UNLIKE THE EL CAMINO DINER, THE RESTAURANT AT the Grizzly Cove marina did not have a sign up front saying, Please Seat Yourself. The hostess had stepped away from the desk to seat another party. I could see her at the far end of the room, holding a pair of menus like a briefcase under her arm.
Adam didn’t wait for her to return. Instead he started walking toward a window table. He gave a little shoulder bump to a waiter at the far end of the room wearing a name tag that said Marco.
“Hey, man!” Marco said. “Back so soon?”
“My friend Sloane is visiting from Minnesota,” Adam said, nodding toward me.
Marco extended a hand. “Well, hey. Any friend of Adam’s—”
“Is someone you’re immediately suspicious of,” Adam finished.
“Ah, man. You said it. I didn’t.” He turned back to me. “It’s nice to meet you, Sloane. What brings you here?”
“My sister was here,” I said. “I wonder if you ever met her—Talley Weber?”
Marco shook his head. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”
“Her real name is Natalie,” I said “I’ll show you her picture.”
I flashed my cell phone toward Marco, and he shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “You guys sit wherever you want.”
Adam said it was up to me. I picked a table by the window, where we could see the Bay Bridge. Marco brought over the menus. The offerings were very seafood heavy. I ran my finger down the line of items. There was a chicken-and-seafood paella; I wondered if I could order it without the seafood part. And without the rice. And without anything besides chicken, including spices. Probably not.
There were a number of side dishes that looked all right—I could order a side of french fries, and a side of mashed potatoes, though Adam would probably think I was weird. (Did it matter to me if he thought I was weird? Not necessarily, but would he be more likely to divulge information if he thought I was a perfectly normal girl? Maybe.)
At the bottom of the second page, there was a kids’ menu. Food for the Skippers-in-Training (10 and under), it said.
When Marco came back to take our order, I asked if I could order the grilled cheese. I’ve tried ordering off kids’ menus before, and sometimes it’s no problem. But sometimes restaurants are really strict about it.
“Sloane is actually ten years old,” Adam told Marco. “She just looks old for her age. She’s pretty self-conscious about it. Don’t tell her I told you.”
“I won’t,” Marco said. “Grilled cheese it is.”
“Sorry to be high maintenance,” I said.
“Grilled cheese does not count as high maintenance. You have no idea some of the high-maintenance requests I’ve had to fill.” He turned to Adam. “And you, sir? Any high-maintenance requests?”
Adam rolled his eyes. “Today I’ll stick to the menu. Fish tacos.”
Marco made a note on his pad. “Your wish is my command.”
After Marco walked away, Adam turned back to me. “So. Tell me something interesting about yourself, Sloane Weber.”
“Something interesting?”
“Yeah, we’re here, and I don’t really know that much about you.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. The only thing about me that I considered at all interesting was that I was Talley’s sister. “I can’t think of anything to say.”
“I’ll make this easy on you—I’ll ask the questions, and all you have to do is answer. First question: What’s your middle name?”
“Marian,” I said. “And yours?”
“Oh no. I’m the interviewer right now.”
“But I’ll get a turn, right?”
“Sure. You’ll get a turn. So . . . you said you like making up stories.”
“I do . . . I mean, I used to.”
“Do you write them down?”
“Yes.”
“What kinds of stories are your specialty?”
“Realistic fiction, mostly,” I said.
“Like, if aliens invaded, here’s a story about how it would go?”
“I said realistic.”
“So you don’t believe in aliens? Out of the entire universe, you think our planet is the only one with intelligent life?”
“No, that’s not what I said. But as far as we know, we’ve never encountered them here on earth.”
“As soon as aliens land, I guess the category changes from sci-fi to realistic.”
“I never thought of it that way before.”
“Good thing you met me,” he said. “Now back to the interview. Any pets?”
“Nope.”
“Nope as in never, or nope as in not right now?”
“Both,” I said. “Although, actually, now that I think about it—we did have pet chickens for a little while.”
“Not the answer I was expecting,” Adam said. “So I guess my next question is pretty obvious.”
“Uh . . . what’s your next question?”
“Do you live on a farm?”
“No, we have a regular house. When Talley was about thirteen years old, she found some stray chickens.”
Looking back, I couldn’t remember exactly where Talley’d found them, or how she got them home without Dad driving her.
“At first she hid them in the bathroom we shared,” I told Adam. “They unraveled the toilet paper and made a nest behind the toilet.”
