Matt parked the Volvo on Water Street. He wasn’t ready to go back to the house, couldn’t quite imagine it without his mother in it. Even harder to imagine her in the Lodge. She would be sitting in the dining room now in front of a white-bread bologna sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup. If she was lucky, the wizened face across the table from her would be conversable. He couldn’t remember hearing many of them speak. Maybe they were shy in front of visitors, suspicious lest their words be used against them.
The sandwich board outside the Smoked Mackerel promised a lunch special easily confused with the fare at the Lodge, but he went in anyway. It wasn’t the food that he was interested in.
He thought Amanda blushed when she saw him. She definitely smiled. He had forgotten about the dimples, more pronounced on the left than the right cheek. She was taking an order and had to ask the customer to repeat it. Matt liked that he was having an effect. Unless she was just not very good at her job. She bobbed her head in the direction of a booth in the back of the restaurant. When she came over a few minutes later, she announced she was on a break and could join him, if he didn’t mind.
“Is it okay? They don’t mind?”
“Who? Candace? We’re not that busy. She’ll gladly scoop up the extra tips.”
“The management.” He remembered tales of Amanda being reamed out as a teenager for even saying two words to her friends when they came in to eat where she was working.
“Carolyn didn’t tell you.”
“What?”
“I’m the management. This is my place.”
He flipped frantically through his memories of his last visit to the Smoked Mackerel, and of their lunch at the hotel. Had he said anything really stupid or offensive? Why hadn’t Bernadette told him? “Oh.” It was the best he could do.
“You didn’t think I was really still just doing my old summer job, only year-round? How sad would that be?”
There was no right answer to that. “It must be a lot of work.”
“The summers are. The winters are a lot of fretting about whether anyone will come in. And here you are. Twice in a week. Don’t have the halibut cheeks again. Or the special. Mushroom soup and ham and cheese, like school lunch or something, but lots of people actually like it. The lobster roll is pretty good.”
Matt couldn’t let the invitation to probe about the lobsterman go again. “So, the restaurant must take up all your time. Do you have … do you have …?”
“What? A home life? Is that what you’re afraid to ask? My domestic arrangements?”
“I guess. Yes.”
“I live by myself. Upstairs here, in fact. I’ve been seeing a lobsterman. But Carolyn will have told you that. Jim. She doesn’t like him.”
“She doesn’t have to.” It seemed like the right thing to say, the gallant thing.
“She’s got pretty good instincts about people actually.”
“Can we have a drink? Is that okay? Can you have a drink?”
“I can have a whole bottle if I want. And I can go and get it from behind the bar. What did you have in mind?”
“Bourbon?”
“Ah. This must have been the day. Your mother?”
“Yup.”
“I’ll be right back.” She brushed her hand lightly on his shoulder as she passed.
He felt a jolt of electricity, willed it away, unsure whether the infidelity would technically be to Jennifer or to Ingrid. A lobsterman was probably quite strong, too, possessive, able to swing his fists. L’Air du Temps hung in the air just below the guilt and the fear. He made a show of scrutinizing the menu.
“They need to come up with better names for bourbon,” she said as she plunked two glasses on the table. “Almost all of them sound like they come from a hillbilly still.”
“You didn’t really need to bring the whole bottle.” It was Knob Creek. Small batch. He decided he would have to reassess the restaurant.
“I’ve always wanted to do this. You know. The padrone and the customer sitting at a table in the back with a bottle between them chewing over old times. Like in the movies. Who better to do something like that with than your first real love? There should be a piano player though.”
He decided to leave the first love comment alone and focus on the musical one instead. “You have live music here, don’t you?”
“At night. Late. On the weekends. You should come.” She blushed (it was not the exit sign). “If you like that kind of thing.” She poured them each a generous inch. “I got drunk every night for three weeks when I had to put my mum in the Lodge.”
“It didn’t help, right?”
“Oh no, it did. It really did. Just not during the day. I really wasn’t ready for the full-on descent.”
Matt remembered that she had had the best head for liquor of any woman he had known. Any he had slept with at any rate. Male friends used to take him aside and ask whether he was resentful. They thought it must be annoying to share a bottle of wine or a case of beer right down the middle. Annoying and expensive. Their key criteria were their partner’s tolerance for alcohol consumption and her willingness to round the bases — low tolerance and high willingness being the desired combination. Amanda was an outlier. He loved that about her.
“Your mother will be all right, you know. Some of the time she will be miserable. And some of the time she won’t really know where she is. That’s one of the mercies, I tell myself. And she won’t remember the times she was miserable when she isn’t.”
“It felt like dropping her off at boarding school or something.”
“You hated boarding school.”
“Exactly.”
“How do you think she felt when she sent you there?”
“She thought she was doing it for my own good.”
“Bingo. She’ll understand. Somewhere deep down.”
“It’s just —”
“When I left Carolyn’s father, I moved to Florida. Did you know?”
“I think I heard.”
“I didn’t take Carolyn.”
“How old —”
“Fifteen. It was better for her to finish school here. With her friends. And I wasn’t … well, I wasn’t in the best shape to take care of her.”
“I’m sure it was the right thing.” He wanted to make it clear he got the message, so they could move on. “Sometimes you have to do what doesn’t feel right because it actually is right.”
“She was my daughter. Do you know what that is — ?” She stopped herself. Matt suspected she had remembered that he didn’t have any children. No doubt people in town talked about things like that. “She was fifteen. A girl.”
“I am sure she was very capable.”
“Inexperienced.”
“But she could handle herself.”
“A virgin, I think.”
“She seems very capable now.”
“She was the grown-up of the three of us.”
“But you still felt guilty. She was her own person by then. Nearly as old as we were when we started seeing one another.”
“She was way more mature.”
“So, there you go.” He reached for the bottle, splashed an inch into her glass before adding to his own.
“You were always a good listener, Matt.”
“Because I never really had anything to say.”
“And a good deflector. Carolyn asked the other day how come we didn’t end up together, you and I.”
“And you told her what?” He thought he was strong enough to hear again her speech about seeing other people.
“I told her it was because you were a good listener. And a deflector.”
“You wanted to see other people. You said —”
“That seemed kinder at the time.”
Kinder than telling him he was boring, he supposed, kinder than saying she suspected she would never get to know him, the real him. If there were one.
“Who knows what I was thinking? It was a long time ago. I can remember a lot of it, of course. If I set my mind to it. Though I sometimes wonder how reliable that is. But only some of the detail comes back. Do you find that? Like that motel in Robbinston. I’ve forgotten its name again.” She wasn’t meaning to be hurtful. He didn’t think she was. “The one we went to, to, you know, pop your cherry.”
“My —?”
“Oh sweetie. You didn’t seriously think that I …?”
Hadn’t he?
“You got so drunk on gin as soon as we checked in.”
Had he?
“And then you puked half the night. I felt so bad for you. All that hard-earned money for the room and we didn’t even do anything.”
Matt thought he might throw up now.
“Sorry. Look at you. I didn’t mean to get talking about all of this. I shouldn’t drink during the day. Do you notice that? That you get drunk a lot faster before five than after? Maybe we should get some food.” She added quickly, “On the house.”
Matt was afraid the lobster roll would stick in his throat but he was too shaken to object. Amanda took the Knob Creek back to the bar when she went to put in the food order. He wished he’d asked for a Guinness in the first place. He wished he’d just gone back to his mother’s empty house. More than either, he wished he hadn’t taken that bottle of gin with them to Robbinston.