Chapter Thirty-Seven. Riley
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Riley
The next morning, I roll out of bed at the crack of dawn to go out and collect lobsters from our traps with Nick.
Most summers I mainly just help in the kitchen, but after not being on the water since last year I miss it.
He’s already up when I walk downstairs in my rattiest shorts and sweatshirt that I only wear out on the boat, and he hands me a thermos of coffee.
We walk through town to the docks, and I love this time of day in Provincetown.
Usually it’s so busy here in the summer, you can barely walk down the street without swerving around tourists and pedicabs, but now it’s peaceful and beautiful.
The sun is just starting to peek through in the gaps of ocean view we see between houses, the air is cool and still, and the only people up are the locals who are preparing to work for the day.
We wave to restaurant owners who are awaiting deliveries and the other fisherman owners who are going out to get the fresh catch for dinner tonight.
My dads’ boat is nothing fancy. It’s a thirty-five-foot lobster boat that’s older than I am and that Nick lovingly maintains and keeps clean.
It always smells faintly of lobster, and any surface is rough with dried salt no matter how frequently he hoses it down.
We barely talk as we set off. We just pull on our bright yellow rubber overalls and rubber jackets and set off toward his traps.
Nick lets me drive since I haven’t all summer, and once we’re out past the no-wake zone and zipping toward our traps, I glance at him and see he’s taking a video of me.
“Dad!” I laugh. “Stop! I look ridiculous.”
“You need all those internet kids to see what catching your food looks like! All they’ve seen you do is make fancy-pants meals for your girlfriend. Let’s show them what lobstering looks like.”
I roll my eyes and turn back to the boat, slowing down as we reach our traps.
We never anchor near the traps so we don’t risk tangling our anchor in our traps and all the others out here.
Instead I stop the boat, and my dad films me as I fish the buoy that our five traps are attached to up onto the boat.
“Are you seriously going to just take videos the whole time?” I say when I finally get the bright blue buoy up onto the boat. Every lobster fisherman has a different color buoy so we know which traps are ours.
“Give your old man a break,” Nick teases. “I’ve been doing this alone all summer. Let me be your cameraman. Share the art of the lobster with the masses.”
I take off my rubber jacket, sweating now that I’m working, and put on my gloves and reel in the traps.
I pull them onto the boat, open them up, and start pulling up lobsters.
Any that are a reasonable size I put in the box on the side to measure, but I throw several snappers back in right away because I can see how small they are.
I find one mama lobster and hold it out to my dad, grinning.
I always loved finding a lobster with eggs as a kid.
I explain what I’m doing as I tag her tail so people know she’s a breeder, and hold her up to reveal the thousands of eggs on her tail, before throwing her back in.
There’s something almost meditative about this process, which I’ve done since I was a little girl, and even though I don’t love it like I do cooking, it’s relaxing to feel the wind in my hair and the sun on my cheeks as I work.
But it is a lot of work. My dad and I haul out and check two hundred traps in a few hours before heading back to the dock, and for the first time it hits me just how old my dads are getting.
Nick is strong and weathered, but by the time we’re done, he seems tired.
We have a lot of traps out to keep up with demand, but I don’t know how much longer he can maintain this grueling pace.
Maybe they really wouldn’t mind if You’re My Lobster didn’t only deal in massive quantities of lobster.
The other night I assumed they were just being kind when they said they supported whatever I wanted to do. I was sure that they must just love me too much to tell me how disappointed they are. But maybe they’re really not.
As we haul the buckets of lobsters off the boat and into our truck, which Anthony parked at the dock while we were out, I try to take the heavier loads. “I miss this,” I say as we heft them into the dirty truck bed. “I miss you.”
“This? Really?” Nick teases. He tosses a lobster at me, live and squirming, and I catch it and drop it back in the bucket full of water.
“We missed you too, sweetie. So much. But … even though I wish it were something else, I’m glad you took the time to explore and figure out what you wanted.
