“Just one?” she said.
Anders nodded.
“Do you mind sitting at the bar? When it’s busy, I’m supposed to save the tables for two or more people.”
He followed her to the back of the room, where he took a seat on a barstool. Hair matted to his forehead, Anders pulled his camera out from beneath his shirt and set it down on the bar. He picked up the menu the girl had left him, a white piece of paper that had been laminated long ago but was now tattered, the plastic peeling at the edges, leaving openings for grease spots to take hold. There were only five dinner options—crab cakes, fried shrimp, fried flounder, catch of the day, or chicken fingers, all served with coleslaw and chips—and though Anders didn’t care for seafood, he had half a mind to order one of everything he was so hungry. He looked up for the bartender and saw a freckle-faced guy in a backward ball cap and T-shirt chatting animatedly with a few men at the far end of the bar. Anders tried to get his attention, to no avail. The group laughed uproariously at something and Anders hoped that signaled the end of the conversation. It didn’t.
Finally, ten minutes later, the guy noticed Anders and sauntered down to his end of the bar.
“What kind of beer do you have?” Anders asked. He didn’t drink much, but after the events of the day, he felt a cold pint was in order.
“We don’t.”
Anders cocked his head. “What do you mean?”
“It’s a dry island.”
“As in no alcohol?”
“Right.”
“Oh.”
He ordered a Pepsi and the chicken fingers (he wasn’t sure he could eat seafood, after all) and then let his eyes wander around the room. Fishing nets and old buoys hung on the wooden slatted walls, but more haphazardly, it appeared, than as a part of any grand décor scheme. A nineteen-inch box TV sat in the corner of the bar, but it was covered in so much dust, Anders doubted it actually worked. He let his eyes graze over the people seated at the tables. A few he recognized from the Cake Walk, and he found, as he had earlier in the day, he could easily spot the locals from the tourists. Not because of their belongings this time, but by a difference in the way they carried themselves. The locals’ posture belied a certain sense of belonging, a comfortable relaxation, as if they had been sitting on these same chairs for years, the wood worn in just the right grooves to fit their bodies perfectly. The tourists were also relaxed—the salt air, Anders noticed, had a way of seeping into your skin no matter who you were, loosening joints and muscles—but they still looked more formal, somehow. As if the chairs knew they were visiting, their worn parts not matching up to the tourists’ bodies the same way.
As Anders was contemplating this, the front door opened and his attention was drawn by the jingle of bells. A woman walked into the restaurant, but instead of glancing away as social etiquette directed, Anders found that, for some inexplicable reason, he couldn’t stop staring. Maybe it was the wild pencil-thin curls of her hair framing her face like a lion’s mane, or her eyes, which reminded him of a cow’s, large and round and set a little too far apart, or her lips, perfectly bow shaped and bookended by two dimples that looked deep enough to swallow a pencil eraser whole. Or maybe it was simply that she stood out in a crowd—specifically, this crowd of burly watermen and retired, linen-clad tourists.
Anders wasn’t sure. And so he just stared, until the girl, feeling his eyes on her, met his gaze. Embarrassed, he turned away and noticed that at some point while he was gawking, his chicken fingers had materialized on the bar in front of him.
And Anders, red-faced and perplexed, stared down at the glistening breading, just out of the fryer, a bead of water from his hair trickling down the side of his face and dripping from his chin onto the plate.
Chapter 5
The first person Piper laid eyes on when she and Tom walked into the One-Eyed Crab Thursday night was Jeffrey Wallace, running plates to a table, a dingy white rag hanging out of his back pocket, swinging to and fro like a horse’s tail.
She tried to shrink, avoiding his notice, while knowing it was an impossibility in a restaurant—and island—this small. She loved Jeffrey, of course, in the way you love a distant cousin, even if you don’t like them that much, because they’re family. And they were family in a sense, considering she and Tom and Jeffrey grew up together from the time she moved to the island, being the only three kids in the same age range, and she didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. But ever since she’d turned him down when he asked her to his senior prom her sophomore year (anybody with two eyes and half a brain knew she’d be going with Tom, who was also a senior), he’d treated her with nothing short of disdain. And she didn’t have the energy to deal with him tonight.
Frankly, she was exhausted. She had waited on more people than usual at the market today, thanks to the influx of tourists looking for fresh-picked crab meat and Mr. Garrison’s famous crab cakes, which they had been mixing and forming since four o’clock that morning.
Not to mention, she hadn’t been sleeping well recently, what with the absence of Tom’s snoring—though she recognized the irony in that. Shouldn’t she be sleeping better?
She flicked her eyes from Jeffrey to Emily Francis, a girl of fourteen, who could probably get owners Mack and Sue convicted of every child labor law ever written if anyone on the island actually cared about those kinds of things. She was standing at the upturned stack of crates, clutching menus and gazing at Piper as though she had suddenly forgotten the English language.
“Can we please be seated?” Piper asked, flashing her a smile.
“Um . . . well,” the girl stammered. “I’m supposed to save the tables for groups of—”
“Three or more,” Sue said, swooping in and shooting Emily a look. “But we can make an exception for you and Tom, Pipes.”
“Thank you, Sue,” Piper said. She followed Sue to a table, shrugging out of her rain slicker and chatting about the downpour and the influx of tourists (neither one mentioned how it was even smaller than the previous year) thanks to the Cake Walk. Once seated, Piper fluffed her hair, though the rain and wind were no match for her tightly wound and belligerent curls. Sue didn’t offer menus; Tom and Piper rarely strayed from their usual—crab cakes for Tom, grilled catch of the day (cobia, this week) for Piper, extra coleslaw. And if they did, like most locals, they knew the options by heart.
“You kids want the usual?” Sue asked.
“Please.” Piper nodded.
As Sue left to gather an iced tea for Piper and a Pepsi for Tom, Piper and Tom sat in a long silence, until she remembered the joke Mr. Olecki had shared with her that morning as she helped Mrs. Olecki in the kitchen of the bed-and-breakfast. She opened her mouth just as Sue arrived with the drinks.