Page 48 of The Hotel Nantucket
When Christina finally heads back to her station, Mario says, “Should we get out of here?”
“Yes,” Lizbet says, and they go.
Back in Mario’s truck, Lizbet isn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.Laugh,she thinks—and she does. They walked out of the Deck holding hands, Mario leading the way, Lizbet ignoring all the people calling after her. When they reached the front, they encountered Christina and JJ having a whisper-fight, Christina no doubt saying something to the effect ofMario Subiaco showed up with Lizbet! They were rude to me!Christina’s back was to Mario and Lizbet, but JJ saw them and said, “Whoa, hey…are you leaving, Chef?”
Mario stopped. “We’re going someplace where the service is a bit more polished.” He saluted JJ. “Good to see you again.”
JJ followed them out the door. “Wait,” he said. “Lizbet, come on, don’t be like this.”
Mario held the passenger door of his truck open and Lizbet climbed in. She waved at JJ as they pulled out.
She doesn’t know where they’re going; she doesn’t care. Mario heads into town, where people are out and about in full July revelry. There’s a group of young women having a bachelorette party; families; happy couples and one couple arguing, which reminds Lizbet of seeing the Laytons. Lyric Layton, who is one of the calmest, most Zen people Lizbet knows, wascrying at the Deck. Something must have been very wrong.
Lizbet suspects Mario is taking her to the Club Car, but they bump over the cobblestones of Main Street, so then she thinks they must be going to Nautilus. Then they pass Nautilus and Lizbet thinks,Lola?She’s with Mario Subiaco, the former king of the Nantucket restaurant world. They’ll be able to walk in anywhere.
Mario pulls down the white-shell lane behind Old North Wharf and parks in a spot markedRESIDENTS ONLY.He says, “I probably should have checked with you. Is it okay if I cook for you at my place?” He smiles.He’s so fine,Lizbet thinks. Now that JJ and Christina have been properly humiliated, she feels energized—and nervous—for another reason. She’s on a date with Mario flipping Subiaco! He’s going to cook for her!
He leads her past the cute cottages of Old North Wharf, past the famed Wharf Rat Club, past Provisions and the Straight Wharf restaurant on the right—where are they going?—and out a rickety dock over the water. Lizbet watches where she puts her feet on the old, uneven boards, thinking in her emotionally heightened state that she could easily topple into the harbor, where her wedges would anchor her right to the bottom.
The dock leads out to a lone cottage, and Lizbet looks around. How in fifteen years has she never realized this little place was here, floating on pillars in the middle of the harbor? To the left are the grand homes of Easton Street and Brant Point Light and to the right she can see and hear the people eating on the porch at Straight Wharf.
Mario opens the door and they step back in time. The cottage feels like something out of what Lizbet vaguely thinks of as “the good old days,” that era in the 1950s and 1960s when properties were both loved and neglected, when summer homes were passed down through families and not purchased online for eight figures thanks to the dazzling 360-degree photo gallery. The cottage features a boxy, wood-paneled room that smells of the sea. There’s a gray tweed sofa and two upright armchairs, a braided rug, a dinged-up dining-room table with mismatched chairs, a kitchen with brown cabinets, Formica countertops, a four-burner electric stove and a white icebox with a long pull-handle. There are some truly atrocious oil paintings hanging on the walls. Lizbet squints—they’re landscapes of Nantucket, no doubt the efforts of one of the former owners who took a summer’s interest in rendering the islanden plein air.She can tell without checking that in the cabinets she will find Junior League and Congregational church cookbooks stained with cranberry sauce and clam juice, as well as a speckled black lobster pot and a box of frilled toothpicks purchased sometime during the Kennedy administration.
Off to the left is a door that leads to a bedroom (low bed, covered with a patchwork quilt) and another door that leads to a bathroom tiled in iridescent pink (it must have been renovated in the seventies). “This is fabulous,” Lizbet says.
Mario sheds his blazer and kicks off his flip-flops. “I’m glad you like it. Some people wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t…get it.” He has brought Lizbet’s cooler bag from the truck and he pulls out the bottle of Krug. “Let me show you the best part.” He grabs two jelly jars from the cabinet, hands them to Lizbet (they’re painted with cartoon scenes fromTom and Jerry), and opens a door that leads out to his—well, Lizbet supposes it’s his front porch. It’s a covered deck that overlooks Nantucket harbor; water laps up against the pilings beneath their feet. A ladder hangs off the railing.
“How,” she says, “did you get this?”
“Xavier,” Mario says. “I was on the fence about working at the bar, but then he dangled this place and I caved.” He expertly takes the cage off the Krug and gently pulls the cork. He pours the champagne into the jelly jars, then he and Lizbet face each other and touch glasses. “This is more like it,” Mario says. “Here’s to you, Heartbreaker.”
