13. Monday
CHAPTER 13
MONDAY
T he Blue Harbor Fourth of July parade had gone off with only three major hitches. First, there had been a last-minute tie-dye incident with one of the Junior cabins. Fortunately, the dye was non-toxic, so the group of blue-skinned campers were really just looking especially festive. Next, there had been a group of teenaged campers who’d briefly staged a protest to object to compulsory celebration of a country they felt, in their words, “in a lot of ways kind of sucks.” Maggie, who might not put it exactly like that but happened to broadly agree with the critique, was happy to let them sit out the parade and opt-in to the cookout. Finally, there had been a bit of a kerfuffle when Parton apparently decided that the balloons adorning one cabin’s wagon-slash-parade-float were a major threat to health and safety that could only be defended against by consistent barking. Jordan thankfully managed to lure him away with a piece of chicken borrowed from Chef Chuck’s buffet and accompanied Parton on a nice, long walk on the opposite end of camp.
Now, finally, it was the buffet’s time to shine.
Maggie had skipped breakfast to help with preparations and had taken more than her usual number of detours to beg coffee from the camp kitchen. In her defense, she had also diligently downed at least part of a glass of water each time, even though Chuck had been too busy today to glare her into proper hydration. All of which was to say, Maggie was very excited for a burger.
Chuck had outdone himself. As Maggie made her way down the 30-foot-long buffet laid out on the main green, she passed an extensive selection of bun options, hot dogs, veggie dogs, hamburgers, veggie burgers, a tin pan full of sandwiches just labeled “vegan,” and a topping selection that included six different kinds of cheese and three different ketchups. She bypassed the drinks table, which was absolutely mobbed because Blue Harbor didn’t regularly serve soda at meals, but the celebratory holiday refreshments available included RC Cola. More caffeine was probably not the move anyway since Maggie had noticed her hand visibly shaking as she’d reached for the plastic tongs to grab some lettuce and tomato. She needed to get some protein into her.
Looking around for a shady seat, she spotted Teddy sitting with Miss Lucille and Nurse April on the steps of the Main Lodge. She hadn’t actually invited Teddy—it hadn’t even occurred to her, which she felt a little badly about in hindsight—but she had at some point during one of their text exchanges mentioned the existence of the July Fourth cookout and that had apparently been enough of a formal invitation for her little brother. She couldn’t say why hanging out at a summer camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains was his best option for a notoriously drunk and swimsuit-clad holiday, but she suspected it had at least a little to do with avoiding her parents’ annual UNC-professor-heavy backyard bash.
Maggie had received a call from her mother between the first and second major hitches in her morning, while she was trying to help one of her counselors track down the red, white, and blue bunting. She blamed the bunting (which had been accidentally misdirected to the crafts room) for distracting her enough that she answered instead of sending the call to voicemail and trying Kathleen back when the generalized chaos had subsided. She knew better.
“Hello dear, what’s this I hear about a Fourth of July cookout that your father and I were not invited to?”
“Hi mom. I’m doing pretty well. How’ve you been?” Maggie had said, holding the phone between her shoulder and her ear as she dug through an upper crafts room cabinet full of pipe cleaners, beads, and at least a hundred shades of glitter.
“Yes, yes, how are you et cetera— don’t play that game with me Margaret. You could call me, too, you know. Now, why is your brother not coming to our annual barbecue but instead attending your party to which we have not been invited?”
“Well, if it helps, Teddy hasn’t been invited either. I didn’t even know he was coming, but thanks for the heads up. And second, it’s not my party. It’s Blue Harbor’s cookout, which, technically is your party. Because, as you might recall, I currently run a summer camp on the theory that, when the paperwork is done, you are going to inherit it.”
“Alright dear,” her mother continued, ignoring the fight Maggie was rather obviously and ill-advisedly trying to pick, “but we are going to come visit you some time. How are things going out there?”