“It’s like they always say—you can take the chicken out of the coop, but you can’t take the coop out of the chicken,” Adam said.
“I guess not, because the rooster started crowing.”
“As in, cock-a-doodle-doo?”
“Yep,” I said. “My dad heard it and he went bananas. He told Talley she needed to rehome them pronto. But pronto took a couple weeks. Meanwhile, Talley moved them to the backyard and she named them. She named one after me. She was kind of a badass.”
“You may be the first person to ever describe a chicken as a badass.”
“Talley called her a badass,” I said. “I was only eight years old. It was probably the first time I heard the word. But it was an apt description for this chicken. She was smaller than the others, but she’d peck her way to the front of the food bowl. Talley should’ve named her after herself, don’t you think?”
I was hoping to catch Adam off guard, and have him say, Oh yeah, that sounds like Talley. And then I’d say, Gotcha! I knew that you knew her!
But, instead, he said, “I suspect you’re more badass than you let on.”
“Hardly.”
“And the other chickens?” he asked. “What were their names?”
“The rooster was Philip. And the hens, let’s see—she had Lola and Cassandra and . . . Shoot. I’m blanking on the last one.” I shook my head. “I can’t believe I can’t remember the fifth chicken name.” The only person to ask would’ve been Talley, which meant the answer was gone for good, just like she was.
Marco arrived with our food. The grilled cheese was on fancy bread—not plain white bread. But at least it wasn’t too grainy. Adam took a bite of one of his fish tacos, chewed, and swallowed. “Thank goodness I didn’t pick the chicken paella,” he said. “I can eat this guilt-free.”
“Talley also rescued stray codfish,” I said.
“Really? How did she—wait. You’re kidding, right?”
“I am.”
“Not bad,” he said. “So what happened to Sloane the chicken and her feathered friends? Did your mom step in and let Talley keep them?”
“No,” I said. I paused, then added, “She died when I was really young.”
“Oh, God, Sloane,” Adam said. “I’m so sorry. How did she—sorry. It’s none of my business.”
“It was a car accident,” I said. “She skidded on black ice and hit a tree.”
Juno’d actually driven me to the spot where it happened just a couple weeks after Talley died. Years had passed since Mom had died, and it looked like an ordinary place on an ordinary street. There were no markings on any of the trees. I couldn’t tell which tree was the tree. Maybe the offending tree wasn’t even there anymore. Maybe the force of the car hurling into it had knocked it down, or at least damaged it badly enough that it had to be chopped down, carted away, turned into firewood. Logs from that tree could’ve kept other families warm on cold Minnesota nights.
“That’s awful,” Adam said.
“It’s all right. It was a long time ago.”
“That’s what people say when they want to make other people feel better about something shitty.”
In the silence that followed, Adam and I each took bites of our respective meals. I felt oddly guilty, because I’d made things awkward. As if it were my fault for having a dead mom.
It was only my fault that I had a dead sister.
The bite in my mouth seemed to be growing as I chewed and chewed and chewed. It was too big to swallow. I was afraid I’d have to spit it out, but instead I reached for my glass of water. I took a thin sip and somehow I was able to swallow my food down.
“Are you and your dad close?” Adam asked.
“Not really. We just don’t see eye to eye these days. It’s funny, Talley once told me there’s a ‘leap second’ inserted every four years into Coordinated Universal Time. Even with different countries having different leaders, and sometimes being at war with each other, the powers that be got together and decided that. Meanwhile my dad and I, who are related, and who live in the same house, and who are missing the same person—we can’t agree on what needs to be done now. My dad thinks I need to move on. And I can’t. Not when there are so many unanswered questions.”
“I’m sure your dad is devastated in his own way,” Adam said. “I once heard my parents talking about this. There’s a word if you lose a spouse. You’re a widow or a widower. But for all the words there are in the English language, and there must be like a million of them—”
“Just under two hundred thousand,” I interjected. “My English teacher has all twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary.”
“Fine. Not as many as I thought, but still a lot. And for all those words, there’s no word in the English language for when a parent loses a child. It’s like the people in charge of coming up with new words decided, ‘Nope. No word can capture that.’ That’s what my parents said.”
“Do they know someone whose child died?”
Adam shrugged. “My dad probably meets a lot of people who have lost a child, given his line of work.”
Had the doctor who came to tell us Talley had died gone home to her family that night and discussed how there was no word in the English language for what Dad had become, a parent who’d lost a child? What would she have said about me?
