Then he went back to his notebook, which is one of the reasons I hired him.
“Do you want me to treat you as the owner that night or as a guest of the party?”
“Guest. Please. Whatever you’d call anyone else, call me.”
“Then I’ll call you ma’am,” he said, “like I call every owner in front of guests. And you’ll hate it.”
“I’ll survive it.”
“One more thing. There’s going to be a question about a family rate.”
“There isn’t one. Don’t discount anything on the bill. I’ll handle it my own way.”
Teao’s left eyebrow went up half an inch and came back down.
He didn’t ask.
He would have asked anyone else.
That eyebrow was the closest he came to telling me what he thought of my own way.
And I appreciated that he kept it to an eyebrow.
Around 11, my phone buzzed.
Brooke.
Coffee. Want you to see the ring.
Then a ring emoji.
I answered in a second.
Yes, of course.
She chose a coffee place on King Street where the cups had no handles.
The ring was two carats, cushion cut, and it caught the window light and threw it around like it had somewhere to be.
Brooke held her hand out over the little table so I could look and kept her fingers spread while she talked.
The Whitlocks.
Celeste, who was very particular.
Grant’s father, Hollis, who didn’t say much.
A wedding in June somewhere on the water.
They hadn’t decided.
“So that night,” she said, “don’t make a big thing about the work stuff.”
“Okay.”
“Celeste asked what you do, and I said you’re at Larks. That’s enough. She doesn’t need the whole résumé.”
“Okay.”
“And you know how to, like, float? If the server’s slow or whatever, just keep an eye on things for me. You’re good at that.”
I put my cup down.
“Brooke, about Larks—”
“Don’t tell me you couldn’t get the room.”
“I got the room.”
She came around the table and hugged me.
A real hug.
Arms all the way around, her chin on my shoulder, the way she used to do when she was 14 and taller than me already.
And I swallowed the rest of the sentence the way I’d swallowed a lot of sentences over 17 years.
I told her the room was hers.
Driving home, I passed the high school where my father taught chemistry for 22 years.
And I thought about the spring I was 19.
Because to explain why I swallowed it, that’s where I have to start.
My father died on a Tuesday in March.
Standing at the sink rinsing a coffee mug.
A stroke.
He was 51.
I was in my second semester at the University of South Carolina, 90 minutes up the road in Columbia, and I came home for a week.
I never went back.
My mother, Diane, stopped opening the mail, so I opened it.
The mortgage was already a month behind because Dad had been the one who paid things and Dad had been the one who died.
The life insurance policy everyone assumed was large was not large.
It was a teacher’s policy.
It covered the funeral and about six weeks of everything else.
Brooke was 14.
She slept in my room for three months on a mattress on the floor beside my bed because she couldn’t sleep alone.
And every night, I read to her.
Not kids’ books.
She was too old for that, and she’d tell you so.
Whatever I had.
Half a semester of a Victorian novel.
Then a mystery from the library.
Then the same mystery again because she liked knowing how it ended.
I’d read until her breathing changed.
Then I’d lie there and do the math on the mortgage in my head.
Three weeks after the funeral, I walked down Queen Street to the restaurant with the green door, the one that was always full.
I went around to the back where the kitchen entrance was and knocked.
A man in his late 50s with flour on his forearms opened it.
Augustine Pereira.
Everyone called him Gus.
“I need a job,” I said. “I’ll do anything.”
He looked at me for a while.
I think he saw the funeral on me.
I think I was still wearing it.
He went inside and came back with a waiter’s corkscrew.
The plain kind.
A little knife and the hinged lever.
He put it in my hand.
“Anything you break,” he said, “you learn to open.”
I dropped a full tray my first shift.
Six glasses.
Nobody laughed.
Somebody handed me a broom, and Gus said:
“Now you know how it sounds.”
And that was all anyone ever said about it.
I was supposed to stay a year.
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