The influx of guests includes the poet laureate of New Mexico, a family of ranchers from Montana, a mushroom grower from Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, a neurosurgeon from Nashville, the owners of an NHL expansion team, a renowned hip-hop producer, a YouTube phenom, and a prominent editor from one of the Big Five publishing houses in New York City. This editor reads Lizbet’s Blue Book and says she’ll pitch it. She gets Lizbet’s e-mail address.
The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
Lizbet is so busy that hours and even days go by when she forgets to be on the lookout for Shelly Carpenter. Now is when Shelly Carpenter will show up; Lizbet is sure of it—and Lizbet is also sure that if Shelly slipped in under the radar in the past couple of weeks, she was met with exceptional service. Edie, Alessandra, Richie, Zeke, Adam, and Raoul are all at the top of their games.
The only thing going better than Lizbet’s professional life is her love life. Every day Lizbet goes to Mario’s cottage on her lunch hour. They make love and then he cooks for her—composed salads with grilled shrimp and creamy chunks of avocado and a side of the homemade cheddar crackers that they used to serve at the Blue Bistro or, on a rare day of rain, clam chowder and giant popovers pulled straight from the funny little oven. Sometimes Lizbet brings a bathing suit and they swim off of Mario’s front porch, and then she showers and braids her damp hair. When Mario comes in to work at four o’clock, he swings by her office with a double espresso—he figured out that the way to her heart is caffeine—and he often brings her a little gift: a cluster of roses, a perfect quahog shell, a grape Popsicle. He makes her a playlist to replace her breakup playlist. Lizbet closes her office door and they kiss like a couple of teenagers for a few stolen minutes before Lizbet straightens her skirt and Mario his chef’s jacket and they get back to work. When Mario gets home from the bar at night, he sends Lizbet a text: I’m home, Heartbreaker. Or Sweetest dreams, Heartbreaker. He has her in his phone as HB. Breaker, not broken! she thinks. She’s healed. She’s so healed that when she hears that Christina left JJ, she feels only a pang of pity for JJ; she could have told him that relationship would end badly. She considers calling to see if he’s okay but decides it’s best not to. She’s consumed with her romance with JJ’s idol, the man whose picture she gazed at on the wall of JJ’s office for fifteen years. It’s the kind of crazy plot twist that happens only in novels and movies—but she’s living it. She can’t believe how happy she is.
But then.
Then a night comes when Mario doesn’t text when he gets home from work. Lizbet wakes up at three in the morning to use the bathroom, checks her phone, finds nothing. What? she thinks. She can’t fall back to sleep. The room is too hot; her mind is aswirl. Did something happen? Is Mario okay? Should Lizbet call him? Should she go to his cottage? She somehow knows she should do neither. She wonders then why Mario never asks to spend the night at her cottage. She lies awake until the birds start to sing, thinking that this was why Mario said they should be careful. （What he’d meant, of course, was that she should be careful.）
He was probably tired, she thinks. He forgot to text. So what?
The next day, Monday, Lizbet goes to the cottage for lunch as usual and everything is fine. The Blue Bar is closed on Tuesdays, and Mario asks if Lizbet can take the day or even just the afternoon off so they can spend it together.
It’s exactly what she’s craving, but the hotel has seventeen checkouts and seventeen check-ins, and Yolanda long ago requested every Tuesday off and Lizbet needs to be around to manage Warren, the fitness instructor who fills in, because he can be a little ditzy.
On Tuesday evening, the Blue Bar has a softball game against the Garden Group. After Lizbet finishes work, she drives out the long stretch of Milestone Road to the Tom Nevers Field to catch the last couple of innings. It’s a close game even though the landscapers are young and in shape and play like real athletes. Mario is wearing an old Ramones T-shirt and his White Sox cap and when he gets up to bat with the bases loaded, he winks at Lizbet. She flushes, feeling like she felt when she was sixteen and watching her boyfriend, Danny LaMott, play for the Minnetonka Skippers football team.
Mario strikes out swinging and Lizbet is almost relieved that he didn’t hit a home run and win the game, because she realizes she’s dangerously close to falling in love with him.
Yolanda is up next. As Lizbet is wondering why Yolanda is on the Blue Bar softball team—and then if the hotel should field its own team, and then who would work if they did field a team—Yolanda wallops a pitch over the centerfielder’s head and everyone on base scores. Lizbet is on her feet cheering along with the rest of the crowd when Yolanda crosses the plate, jumps into Mario’s arms, and gives him a kiss on the lips. Suddenly, Lizbet feels not only like an outsider but also really freaking jealous.