Last Night at the Lobster Read online

  “Hey, Coach.” Manny waves, though it’s impossible for Mr. Kashynski to hear him through the windshield. Manny digs a finger under his cuff to read his watch (and there’s the rubber band again, like a reminder), then holds the same finger up to let Coach know there’s still one minute. Mr. K. waves back, dismissive, no rush, and breaks out his paper.

  Inside, Nicolette informs him that Crystal isn’t in yet, as if he hasn’t noticed.

  Jacquie’s sitting in the break room with Roz, refilling salt and pepper shakers. He breezes through, just long enough to thank her for coming in.

  “My car died,” she apologizes.

  “That’s okay,” he says. “You made it.”

  “Good thing too,” Roz says. “It’s all-you-can-eat shrimp.”

  “No,” Jacquie says, like she can’t believe it. “Hell no.”

  “What am I supposed to do,” Manny says. “They’ve been running the ads all week.”

  In back, Eddie’s still filling tins with biscuit dough, and Manny tells him that’s great, that’s more than enough, and sends him back to the dishwasher. Rich is mixing tartar sauce. Leron’s draining a basket of fries.

  “So this is it,” Ty asks.

  “This is it,” Manny says.

  “Better pray we don’t get slammed.”

  “Coach is out there already.”

  “Tilapia,” Ty tells Fredo, who hesitates before opening the reachin, then hesitates again. “White tub, second shelf, right. It’s marked right on it.”

  Manny can see this is going to be an all-day thing, and leaves them to figure it out. (In his confusion, he’s entirely forgotten about calling the plow guys.)

  From here in it’s all checklist. He turns up the house lights, turns on the fake stained-glass lamps over the tables in all four sections. He powers up the sound system and dials the house music to the approved volume, and there’s Bonnie Raitt singing “Something to Talk About” for the millionth time. Window by window he gently tugs the cords of the blinds and lets in the gray light of day. On cue, Mr. Kashynski hauls himself out of his car and starts up the walk. Nicolette retreats to the break room. Dom gives him a thumbs-up from the bar. Kendra’s ready, hair just brushed, lips painted, a stack of menus waiting on the host stand, two dozen pagers neatly ranked in the cubby behind her in case they get overrun.

  “Here we go,” Manny says, to himself as much as anyone, and for the very last time he flips the breaker for the neon by the highway, then slides the tab of the plastic CLOSED sign on the front door to the right to let the whole world know they’re open for business.

  WHICH NOBODY CAN DENY

  They come in pairs and threesomes and the rare foursome, mostly wives and young mothers this time of day, escapees from the mall. They come from West Hartford and Farmington and Simsbury and other suburbs Manny’s only driven through summers on his way to Barkhamsted Reservoir, and driven carefully, wary of gung-ho cops. Their SUVs chew through the snow and plug the parking spots, for one day justifying their pricey four-wheel drive. They track in clumps of snow, pausing to stomp and read the specials on the chalkboard, then follow Kendra to their booths, sliding in, dumping bags and gloves and jackets, relieved to sit down and gather themselves and compare their loot. They warm their hands over the single cupped tea light, ignoring Manny as he cruises through. They want their waitress. They want their lunches so they can get back out there and get their shopping done.

  In the corner, Mr. Kashynski hunches over the splayedout sports section with his coffee, occasionally picking at his tilapia, his plate pushed to the side. Roz sometimes bitches that he’s hogging one of her four-tops, but on slow days she’s grateful to have him. Plus he doesn’t run her the way the shoppers do, asking for waters all around and more biscuits for the kids, sending her to check with Ty to see if the scallops are frozen or if there’s any clam juice in the seafood stuffing.

  Manny drops by to say hey, and Mr. K. taps an article with a liver-spotted hand. “We almost lost to Weaver. Weaver! I don’t know what’s going on over there anymore.”

  “It’s early,” Manny says, because he’s heard Coach go off like this before. It’s the start of the season, and though New Britain’s gone through three other coaches since he retired (forced out, rumor was, over a disagreement with someone on the school board), he still gets excited this time of year. “We’re still undefeated, right?”

