Claire rubs her eyes and lets her forearm fall across her face. “Mommy?” she says. “What’s a love child?”
“Alove child? Where did you hear that?”
“I heard Pauline say it,” says Claire sleepily. “When I was listening from the bathroom to the kitchen.”
“Who was she talking to?”
“I don’t know. I think she was on the phone.”
Louisa studies Claire, with her fair hair and her fair skin, both hiding a fiery spirit. Claire is not yet eight! Louisa hasn’t treated her to the Facts of Life talk. “A love child is a child who is loved very much,” she says.
“Oooh, that sounds really nice,” says Claire. “So I’m a love child.” She turns on her side on the beach towel and goes back to sleep.
16.
Kristie
Kristie has half the deck for the lunch shift, and Todd, who tends bar when he’s not serving, has the other half. It’s a fine, clear day; Kristie can see well across the harbor, all the way to the breakwater. The boat traffic is steady: not just the bigger boats coming from Camden, but the smaller boats in their slips are coming in or going out, and all along the pier she can hear fragments of words or sentences and the cries or laughter of children and the squawking of gulls.
At table three, one of Todd’s tables, sit two women in their sixties, one with dark hair, and one with a blond-silvery mix. It’s a four-top and Kristie can tell by the seats they’ve chosen, next to each other rather than across from one another, that they are close.
“It’s the saddest thing,” the woman with the dark hair says. Something in her voice makes Kristie stop and listen. “It’s enough to break your heart. Corinne, believe me when I tell you that Martin Fitzgerald had one of the finest minds I’ve ever known, in all my days on the bench, and before that, all way back to clerking, and law school. If it weren’t for him there would have been, I don’t know,countlesspeople withering in the jails after a drug—” The woman turns her head toward the water and the rest of her words are lost to Kristie.
Kristie takes a painfully long time clearing the plates from table six—so long that she sees Fernando glaring at her from the doorway—but then the clatter of a bus tray from across the deck drowns out the rest of what the woman is saying.Martin Fitzgerald.She wants to sit down. Her heart is beating fast, and her fingers are quivering. Table seven signals for the check, which, owing to the setup of the deck and the way the tables are numbered, brings her back in orbit with the two women.
She delivers the check to seven, then she drops a napkin near table four and bends to pick it up. She makes herself busy folding a clean napkin in thirds to put under an imaginary wobble on one of the table legs so she can study the women more closely. They are drinking white wine and eating salads. They have expensive haircuts and expensive perfume and each wears a single expensive-looking bracelet (one silver, one gold) and even the way they tip their heads toward each other looks expensive, like they’ve been trained in a special expensive school to do so.
“It’s a terrible disease,” the blondish one says. “Simply awful, Nina, I know. Oh, I’m so sorry to hear it.”
“Kristie!” says Fernando sharply. He’s right next to her.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “This table was doing that thing again.”
A few minutes later, at the bar, Kristie and Todd are both waiting to pick up their drinks. Kristie says, “Who’s that woman? At table four? The one with the dark hair?”
Todd shrugs. “Girl, how should I know? You think I know the name of each and every one of my customers?”
“Right,” she says. “No.”
He smile-smirks at her and garnishes a seltzer with a lime. “Do you know the names ofyourcustomers?”
“No! No, of course not. I just thought she looked familiar, that’s all.” Her knees feel unsteady. Maybe she misheard the name.
At the end of her shift she’s rolling silverware, thinking about the thing she has to do as soon as she clocks out. She knows Danny is working at the Fitzgeralds’ today after his work for Gil is done, so she has time. He won’t be back for a couple of hours.
“Earth to Kristie!” says Fernando. How is it that he’severywhere,constantly popping up like a Whac-A-Mole? She braces herself and looks up. Fernando is holding a clipboard, has a pen behind his ear. “Any interest in a double? Lexi called in sick.”
“I can’t today,” says Kristie. “Sorry, Fernando.” She knows Lexi isn’t sick. Her boyfriend is visiting from Atlanta and they’re going out to dinner in Camden. They have a reservation at Peter Ott’s; Kristie was standing right next to Lexi when Lexi made it. Seven o’clock on the deck. There is nothing a server likes more than going out to another restaurant to be wined and dined. Kristie understands this, and she likes Lexi, but this is not her problem. Kristie is so, so tired. She can’t imagine taking on a dinner shift.
“Plans?” says Fernando with a slight sneer. “Big night out?”
“Something like that,” says Kristie. “Not that it’s any of your business.” More Netflix; maybe a pizza. Plus the thing she has to do.
“Your loss,” says Fernando. “Lexi was in station one.” Station one is the best one. You walk with at least two hundred after a busy night in station one.
“I guess it is,” she says, shrugging, but not too hard. It’s a lot of money she’s giving up by saying no. She got another call from the collector on her way to work—her phone saidprivate number,so she didn’t answer, but she knows they’ll catch up with her. When she thinks about how many baked stuffed haddocks she’ll have to serve to get to $27,000 she wants to lie down on the stack of napkins and go to sleep while somebody else figures out her problems.
“You should smile more,” says Fernando, when she’s clocking out. “You’re a lot prettier when you smile, you know.”
