Chapter Thirty-Five. Riley
Chapter Thirty-Five
Riley
I don’t cry until I’m home. I didn’t tell my dads I was coming; instead I take the Provincetown Inn shuttle from the airport into town and lug my suitcase down Commercial Street into the West End and to the front door of You’re My Lobster.
No one looks twice at me; in fact, the hundreds of gay men around me are probably looking anywhere but at me, and it’s a relief.
Everywhere I went with Luna, eyes were on us, and when they weren’t, it was because she’d strategized to avoid that.
Every room we went in, we had to draw the blinds.
Now I get to stand in the sunlight, surrounded by people, and actually enjoy it. It’s a relief. I leave my suitcase in the sand to the side of the shack and walk right into the kitchen, where Nick is boiling lobsters and Anthony is assembling rolls.
“Dad,” I say, and they both turn around, immediately stopping what they’re doing. And only then do I cry.
Anthony takes off his gloves in an instant and crushes me to him, and his apron is covered in lobster bits and oil and he smells like briny seafood and it’s the most incredible feeling ever.
Nick closes the boiler tank and wraps his arms around both of us, and just having them hold me slows my choked sobs to nothing.
“Honey, what’s wrong? Tell us everything?”
“I’ll tell you tonight,” I say. “Let me help out first.”
My apron is still hanging on the hook, as though they were just waiting for me to show up each day, and it breaks my heart a little bit.
I put it on over my clothes and take my place at the counter between Nick and Anthony, shelling and cleaning lobsters with a level of speed and precision only possible when you’ve been doing this since you could eat solid foods.
I crack claws and backs and slide the meat out, placing it in the giant bowl Anthony pulls from to assemble the rolls.
The dinner rush is hitting, and while two local teens take orders and two more make fries and lightly grill the buns, we assemble hundreds of thick meaty rolls.
I don’t think about anything except the job at hand for a few hours, and at the end of the night we make monster rolls for the teens to eat at the now empty picnic tables, and we take ours next door to our house.
For Provincetown, we have a big place, a sixteen-hundred-square-foot condo on the water that my dads bought back when they were a hundred thousand dollars in the nineties.
Back then they thought it was outrageously expensive, but now places like this go for millions, and the people who buy them only ever use them in the summertime.
It’s a lot of work to have a place on the water like this in the winter—we’re fighting a constant losing battle with erosion—but it’s worth it to be able to live here.
We sit on our deck and listen to the water that’s lapping against it since it’s high tide, and dig in.
No matter how many incredible dishes I learn how to cook, nothing will ever top a perfect lobster roll.
A toasted brioche bun, thick chunks of meat, with just a bit of light mayo and the salt from the ocean water they’re boiled in to season them. It’s perfection.
“I missed this,” I say when I finished eating.
“We missed you,” Nick replies. “You have no idea how much. But now tell us everything. Where’s Luna? What’s happened?”
The pressure is building behind my eyes again, and I want to force it away, but I can’t do that and talk. “She released a song about what happened with Liv. After I told her I wasn’t okay with it.”
“Oh, honey,” Anthony says softly.
“I just can’t believe her. It’s so selfish.” I speak through my tears. “This wasn’t hers to talk about.”
“Can we hear the song?” Nick asks, and Anthony shoots him a look. He holds up his hands. “I just want to know what we’re working with!”
I take out my phone and play them the part of the song Luna posted, crying the entire time. She hasn’t even taken it down, after all that. My dads are quiet when it ends, and I start to put my phone away.
“Wait,” Anthony says. “Can you play it again?”
We listen again, and I can see the pain on their faces. “Honey, is that how you feel?” Anthony asks.
I’m sobbing now, and Nick gets up and holds me while I cry, until I’ve calmed down enough to speak.
I never told them what I was going through, or that I decided to give up on my culinary aspirations after what happened.
But now I have to be honest. “I was staging at Contessa. I was going to tell you the next day; I had gotten a job as a kitchen assistant. I wanted to quit school and study as a chef, try fine dining, maybe go to culinary school abroad. I wanted to just really try it all and see where I landed. I love fine dining, I love the elaborate meals, the ambiance of the restaurant, the fast pace. But after Liv … if I had just done what we’d always planned, it never would have happened.
So I decided to just stick to the plan. You were trying to give me a better life. I should have just been happy with it.”