Maggie considered the property-tax sized hole she’d discovered in Blue Harbor’s finances, which she had not yet figured out a way to plug. She’d already exceeded her standard 48-hour crisis-solving window by several days, and the delay was beginning to make her anxious. She had a few ideas, sure, but none was past the research stage. If she couldn’t put together a convincing proposal to share with prospective buyers in the next few weeks, Daniel Becker’s prediction that Blue Harbor would be turned into some sort of vacation timeshare resort property was looking increasingly likely to come true.
She’d blithely brushed off the possibility when he’d mentioned it, partly because she hadn’t believed the situation was that dire, but mostly because she hadn’t been sure the idea bothered her. She hadn’t thought that Camp Blue Harbor could still be Camp Blue Harbor without Aunt Peg. But as famous economist John Maynard Keynes may or may not have ever actually said: “When my information changes, I change my mind.” Because, as it turned out, Camp Blue Harbor was very much still the place her aunt had cultivated, the place where Maggie had spent so many summers growing into herself. And the idea that it might not be that place for much longer bothered her after all.
But none of her potential solutions were ready for prime time, and Maggie never raised an issue without having a solution at the ready. So, when her mother prompted her again to share how things were going, Maggie just said, “Oh, you know, barely-controlled chaos.”
“Yes, I imagine that’s really the best you could hope for. Well done, dear. Oh, that’s your father walking in with those fancy hot dog buns he likes. Tell your brother we love him and that he’s not forgiven. Happy Fourth!”
And she’d hung up.
Maggie was now about five feet away from passing that message along to Teddy when a shoulder bumped her right arm and nearly sent her much-anticipated burger sliding off the side of her compostable plate.
“Sorry I—” The owner of the offending shoulder turned away from the person she’d been talking to and froze when she registered Maggie’s face.
It took Maggie a second to place her. She looked familiar. Maggie knew her. And from the way she was staring, she knew Maggie, too. Four or five inches shorter than her, athletic build, sandy blonde hair tied back. There weren’t all that many people in the area that Maggie knew who didn’t work for her. The vet tech at the ER? Someone from the cell phone place or Goodwill? And then the woman tucked a strand of hair that had fallen out of her messy bun back behind her ear, and it clicked.
“Hi,” said the bartender whose name might have been— “It’s Drew.”
Yes. Drew. That was it.
“Drew. Hi,” Maggie said automatically. And then, realizing she’d never actually given the other woman her name, “Maggie.”
Drew’s lips twitched and her eyebrows rose in a way that could only be described as smug, but before Maggie had a chance to figure out why her name had elicited that particular reaction, and, for that matter, why Drew was even at the Blue Harbor Fourth of July Cookout, which, admittedly, had rather lax security, another familiar voice chimed in.
“Have you met?”
It was—“Becker?” And there he stood, dark curly hair escaping from under the sides of a thematically appropriate sequined stars and stripes baseball cap.
“McArthur. We didn’t mean to intrude. Drew promised Chuck that we’d stop by to taste-test his vegan…delicacies.”
“This is your Maggie?” Drew asked Becker, eyes twinkling in a way Maggie found inexplicably menacing.
“This, uh, yes?” Color flooded Becker’s cheeks, and Maggie suddenly wondered what he’d said about her. It hadn’t actually occurred to her that he might have mentioned her to…anyone. “Drew, Maggie. Maggie, Drew.”
Drew held out her hand, and Maggie took it. “Nice to formally make your acquaintance.”
Still holding onto Drew, Maggie turned to Daniel. “Sorry, how do you two know each other?”
“Dan and me lived together in college,” Drew answered for him. “Sophomore, junior, and senior years.”
Oh, of course they did. Asheville only had a population of 100,000. There had to be at least 100 bartenders right? And Maggie was bisexual! She could have picked almost any of them! She wasn’t exactly embarrassed…Ok, yes, she was embarrassed. A casual hookup was one thing, but she had to admit her departure had been a little…unhinged. And rude. It had been a very long day! She was jet-lagged! She figured it would give the bartender a fun story to tell! She just really would have preferred it not be a story told to Daniel Becker, possibly the most wholesome man alive.
Turns out she kind of didn’t want him to think badly of her? Gross.