I want you to be happy. And you should still do the rest of the tour; it’s not like we’ll be open in the winter anyway. You’re only young once.”
I nod, but I’m not sure where Luna and I stand right now. I don’t even know if we’re together. In the truck, I finally take my phone out of the dry bag I had it in while we were on the boat and see I have about a million notifications.
I open the text from Anthony first and see it’s a link to a video.
I click it, then watch a video of Luna and Hudson singing to each other.
It doesn’t seem like anything that crazy, until I notice the date on the video is last night.
When they work it out, the caption reads.
I know Luna wouldn’t go back to Hudson. But I’m tired of being a pawn in her scheme to carefully curate every aspect of her life for the perfect publicity.
This song was a step too far, and if she really can’t see that, if she’s really still playing more games like this, I don’t know if we’ll be able to work things out.
I don’t know when I’ll see her again. I don’t know if I’ll see her again. I don’t know anything anymore.
I spend the weekend working at the shop, but come Monday, when things are a bit less busy, I dive into preparations for the weekend dinner service.
I make flyers advertising it and put them in all the cafés—Relish, Kohi, Joe, Spiritus, Mama Matcha, Liz’s—hanging them alongside the flyers for popular drag shows like SHOWGIRLS!
and the Errors Tour. I don’t want to shut down my dads’ shop for the night just to have no one show up and make them lose out on an entire weekend of revenue.
I buy mismatched wooden tables and chairs at the Methodist church thrift store, and in the morning before we open I stage them, pulling the picnic tables to the side and setting tables leading all the way from the sandy top of the beach to where the water would be licking people’s feet.
The tide goes out as the evening goes on here, so we can add more tables throughout the night.
I fill the sand between the shack and our place, and invite all of the neighbors to come for free dinner in hopes they don’t complain about turning the beach into a fine-dining restaurant for the night.
In town I spend a fortune buying white linen tablecloths and napkins, and then go hunting through all of the thrift stores in Wellfleet for beautiful mismatched plates. This isn’t going to look like a classic restaurant, but I don’t want it to. I want it to be perfectly me.
All week I plan the menu, which will have only three options for each course.
I need to keep things simple in order to make this work.
In New York I learned a lot about how to pace and shop for a dinner service, which is much more complicated than I’d ever realized.
Cooking for one or hosting one big dinner is one thing.
Having enough food to continuously run a dinner service is something else entirely.
I settle on a lobster pasta, seared swordfish steak, and a shrimp-and-clam ravioli for the mains, and then baked oysters; a tomato, peach, and feta salad; and seared asparagus for appetizers.
For dessert, I’ll offer either a homemade ice cream sandwich or a strawberry cheesecake.
It’s a simple menu, but I practice the dishes all week until they’re perfect, and I make sure to source more than enough of the ingredients, besides the lobsters, of course, from the local farmers and fishmongers.
For drinks, I offer three cocktails: a Hugo, a basil gimlet, and a Cape Cod martini, along with wine pairings for each of the mains. It’s very minimal, but the flavors complement the food, and the wine is from Truro Vineyards.
On Thursday I post a printout of the menu on our shack window, and all day long I catch people from town looking it over.
I share all of this on TikTok, and the videos do well, but most of the people watching don’t live here, so I can’t count on them for attendance.
And I didn’t take reservations, so until Friday, I don’t know what will happen.
My dads sell lobster rolls until four in the afternoon, and then they turn the kitchen over to me and act as my sous chefs while the teens who take orders set up the tables and go home to change before acting as waiters for the first time ever.
We prep everything we can in advance: shelling lobster, assembling ice cream sandwiches, and batch making cocktails.
I make plates of each dish for my dads and the waiters to try, and instruct them on what to say about each one.
I hand out stacks of printed menus. And suddenly it feels like I’ve blinked and then it’s 7 PM and dinner service has started and my heart is in my throat as I go outside to see if anyone has come.