Chapter 21
That first night after his meeting with Juliet, Theo slept fitfully, finding himself tumbling through nightmares.
Something was off-kilter about the world, now that Juliet was back in it.
Something unstable, that made him think everything was going to crumble beneath his feet.
That said, she was the only person willing to set aside time each day to help him with The Dockside.
She’d even asked for a few weeks off at the Eco-Lodge to help him take care of things.
When he’d told her he couldn’t pay her, not really, she’d told him she had more than enough from her husband’s alimony, for now. Somehow, that made Theo feel worse.
The following morning, Theo approached the restaurant to find Juliet on a ladder out front, cleaning the gutters. Already, she’d ripped the OPEN sign off the roof, and it sat lopsided on the sidewalk. Theo stared down at it, his heart thumping. “Why did you take that down?”
Juliet clattered down the ladder, smiling. “It’s the ugliest OPEN sign in all of Bluebell Cove.” She shrugged. “I think we can do better than that. That’s all.”
Theo still remembered installing the OPEN sign.
He remembered flicking it on at the age of twenty-seven or so, the year after he’d given up the market stall and opened his own place.
As soon as he’d flickered it on, his ex-wife Marie had thrown her arms around him and kissed him and said, “It’s going to be great!
Everyone will come!” For a little while, they had.
That hadn’t been so long before Marie had returned to Paris and divorced him.
“Uh-oh.” Juliet brushed a leaf off his shoulder. “Where did you go? Don’t tell me you’re running down memory lane.”
Theo gritted his teeth and forced himself to meet her gaze. “Let’s get to work,” he said.
“That’s what I like to hear.”
That first week, they didn’t take a single customer and instead focused on cleanup, painting, refurbishment, and throwing things out.
Juliet had a vision for a brand-new bar area, complete with tile shipped in from Portugal, but when they learned how expensive Portuguese tile was, they laughed at themselves and opted for something that looked vaguely Portuguese but was 20 percent of the price.
Throughout, Juliet continued to fine-tune the menu designs she’d shown Theo initially.
Theo thought the menus were silly. “In Europe, they change menus all the time! A lot of places write their menus on blackboards. With chalk!”
“Is that really what you’re going to tell Calvin Parish?” she asked, her hand on her hip. “You’re going to say, ‘It works in Europe!’ and have him take you seriously?”
Theo laughed to himself. They were on the patio, drinking light beers after painting the front door. A few tourists walked past, eyeing the restaurant, before stopping and asking what it was going to be.
“A new restaurant?” they tried to ask.
“Yes!” Juliet assured them. “It should be opening the first week of August.”
“Oh, goodies. We’ll still be here, won’t we, Rick? What’s it going to be called?” a woman in the tourist group asked, smiling.
“That’s a surprise,” Juliet said, putting on her mystical supermodel routine.
The tourists laughed, their eyes widening before moving along. Theo gaped at Juliet. “You’re going to change the name, too?”
Juliet shrugged. “We need to cast all that bad luck off our shoulders. And I’ve been thinking.
Maybe The Dockside doesn’t say enough about the kind of cooking you do here.
The kind of elite cooking you’re prone to.
When I hear Dockside, I think, like, sandwiches and burgers and onion rings.
And you do not do sandwiches and burgers and onion rings. ”
Theo rubbed his temples while Juliet began to talk about pricing, about how many people Theo needed in the restaurant at any given time in order to secure a profit, plus the general “aura” around the place.
“In Manhattan, I’ve dropped close to a thousand dollars on meals where I was still hungry after,” Juliet confessed.
Theo’s jaw dropped. Genuinely, he couldn’t fathom that. “But those aren’t the types of customers I’m after.”
“Why not?” Juliet asked. She typed something on her computer, then turned the screen so that he could see small, gorgeous plates from whatever culinary scene she’d enjoyed back in the city.
He saw Kobe beef and Iberico ham and octopus in a Turkish glaze.
His mouth watered, imagining not only eating those foods but also the process the chef had taken to make such a fine creation.
He hadn’t cooked in weeks, at this point, as he and Juliet often grabbed burgers after work, or he ate small snacks at home before going to bed.
“Something I want you to notice about this,” Juliet began, sounding tentative, “is the plating. Do you see how it’s almost like a painting? A modern art piece?”