“Riley, we love you,” Nick says firmly. “Liv’s death was a horrible tragedy, but it was not your fault.”
“Is that still your dream?” Anthony asks softly.
“I—I had let it go. But then doing this tour, and shadowing all the New York chefs and seeing all the restaurants abroad, I think I want something I hadn’t even thought of yet back then.
I want to do a high-end dinner service, but P-town style.
I want people to spend hours eating with friends with their feet in the sand and the tide creeping up to catch their toes.
I want to make a limited menu that’s all fresh and local and artisanal and so elaborate and beautifully plated.
I want it to be a place that everyone wants to get into, and where a family from here could be eating next to some famous person who’s on vacation. I want it to be beautiful.”
It’s finally all out there, and it’s terrifying. The moments while I wait to hear what my dads will say are the longest of my life. Nick exhales slowly in frustration and Anthony watches him.
“Riley, you can do that,” Anthony finally says. “We can do that.”
“Anthony,” Nick says sharply. “We talked about this. Anything else. It’s too hard. I’m not losing my other baby girl. Riley, you can get a nice job in some air-conditioned office where you get to leave at five. You don’t need to do this just because we do.”
“Dad. I want to. I’ve never wanted anything else.
” Nick looks away, and my heart falls. My dads are the only family I have left.
They’re so precious to me, I need them to be okay with this.
The tears are falling again, and I try to wipe them away but can’t keep up and instead end up blowing my nose into a plasticky napkin.
“Nick, sweetheart…” Anthony says gently, glancing between me and Nick. “If you don’t support her, you’ll lose her anyway.”
They stare at each other, and Nick angrily wipes away a tear before it can fall, nodding with gritted teeth.
He turns to me. “Riley, it’s really hard work, you know.
It’s stressful if you have a restaurant out here, making a year’s income in a few months.
Even if it’s fun in your twenties, it’s a hard lifestyle when you get older.
It’s exhausting, it wears people down, that’s when they start to drink at the end of the shift or—”
He cuts himself off, and I’m sure he’s thinking of Liv. I reach out and take Nick’s hands in mine. “I’m not her,” I whisper. “And I know all that. But I love it anyway. I’ve loved it since I had to stand on a stool to reach the counter in You’re My Lobster. I can do it. Just let me try.”
Nick nods emphatically. “Okay then. But if even for a moment it ever feels like too much … you need to say something. No more secrets.”
“I promise,” I agree.
Nick’s shoulders relax the tiniest bit. “Let’s start doing a dining service at our place so you can try it. You can do weekend fine dining; we’ll get some tables, put them on the beach.”
“Are you sure? What if it flops? Losing a whole weekend of money is a big deal.”
“We’re sure,” Anthony says. “We believe in you. If it works and you love it, next summer you can go all in.”
“You’re My Lobster is a Provincetown institution, though,” I argue, even though I should just take the win. “It’s, like, historic at this point.”
“Look around, honey,” Nick says with a shake of his head. “This town changes every year. We can change with it. We’re not so old that we can’t learn some new tricks. Let us be your sous chefs on the weekends for the rest of the season.”
“Why do you believe in me?”
“You’re our little girl, Riley. We believe in you because we know you.
We’ve seen all the incredible things you’ve cooked in your videos and on tour.
You’re our light, not the shack.” Anthony pulls me to him and kisses the top of my head, even though I probably have lobster juice in my hair.
“We could never be disappointed in you.”
“Thank you,” I say quietly. “Suspended Animation” is still playing on a loop in the background, and in the silence I listen to it. I wonder if I would have had this conversation if it weren’t for the song.
“It is a good song,” Nick remarks as it starts again.
“It was messed up of her to put it out like this. Like, I know she’s a songwriter, but this was so personal for me.” I pause and sigh. “Liv would’ve loved to have a Luna Leya song about her.”
Anthony smiles, his eyes wet. “Yeah, she really would’ve.”
We sit there on the deck and listen to the song.
And the more we listen, the less it hurts.
Luna went about it all wrong. She should have talked to me; she should have played it for me and asked me again and respected my wishes.
But I think this is the first time she’s dated someone and had the relationship be full of mutual respect, rather than just separate lives that intersected here and there for photo ops.
Luna’s helped me face my fears and trauma head-on, and work up the courage to admit and go after what I want.
I love her, even the messy parts. And if she’s willing to face her mistake and learn from it, then I’m here, waiting, to continue to grow together.