“You never wanted to get married?”
“When I met JJ, I was too young to get married. Then we became sort of anti-establishment. We wanted to be like Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. We thought getting married would kill the romance. But JJ killed it a different way.”
“I take it Tina is the new girlfriend?” Mario says.
“Christina, yes, our former wine rep. A woman I used to like.” Lizbet tells Mario about Last Night at the Deck, finding the texts, their subsequent breakup.
“Ouch,” Mario says. “I’ll point out that he’s not good enough for you.”
“He was, though,” Lizbet says. She has a hard enough time understanding this herself, much less explaining it to someone else. What she had with JJ was real. Every minute together felt like an investment in their future—breakfast, lunch, dinner, drives, walks, cocktail parties, meetings with food vendors, trips to the post office, ferry rides, the vacations to Bermuda and Napa and Jackson Hole, holidays with her family in Minnetonka and his parents in Binghamton, every movie they watched, every show they binged, every song they heard on the radio, every cookbook they tried a recipe from, every funeral they attended （there had been three）， every wedding （six）， every baptism （five）， every beach day, every text and call, every trip to the Stop and Shop, every house they toured before buying the cottage on Bear Street, the fights and quarrels, the flat tires and dead batteries, the leaks in the ceiling and the power outages and the day the fridge died, the football games, the concerts （Kenny Chesney, the Foo Fighters, Zac Brown）， the burns and cuts in the restaurant kitchen and the head colds and stomach bugs at home—all of these things had been like bricks in a fortress that was supposed to keep Lizbet safe and happy for the rest of her life. She and JJ had inside jokes, secret code words, routines and rituals. Lizbet scratched JJ’s back every morning; she knew where his spot was, southeast of the shamrock tattoo in the center of his back that was always extra-itchy. On Sunday mornings in the winter, JJ would draw Lizbet a bath, light her scented candles, and leave her a pile of food magazines. While she was in the tub, he would go to Nautilus to pick up Caleb’s bagels with sriracha schmear and they would eat in the kitchen—Lizbet still in her bathrobe—while they listened to old Springsteen concerts. Those Sunday mornings were sacred, their version of church.
Lizbet had actually thought they would get married someday, despite their cool posturing. She wanted a marquise-cut diamond, she wanted a ceremony on the beach at Miacomet followed by a clambake; she wanted to dance in her wedding dress at the Chicken Box. They had talked about children—they wanted two—and when Lizbet missed her period in January of 2021, they were both giddy and nervous. It wasn’t exactly what they had planned—a baby arriving in September, Lizbet hugely pregnant all through the summer season—but they both grinned like crazy, calling each other Maw and Paw, naming the baby “Bubby”—and when Lizbet started to bleed at nine weeks, they cried in each other’s arms.
The sexting with Christina had started that summer. JJ had bulldozed the fortress. Worse, he’d allowed Lizbet to think that the fortress had existed only in her mind.
The ending, rather than creating a stronger place that Lizbet could launch from into a new, different, better-quality life, was an obliteration, as though fifteen years of Lizbet’s life—her prime years, twenty-three to thirty-eight—had vaporized. She couldn’t salvage anything from them except the knowledge that she had, technically, survived.
Lizbet drinks what’s left in her jelly jar and turns to Mario. “You’re how old? Forty…？”
“Forty-six.”
“Have you ever had your heart broken?”
Mario sighs. “Not like that. Not by a woman, romantically. But when Fiona died…”
Fiona Kemp, Lizbet thinks. Chef of the Blue Bistro. She died of cystic fibrosis at the end of the 2005 season. It’s Nantucket restaurant-world legend.
“…and when the Blue Bistro closed, my heart broke. It’s going to sound pompous as hell, but it was the dismantling of a dynasty. The bistro was the best, not because of the food or the location…it was the best because of the people. It was like a winning football team before the quarterback declares free agency and goes to a different team or like that string of golden summers at sleepaway camp before you get your driver’s license and a job making subs at Jersey Mike’s. We all knew Fiona was terminally ill and that we were living on God’s grace. But even so, when it ended, we were shell-shocked. The dream died with Fiona, a piece of all of us died with Fiona. So yes, I’ve had my heart broken by this island. So badly that I left for seventeen years.” Mario takes Lizbet’s hand and leads her back to the railing. They watch the Steamship ferry glide majestically out of the dock; it’s all lit up, as big as a floating building.