“How do you two know each other,” asked Teddy, who had suddenly appeared at Maggie’s elbow, attracted like a moth to the flame of low-stakes interpersonal drama. It was then that Maggie remembered they had an audience. Out of the corner of her eye she caught April and Miss Lucille both scowling in Teddy’s direction from where they remained seated. She suspected that they objected not to his intrusion on a private conversation, but to the fact that his intrusion had ruined the opportunity for some perfectly good eavesdropping.
“Oh, Maggie came into the bar a few weeks ago.” Then she winked—winked!—at Maggie, and added, “Good tipper.”
“Is that what the kids are calling it these days?” Teddy asked with unhelpful delight, and Maggie was sure she heard Miss Lucille snort.
Maggie chanced a sideways glance at Daniel. She could almost see his brain glitching, working to fit this new information into his perception of her.
Before she could figure out what to say (“It wasn’t you. It was me.” was her best current proposal, and it really needed workshopping), Chef Chuck appeared, as if out of thin air, carrying two plates with what looked like the sandwiches from the buffet’s vegan section.
“I have brought for taste testing,” he announced to Drew and Becker, either blithely unaware of or deeply uninterested in the scene he was interrupting. It could be hard to tell with him. “No meat. No cheese. No butter. No eggs. All joy gone from the recipe.”
“I don’t know if you want to pitch it exactly that way…” Drew said grabbing a plate.
“Why not? It is not accurate? Taste.”
Daniel took the second plate from Chuck with noticeably less enthusiasm.
“Taste,” Chuck commanded again.
Drew picked up what looked like, but was apparently not, pulled pork between two potato buns and bit in. The assembled crowd watched as she closed her eyes and made a quiet sound of appreciation.
“Fuck, Chuck. This is delicious. What is this? Jackfruit?”
“Top secret recipe.”
“It’s fruit?” Becker asked, eyeing his own plate as though it might attack at any moment.
“It’s not armed and dangerous,” Drew said, through a second mouthful. “This is really excellent Chucky.”
“Spasibo.” Chuck nodded in acknowledgement of the praise but kept his eyes on Daniel.
Finally, Daniel grabbed his sandwich and, with a deep breath and a performatively skeptical look at Chuck, took a bite. He chewed tentatively, then contemplatively. Maggie found herself watching the muscles in his jaw work, which was, of course, reminding her of other times she’d seen his muscles tense, and now was really, really not the time, so she switched to watching Chuck watch Becker instead. The chef appeared to be holding his breath.
Finally, Daniel’s verdict came. “You know what? That was not half bad.”
Chuck broke into a smile so wide it transformed his entire face. “The producers will be happy.” He slapped Daniel heartily on the shoulder.
“Producers?” Maggie asked, as her chef began to head back toward his masterpiece of a buffet.
“Chuck will be on Excellent Food Truck Race,” Chuck himself called over his shoulder.
“I love that show,” said Miss Lucille from where she still sat on the steps of the Main Lodge, confirming that she could, indeed, hear every word of their earlier conversation. “Those women with the Creole food were absolutely robbed. I enjoy a good dill as much as the next person, but three men and a pickle truck?”
“Da!” Chuck yelled back in enthusiastic agreement as he disappeared into the crowd of campers.
“Alright well, I’d better be getting back to Oak Ridge,” Daniel announced, looking around somewhat desperately for a trash can. When he spotted one near where April and Miss Lucille sat, he crossed the distance in a few strides, dropped his mostly-full plate in, and turned back, watching the group he’d broken off from as though he were waiting for something. After a long moment, she saw him catch Drew’s eye.
“Looks like that’s my cue,” she said to no one in particular. “Nice seeing you again, Maggie.” She winked at her once more and headed over toward the trash can.
Long before they were out of earshot, Teddy said with evident glee, “Fantastic party.”
“Why are you even here?” Maggie asked, possibly misdirecting a bit of her inner turmoil in his direction.
“To celebrate the birth of our great nation, of course.”
“Mom says you’re not forgiven for missing the PhD bash, by the way.”
Teddy smiled beatifically. “I’m the baby. I’m always forgiven.” He nearly skipped back to his seat between Nurse April and Miss Lucille, leaving Maggie alone with her burger and her thoughts.