2. The Rationing
The Rationing
Come June on the Hollow you learned the hours or the hours broke you.
Before ten in the morning, the air was soft off the water, light coming in low and gold across the marsh grass, the brick sidewalks downtown still cool enough underfoot to let you believe the day might be reasonable.
After six in the evening you got that back.
The heat finally peeled itself off the pavement and went wherever heat goes, and the whole island exhaled, salt air moving through the streets again.
Everything in between was a debt you paid in sweat with a side of possible heat exhaustion.
By six thirty, downtown had come back to itself, and I was walking the strip with Madeline's hand in mine, feeling the evening the way you feel a sauce coming together.
The temperature dropping just enough, the light going amber and then rose over the marina, the storefronts along Harbor Street throwing warm gold onto the brick.
You could walk the whole length of downtown and know half the people you passed.
A stretch of storefronts the Hargrove family had spent nearly a hundred years making look this effortless.
Whitewashed buildings with second-floor porches strung with lights just beginning to matter as the sky went down.
A gallery sitting between a provisions store that had been in the same family since before my father was born and a wine bar new enough to still be proving itself.
Bougainvillea worked up the ironwork over restaurant doors.
And underneath all of it, the smell of whatever Celestine was pulling out of her oven on Marsh Street, drifting down to meet the salt air and turning into something that had no business smelling that good.
Madeline walked beside me in a white dress that ended above the knee, hair down, gold hoops picking up the last of the light every time she turned her head.
She had her hand in mine and she was telling me something about a family she'd recognized on the ferry, somebody her mother knew.
I heard her. I was present. I was also somewhere slightly behind my own eyes, the way I'd been since February, watching my life happen from just close enough to participate.
The Perch sat on the corner of Harbor and Elm, second floor of a building old enough to have earned its historical marker and wise enough to keep a bar worth sitting at behind its oldest walls.
Open air on three sides. Ceiling fans overhead.
The whole place looked out over the marina, where the boats had settled in for the evening.
We took the two stools at the end of the rail where the view was best.
Cress appeared before we'd finished settling. He'd been at The Perch every summer since before I was old enough to take a stool at it, and he set napkins down in front of us the way he always did.
"Chef Duckworth," he said.
"Cress." I lifted my chin at him. "Season treating you all right?"
"Early yet," he said. "Which means it's still good."
He looked at Madeline the way every man with vision does. The way every man had pretended not to during our walk here. He took in what he was looking at with the practiced restraint of a man who had learned that the bar was not the place for what his face wanted to do.
"What are we drinking tonight?" He asked politely.
"French 75 for her," I decided, without looking at the menu. "Hendricks, St. Germain, fresh lemon, top it with Billecart-Salmon if you have it."
Cress nodded like he appreciated the specificity.
"And for you Chef?"
"Blanton's," I said. "Neat. One rock."
Cress smiled at something in the middle distance and went to build the drinks. Madeline was looking at me sideways, a smile pulling at the corner of her mouth like it was on a line she hadn't decided whether to reel in.
"You ordered for me."
"I did."
"I could've wanted something else."
"Tell me one thing in that order you'd change."
I watched her realize I’d been paying attention since the first night she sat at my bar.
"That's what I thought," I teased, and turned back to the water like the matter was closed.
She smirked. "You were supposed to say something charming there. Let me off the hook."
"I don't do hooks." I reached over without looking and ran my thumb once across her knuckles. "I do orders. You'll drink it and you'll close your eyes on the first sip, like you do, and then you can tell me I was wrong about you. I'll wait."
Cress set the French 75 down in front of her first, the champagne still moving in the glass, a thin curl of lemon peel draped over the rim catching the bar light. It looked like something you'd paint if you were trying to capture what the last day of June was supposed to feel like.
My bourbon arrived. I picked it up and held it for a second, felt the weight of the glass, the cold of the ice against my palm, then took a slow pull and let it settle.