Theo collapsed back in his chair. “That’s all pretentious garbage,” he said. He’d resented those people in culinary school, people who’d been so hyperfocused on beauty rather than flavor. He had a sense that Nellie Strong had been like that, too. “I’m not like them,” he said.
Juliet grimaced, then closed her computer again. “All right,” she said. “Break’s over. Someone has to put the new tables and chairs into place.” But even as she got up to start unpacking the new gear, Theo knew better than to think that she’d given up.
* * *
Juliet broached the question on the final day of July.
It was only a week till the newly named The Salty Anchor would reopen to the public, and she’d been operating an internet and word-of-mouth campaign that already had sixty-seven sign-ups for that first opening night.
But, she said, she still wasn’t convinced that the food had that “spark” the new restaurant needed for a different kind of moneyed crowd.
“I think we need to do some field research,” she told Theo, her smile crooked as she clicked her pen. “Come with me to New York?”
Theo wore a white tank top that highlighted his growing muscles, muscles he'd popped over the past few weeks of hard labor at the restaurant. He was tanner than he’d been in years, and he was sleeping like a baby most nights, which had almost eliminated the bags under his eyes.
“What would I do in New York?” he asked.
Juliet threw her head back happily. “You’d do what you love to do. You’d eat and eat and eat.”
Theo pulled his fingers through his hair.
Was his heart really up for a trip to Manhattan with Juliet?
Since that first hug all those weeks ago, the two of them had been circling each other, conscious that it wouldn’t be comfortable to touch one another too often, to draw one another close.
Theo hated that his dreams had already begun to include Juliet in a constant rotation.
Sometimes Callie was included in the dreams, just before they shifted into nightmare territory.
“You’d actually be helping me out,” Juliet added, switching tactics. “The people living in my apartment in Greenwich need me to come by and check on something. And I think I left a necessary box in their closet. I’d be going anyway.”
Theo wet his lips, thinking of Danica, the daughter he’d still never met. “Wouldn’t your daughter like to go with you instead?”
Juliet’s eyes fluttered down. “I don’t know.
She’s mostly in her room. I’m sure she’d love to go to the city, but I have a hunch that she’d run away from me and hide out at her friend’s place and leave me all worried and, yeah.
” She suddenly looked far older than her late thirties.
Theo sensed that that was what having children did to you. The worry was intense.
Finally, after another hour of poking and prodding and an entire evening of text messages, Theo broke down and said he’d go to Manhattan—but only for one night.
Immediately, Juliet made them three different reservations: one for dinner, one for breakfast, and another for lunch.
“We’re going to eat as much as we can while we’re there,” she said, her eyes alight.
“That gives you a little bit of time to fine-tune your plating and make those ‘artistic pieces’ the public loves so much.”
Theo groaned into a smile. “We’ll see.”
The drive from Bluebell Cove to Manhattan took six hours.
Throughout, Theo drove most of the way, grateful to Juliet for her DJ skills.
Juliet played all their hits from their teenage years: mostly tracks from 1999 to 2005, which, they agreed, had been an awful time for music, but music that remained in their bodies and memories forever.
Juliet tore open a bag of M&Ms and handed three over to Theo, who crunched them gratefully. He could feel her eyes studying him.
“Have you really not spent much time in the city?” she asked finally.
Theo laughed nervously. “I mean, I’ve been there. Several times. My ex-wife wanted me to come more often. She wanted to move there, toward the end.”
“But you wanted to stay in Bluebell Cove,” Juliet added thoughtfully.
Theo raised his shoulders. “You know, maybe that’s been my biggest crime my entire life. Maybe that’s been the thing that’s held me back. Small-town allegiance. It’s not like it’s really gotten me anywhere.”
“I don’t think of loyalty as a weakness,” Juliet said quietly, her eyes out the window. “Maybe I used to think that, but I don’t anymore. Not now that so many people have turned their backs on me.”
Theo’s hand flinched with the desire to reach over and touch her, though.
But right then, the song switched to “No Scrubs,” one of Callie’s all-time favorites.
The mood switched almost immediately, and Juliet’s face was twisted with surprise and shock.
She changed the song fast, but Theo’s ears continued to ring after, as though he couldn’t get the sound out of them.