By their second glass, they’re sitting next to each other on a wicker love seat on the deck, bare feet up on a wrought-iron table, gazing out at the darkening sky. The red beacon of Brant Point Light glows, then dims.
“How did you get to Nantucket from Minnesota?” Mario says. “I don’t think you’ve told me.”
“Well,” Lizbet says. “When I was at the University of Minnesota, there was a girl in my dorm who showed up to school a week late. All we knew about her was that her name was Elyse Perryvale and she was from out east. None of us could understand why anyone would miss the first week of freshman year.” Lizbet sips her champagne. “She was tan and had this sun-bleached hair, and she was wearing faded jean shorts and boat shoes that looked like they’d been repeatedly run over by a vintage Jeep Wagoneer. And she said, ‘Sorry I’m late. My parents wanted to eke out one more week at our house on Nantucket.’”
“Did you hate her?” Mario asks.
“Iworshippedher,” Lizbet says. “I thought that was the most seductive sentence I’d ever heard. We were from Minnesota—summertime for us was going to our lake cabins and waiting in line for Sweet Martha’s at the state fair. And here was this…mermaid among us. I asked her all about Nantucket and she lent me a Nancy Thayer novel, which I devoured. The summer after I graduated, I moved out here and got a job waiting tables at the Deck, which was brand-new that year. I started dating JJ and fifteen years passed.”
“You never wanted to get married?”
“When I met JJ, I was too young to get married. Then we became sort of anti-establishment. We wanted to be like Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. We thought getting married would kill the romance. But JJ killed it a different way.”
“I take it Tina is the new girlfriend?” Mario says.
“Christina, yes, our former wine rep. A woman I used to like.” Lizbet tells Mario about Last Night at the Deck, finding the texts, their subsequent breakup.
“Ouch,” Mario says. “I’ll point out that he’s not good enough for you.”
“He was, though,” Lizbet says. She has a hard enough time understanding this herself, much less explaining it to someone else. What she had with JJ was real. Every minute together felt like an investment in their future—breakfast, lunch, dinner, drives, walks, cocktail parties, meetings with food vendors, trips to the post office, ferry rides, the vacations to Bermuda and Napa and Jackson Hole, holidays with her family in Minnetonka and his parents in Binghamton, every movie they watched, every show they binged, every song they heard on the radio, every cookbook they tried a recipe from, every funeral they attended (there had been three), every wedding (six), every baptism (five), every beach day, every text and call, every trip to the Stop and Shop, every house they toured before buying the cottage on Bear Street, the fights and quarrels, the flat tires and dead batteries, the leaks in the ceiling and the power outages and the day the fridge died, the football games, the concerts (Kenny Chesney, the Foo Fighters, Zac Brown), the burns and cuts in the restaurant kitchen and the head colds and stomach bugs at home—all of these things had been like bricks in a fortress that was supposed to keep Lizbet safe and happy for the rest of her life. She and JJ had inside jokes, secret code words, routines and rituals. Lizbet scratched JJ’s back every morning; she knew where his spot was, southeast of the shamrock tattoo in the center of his back that was always extra-itchy. On Sunday mornings in the winter, JJ would draw Lizbet a bath, light her scented candles, and leave her a pile of food magazines. While she was in the tub, he would go to Nautilus to pick up Caleb’s bagels with sriracha schmear and they would eat in the kitchen—Lizbet still in her bathrobe—while they listened to old Springsteen concerts. Those Sunday mornings were sacred, their version of church.
Lizbet had actually thought theywouldget married someday, despite their cool posturing. She wanted a marquise-cut diamond, she wanted a ceremony on the beach at Miacomet followed by a clambake; she wanted to dance in her wedding dress at the Chicken Box. They had talked about children—they wanted two—and when Lizbet missed her period in January of 2021, they were both giddy and nervous. It wasn’t exactly what they had planned—a baby arriving in September, Lizbet hugely pregnant all through the summer season—but they both grinned like crazy, calling each other Maw and Paw, naming the baby “Bubby”—and when Lizbet started to bleed at nine weeks, they cried in each other’s arms.
The sexting with Christina had started that summer. JJ had bulldozed the fortress. Worse, he’d allowed Lizbet to think that the fortress had existed only in her mind.
The ending, rather than creating a stronger place that Lizbet could launch from into a new, different, better-quality life, was an obliteration, as though fifteen years of Lizbet’s life—her prime years, twenty-three to thirty-eight—had vaporized. She couldn’t salvage anything from them except the knowledge that she had, technically, survived.