Madeline lifted her glass and looked at me over the rim. She took the first sip with her eyes wide open, defiant, staring straight at me the whole time. Her eyes involuntary, closed anyway halfway through the swallow.
"Goddamn it," she said, eyes still shut.
I laughed and she opened her eyes and pointed at me with the glass.
"Don't you dare sit there looking satisfied."
"I'm not satisfied." I turned my glass on its napkin. "I'm right. Different feeling. Better finish."
"You know what your problem is?" She swiveled her stool toward me, knee sliding between mine like it had a reservation there. The white dress had moved up when she sat down and she had not corrected it. "You've been paying attention to me all this time and letting me think I was chasing you."
"Maybe."
"Maybe." She took another sip, slower, holding my eyes as if she was seeing the truth now. "But a man doesn't memorize a woman's drink, down to the last detail and then complains about being caught."
"Nobody's complaining."
"No?" Her hand found my forearm, right on the gardenia, and this time she didn't trace it. She just held on, thumb pressing into the muscle like she was checking whether I was real. "Then tell me something true, Chef."
She leaned in close enough that I got her perfume over the salt air, warm and expensive with something reckless underneath.
"Have you been enjoying your time here with me?”
"Yeah," I answered without hesitation. "I am."
Something in my own voice surprised me. It sounded like a man at a bar with a beautiful woman on a summer evening, nothing underneath it, nothing behind glass. It sounded uncomplicated. I hadn't heard myself sound like that in a long time.
"Okay," She said looking out to the marina.
"Okay what?"
"Just okay." She turned back, and set her glass down, and then leaned in until her mouth close enough to my ear. "Because you should know what happens to men who tell me the truth. They get rewarded. And you've been so careful all week, baby. Building your little braise."
She pulled back just far enough to look at me, and her eyes had gone dark under the brim of the evening.
"But I've been thinking about your hands since the pool."
"Yeah?" I heard myself ask.
"Mmhmm." She smiled like she'd heard it too, the gap between the man and his gates.
Then she reached over, took my bourbon out of my hand, and helped herself to a slow sip, eyes on me the whole time. She set it back down in front of me with the cube rattling.
"So here's my order, since we're taking turns. We’re gonna have a good time here tonight. Then you’ll walk me home, and when we get inside, I want everything you've been rationing. Every hour of that patience, all at once, until I understand exactly what it's been costing you to hold back."
Her thumb slowly dragged once across my bottom lip.
"You've had your hands on me all week like I'm something that might break. Tonight I want to find out what happens when a man like you stops being careful. Don't be a gentleman, Dillion." Her mouth found my ear. "Be thorough."
Then she swiveled back to face the water, picked up her own glass like she'd asked me about the weather, and crossed her legs with the satisfaction of a woman who knows exactly what she'd just done.
And I, Dillion Duckworth the Third, heir to a restaurant, trained in two countries most men in Oak Hill couldn't find on a map, a man who had once told a food critic to his face that his palate was provincial, swallowed my next thought whole and sat there without a single word in my pockets.
She'd turned the board around in one move.
Because here was the truth I'd been plating around all week: the carefulness wasn't for Madeline.
Madeline had never asked for careful. The slow wasn't some philosophy of mine either, whatever I'd preached in the pool.
The slowness was a door I was keeping open for a woman who had stood on the other side of one in February and let it stay shut.
I'd been running my life like a table I was holding for a party that called to cancel. Months now, I’d been wiping it down, keeping the setting fresh, turning other people away from it, telling myself that's just professionalism.
That table was costing me covers. Madeline had spent days on The Hollow with me and I was plating for a ghost.
You can't cook for the dead, my grandmother used to say.
She meant grief. She meant you make the food for the living or the food makes you bitter.
I looked at the living, sitting right there, gold hoops and dark eyes and one knee still between mine, and something that had been standing at attention in me since February finally, finally stood down.