head. “You know what? That’s not true. Nate’s dad told me.”
“Oh, so you met Thomas?”
Eve nods. “Yes,” she says. “I met Thomas.”
Maggie looks back down at her pile of asparagus, thinking about Thomas: how looking at him earlier today felt like looking at her future. This morning, she thought she understood what was happening in her own future. She was in love. How can everything change in the space of a few hours? Maybe that’s the only way everything changes. Just when you finally believe that anything is stable, and will stay the same.
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” Eve says.
“What?”
“Ending up in a situation you never thought you’d be in. Or maybe the very one that you thought you’d end up in, but were trying to avoid.”
Maggie meets Eve’s eyes. She wonders what Eve thinks she knows. Is there something people can discern about their relationship, just by watching her and Nate?
Eve shrugs. “Just a guess,” she says.
