Maybe JJ and Christina will get married and have six kids and two Labradoodles, and JJ will coach football at the Boys and Girls Club and win citizenship awards, while Lizbet…what will Lizbet do? Work the front desk at a hotel that will receive a three-or possibly even two-key rating from Shelly Carpenter because the hotel is cursed or haunted or both—and that’s only if Shelly deigns to show up.
No, Lizbet won’t mope. She won’t engage in negative thinking. She tries to recall an inspirational meme, but the only one that comes to mind is the quote attributed to Socrates, and she’s sick of it.
Lizbet is careful to just sip her second cocktail. The strawberry and ginger and blood orange square-dance on her palate—spiraling out, reeling back in. She closes her eyes.
“It’s good, right?” Petey says. “Those strawberries were picked at Bartlett’s Farm this morning.”
“Did you tell Chef I was here?” Lizbet asks.
“I sure did.”
“Is he coming out?”
“Coming out here?” Petey says.
Yes, Lizbet thinks. That’s what chefs do when there’s a VIP—they come out to the dining room to say hello. It’s only a quarter past five, so there’s no way Mario is in the weeds yet.
“He doesn’t believe in it,” Petey says.
Lizbet feels stung; it’s another rejection—not that she cares one whit about Mario Subiaco. He’s full of himself.
She should probably leave. Even in 2022, there’s something a little pathetic about a woman sitting at a bar alone. Lizbet has a bottle of Krug champagne at home, languishing in the back of her fridge. She’ll drink the whole thing by herself. She was saving it for a monumental occasion, either good or bad. She had hoped, of course, for the former and gotten the latter, but there’s no denying that Christina taking over Lizbet’s job at the Deck is monumental.
Petey disappears into the back again and Lizbet can’t blame her for wanting to escape; Lizbet isn’t exactly a fountain of scintillating conversation. When Petey returns, she’s holding a silver julep cup lined with parchment and filled with golden, crispy, paper-thin potato chips. Alongside these, she sets a dipping sauce that looks like creamy Thousand Island flecked with herbs.
“Our amnesia sauce,” she says. “It’s so good, it makes you forget everything else.”
Oh, but that this were true, Lizbet thinks. Then she tastes it—and for one sublime moment, she can’t remember her own name, much less the name of her ex-boyfriend or the wine rep he was sexting. For the next few minutes, she exists in a bubble where it’s only her, the Heartbreaker, the blue granite, and the world’s best chips and dip.
Elvis Costello yields to Van Morrison, “Crazy Love.” The playlist isn’t helping her, but what does help is Petey appearing with a trio of deviled eggs, one topped with bacon, one sprinkled with snipped chives, the third crowned with diced sweet red pepper. Lizbet takes a bite of each. They’re perfection. If Lizbet closes her eyes, she could swear she was back in Minnetonka at the annual First Lutheran…
“Chef calls these his church-picnic eggs,” Petey says.
Yes, precisely.
“Another Heartbreaker?” Petey asks.
“You betcha!” When Lizbet drinks, she starts sounding very Minnesota. “Please and thank you.” She’ll Uber home if she has to. Other people have entered the bar and are tucked into the banquettes. Lizbet doesn’t know anyone—yet. The second she sees a familiar face, she’ll leave.
The third Heartbreaker arrives along with three chilled soup shooters—curried zucchini, cream of Vidalia onion, and a spicy watermelon gazpacho. Behind that are two hot chicken sliders with house-made pickles and cafeteria tacos, which are like the ones Lizbet remembers from Clear Springs Elementary except the shells are crispier, the ground beef richer, the shredded cheese smokier, the tomatoes riper, and the iceberg crunchier. Lizbet takes a bite of this, a nibble of that. She watches sausages wrapped in puff pastry with some kind of mustard sauce go past her and she feels a pang of envy. She’ll get that next time, along with the painterly array of miniature vegetables from Pumpkin Pond Farm, served with buttermilk ranch. The food is so fresh and so fun and so flawlessly presented that Lizbet decides Mario Subiaco can have all the bragging rights he wants. The music picks up energy—Counting Crows, Eric Clapton. Lizbet bobs her head along. She hasn’t looked at her phone even once; she is not unproud of that. She’s a woman having fun at a bar alone. What was she afraid of?