“My dad said it was…well, excruciating was his exact word.”
Link gives a short, bitter laugh. “Excruciating for him? No offense, Bess, but he was married. He went right home to your mother.” Link pushes away the pakora on his share plate and Bess thinks, Oh no, no, no! She only wanted to tell Link what she knew. She didn’t mean to hurt him or make him angry. “You can see how this little arrangement…”
“Same time next year,” Bess says. “It was a movie they used to watch.”
“Yeah, well, the same time next year was profoundly unfair to my mother.”
“That’s what I told my dad,” Bess says. “The arrangement was lopsided. And sexist.” Bess remembers how Jake had patiently endured her tirade about white male privilege. “He assured me that the arrangement was Mallory’s choice. I guess there were a couple of junctures when my dad said he wanted to be with her on a permanent basis and she turned him down. She didn’t want to leave Nantucket.”
“She never would have left the island.”
“He said she was happy. He told me she had a full life.” Bess’s second glass of wine is dropped off by none other than Shamin herself.
“Is everything okay here?” Shamin asks, eyeing the untouched pakoras. “We are busy preparing your entrées.”
“Delicious!” Bess says, too eagerly, and she takes a perfunctory bite of pakora.
“Very good,” Shamin says, smiling, and thankfully, she leaves them.
Bess turns back to Link. “I’m not pretending to know what your mother’s life was like. You would know that far better than me. But my dad claims she had her job, her cottage, friends, a community…and you.”
Link looks at her incredulously and she can’t help but agree with him. She’s ridiculous! She’s trying to justify what happened between their parents when it was, quite clearly, unfair to Mallory. But then, Link does an amazing thing. He reaches across the table for her hand. Bess tries to act natural but she instantly flushes from the neck up. She likes Link so much—okay, she realizes she doesn’t really know him, but she’s been drawn to him since she first set eyes on him, stepping out of the cottage on Nantucket. He’d looked so forlorn, a boy on the verge of losing his mother. He’d been trying to escape the adults inside and, like Bess, he was probably wondering what the hell Jake McCloud was doing there. But he was kind and funny with Bess, and she thought she’d seen a spark in his eyes, like maybe he thought Bess was pretty, and then he offered to show her the beach. She’d wanted him to ask for her number before she left but her dad had been standing there and it wasn’t clear if she and Link would ever see each other again, so what would be the point?
“Don’t you think everyone deserves to find love?” Link asks. “Isn’t that what we’re all programmed to search for? Someone we can connect with—a lover, a friend—someone to build a life with?”
Bess nods but is afraid to speak. She isn’t sure if Link is trying to tell her she might be that person for him (could she be so lucky?) or if he’s blaming Jake for keeping Mallory from finding such a person.
They found love, she wants to say. Maybe it didn’t look like other people’s love—a split-level house with a two-car garage, family road trips in the summer, date night on Saturday—but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t romantic or real. That doesn’t mean they weren’t devoted.
Something about the way her father described his time with Mallory made it sound very real and very romantic. And if twenty-eight consecutive summers “no matter what” wasn’t devotion, then what was?
But before Bess can articulate any of this, two things happen. The first is that a server arrives with their entrées and the second is that Link’s phone plays Toto’s “Africa”—Bess loves that song too—and the screen lights up with the name Stacey.
Link stands up as his plate of palau lands. “I have to take this.”
Bess blinks. “Okay?”
“Outside,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”
Who is Stacey? she wonders. An old girlfriend? A current girlfriend? She tries not to worry. It might be his boss or a coworker or a friend. She feels relieved that they are finished with the Jake and Mallory story. Maybe when Link gets back they can eat and talk about their own lives like two normal people on a date.
Bess watches Link on the sidewalk on his phone, his head bent, his ear plugged. She considers the food. It would be rude for her to start without him, but she’s hungry, so she helps herself to one of the pakoras, which have finally cooled enough to eat. She devours one and is reaching for another when a guy takes Link’s seat.
“Uh…?” Bess says, her mouth full. She swallows. “Wrong table?”
“You’re Bess, right? Bess McCloud?” The guy looks like a Hollister model, or like the lead actor in a sexy HBO series about the Ivy League’s secret societies. And then, of course, it dawns on Bess: It’s the lobbyist.
“Aidan?” she says.
“You ditched me,” he says. “I finally made it to Roofers Union and you were gone.”
Bess stares at Aidan Hydeck’s perfectly coiffed dark hair, his sleepy brown eyes, and his square shoulders and realizes that, in the excitement of leaving Roofers Union with Link, she forgot to cancel this date. And not only that, she continued to share her location with Aidan.
“I’m so sorry,” she says.
He tilts his head and gives her a slow smile. “It’s okay, I was the one who was late.”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t your fault. You got stuck on the Metro.”
“That I did.” He looks at the food on the table. “I don’t mean to be a poor sport but I don’t like Indian food.”
“It’s Afghan.”
“Even worse,” he says. “I was really looking forward to wings at the Roof.” Only then does he seem to notice Link’s empty beer glass and the share plate with the now-cold pakora. “Oh snap, are you here with somebody?”
Bess is at an utter loss. She checks out the window. Link is still on the phone, standing just off the curb in the street between two parked cars.
Aidan follows her eyes and taps the glass. “That guy?”
“He’s…an old friend. He showed up at Roofers Union and…oh God, Aidan, I’m so sorry. I meant to let you know I was leaving. I’m not like this, I swear.”
Aidan gets to his feet. “It’s fine,” he says. “I would suggest that we reschedule when you’re not quite so busy but now that I’ve seen you in person, I don’t think I want to bother.”
Bess recoils. Did he just say that? She knows he’s angry but that was dirty.
He leans down by her ear and says, “The only reason I asked for this date is because I know who your mother is.”
Link approaches the table. “Hey?”
Aidan turns around and smirks at him. “She’s all yours, bruh.”
Bess is so angry she wants to dump her palau all over Aidan’s gorgeous lobbyist head. Instead, she stares at the table and waits for Aidan to leave the restaurant; she can’t make a scene, not here. She wants to ask Shamin to wrap everything to go so that Bess can eat it alone in her apartment. Link was on the phone with Stacey for so long that all Bess can imagine is he’s about to offer an excuse to cut dinner short so he can meet her.