“There’s a word for losing your parents,” I said. “You’re an orphan. But when you lose a sibling—there isn’t a word for that, either.”
“That’s true,” he said.
“You know those chickens I was talking about?” Adam nodded. “They might still be alive. When Talley first brought them home, they had all sorts of problems, like mites between their toes. Talley soaked their feet in oil. She nursed them back to health. And now—chickens can live up to a decade, even longer sometimes. It seems weird that Talley saved them and she died, and the chickens don’t even know it. I feel like I should find them and tell them what happened. Not that chickens would care, or even understand. It wouldn’t have any meaning to them. It’s ridiculous.”
“No, it’s not,” Adam said. “Not if it would have some meaning for you.”
“When your sister dies, you have bigger things to worry about than telling her old chickens.” I shook my head, and then I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. “God, that sounds like a metaphor. My friend Juno makes fun of me sometimes for all the metaphors I come up with. But this time I mean telling literal chickens!”
“You have a nice smile,” Adam said. “And there’s something else, too.”
My cheeks had warmed. “What?” I asked.
“You’re a very interesting person, Sloane Marian Weber.”
Now my cheeks were blazing. I took a sip of water to cool down. “Do you have siblings?” I asked, once I’d swallowed. “You didn’t answer before.”
“Just me and the ’rents at home,” Adam said. “Speaking of whom, you certainly don’t corner the market on strained relationships with parents. They’re always up in my grill. I don’t hate them. But I don’t like them, and I don’t think they’re too wild about me, either—which I guess begs the question: Why do they care so much about what I’m doing on any given day?” He sighed and shook his head. “It’s so much easier when you can like the people you love.”
“I never liked or loved anyone as much as I liked and loved Talley,” I said. “And you’ve been acting like a totally nice guy all through this lunch.”
“Don’t tell anyone. I have a reputation to uphold.”
“But I’ve been waiting for you to slip up and admit that you knew her.”
“I told you that I didn’t.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“Do you have trust issues?”
“No. But I have a dead sister, and she had your phone number.”
“I don’t know why she had it,” Adam said.
“And you’re hanging out with me, and you brought me to this place of all places—Grizzly Cove, with that flag waving front and center.”
“If you’d asked me ahead of time if there was a flag in the parking lot, I probably would’ve said no. I’ve never even noticed it.”
“And you asked to see the list, and then you nearly destroyed it.”
“That was an accident. I swear.”
“And,” I said, “you used the term ‘shit-slammer.’”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did,” I said. “On the phone when we first talked, you said it. That was one of Talley’s terms.”
I remembered how I’d asked him about it at the time:
What did you say?
I said this day is going to kick my ass.
Kick my ass was a much more common saying, and maybe it’s what he’d said to begin with. I let out a sigh. Grief was turning me into an insane version of myself.
“Are you okay?” Adam asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I must’ve heard it because I wanted you to say it—because I miss my sister, and I want answers, and wanted proof that you knew her.”
“I didn’t know her.”
“I guess I owe you an apology. I’m normally a much nicer person. People like me.”
“I like you,” Adam said.
“I’m so embarrassed.”
“You don’t have to be,” he said. “Really. Just forget about it.”
When Marco came over with the check, Adam pulled out his wallet. “No, no,” I said. “This is my treat.”
“I can’t let you pay,” Adam told me.
“Why not? Because I’m a girl?”
“I want to be chivalrous. Is there something wrong with that?”
“Sorry, but yeah. It’s benevolent sexism. It’s fine if a guy holds open a door for a woman because he got there first, as long as the woman could be the one to hold open the door if she got there first. Then there’s equality. But if the guy always holds open the door, like the woman is incompetent and she can’t do it herself, well, that’s problematic, and it’s actually not benevolent at all. It contributes to the cultural view that women need men to help them.”
“Whoa,” Adam said. “Okay, well what if I want to treat you because coming here was my idea? It’d be rude for me to expect you to pay when you had no choice as to where we were going. Besides, all you got was a kids’ meal. My tacos cost much more.”
“But I was the one who accused you of lying, so maybe I owe you the difference between tacos and a grilled cheese.”
“No, you don’t. I told you to forget about it.”
“Okay,” I said. “How about if we each pay for our own meal?”
“If you insist.”
“I insist.”
“All right. I feel bad, though. I really was planning to take you to lunch. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
I shook my head. But then I changed my mind. “Could we go by Mr. G’s and Bel Air on the way home—if they are on the way home?”
“They are now,” Adam said.