  “We haven’t faced anyone yet, and we’ve got less than a month to get ready for Southington.”

  “I hear they’re good,” Manny sympathizes, though he’s only heard it from Mr. K. himself, and can’t remember the details. Like any longtime acquaintances, there’s a comfortable slackness to their conversations. Manny can listen to him and scan the room for trouble at the same time, like a cop writing someone a ticket. The foyer’s getting busy, with Kendra trying to greet and seat at the same time.

  “What’s this I hear about you guys closing down? That right?”

  Officially Manny can’t answer him, but his pause is a tip-off. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Around.”

  “Not from anyone around here.” Meaning Roz.

  “It’s not a big secret, is it?”

  Manny plucks the rubber band and rubs his wrist, stands with hands on hips.

  “Damn,” Mr. K. says. “I was hoping it wasn’t true. When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Jeez, I wish you’da told me. I’ve got a ton of coupons just sitting around at home.”

  “You like Italian food?”

  He shrugs.

  “They should be good at the Olive Garden. That’s where they’re sending us.”

  “The one in Bristol?”

  “Starting Monday. Come on by, we’ll take care of you.” Because Manny and the survivors, being new, are scheduled for lunch all week. He hadn’t considered it a good thing until now.

  “I might do that,” Mr. K. says.

  “Do,” Manny says, and nods to seal the deal, then excuses himself to help Kendra.

  One problem the remodel was supposed to solve was their small foyer. In the summer, customers can take their pagers outside and sit on the benches. Today they’re crammed between the live tank and the marlin, blocking the way to the restrooms, and every time the door opens, the wind makes them groan. Kendra’s not at the point of taking names yet. There are open tables, she just can’t get to everybody at once. When she leaves her post to escort a two-top in, the crowd mutters. A tall bald guy in a khaki trench coat over a suit and a red bow tie bellies up to the host stand. Manny steps in and asks how many are in his party.

  “Fourteen,” he says, and looks behind himself. “We’re not all here yet.”

  “Do you have a reservation?”

  “The girl I talked to said you don’t take reservations.”

  “We don’t, but for parties of more than ten we like to have some advance notice.”

  “That’s why I called,” the man says. “She made it sound like it wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “It’s not,” Manny says, nonchalant, thinking it was probably Suzanne and that it was probably intentional, while simultaneously trying to figure out where he’s going to put them all—along the back wall, fitting together six freestanding four-tops—and who’s going to serve them. It’s a two-person job, so Roz, obviously, since Coach will be holding down his corner for a while, and Jacquie, since her section’s next to Roz’s. By basing his choice on proximity, Manny doesn’t have to admit his natural hesitation to give this mob to Nicolette. It’s an office party, always demanding, and messy, and at the end they’re likely to pool their dollars and scrimp on the tip.

  “Thanks a lot,” Roz says, helping him muscle the balky tables into place.

  Jacquie pitches in, and so their first real moment face-to-face is an awkward dance with a four-top in the middle of the room, with an audience looking on. He wants to talk to her like they used to, curled into each other under the covers, his lips so close to her ear all he ha
d to do was whisper. She’d laugh and push him away and they’d clinch again, trading secrets from when they were little kids, even the few memories he has of his mother.

  Jacquie lifts with her fingertips and shuffles sideways with him, adjusting the table after they set it down so the edges are straight, then moves to the next one. Manny follows. Per company policy, she’s taken her diamond stud out, and seems defenseless and vulnerable, like his abuelita waking up in the hospital without her glasses. He already asked Jacquie if she wanted to come with them—them, not him—and she’s already said no, so how is he supposed to change her mind now? He can see himself begging her and freaking her out—giving her even more reason to put all of their sorry history behind her.

  He remembers working beside her like this just this spring, how sharp and rich it was, carry ing their secret; it could pop out in a deep kiss back by the coatrack, a tug on his hand out on the loading dock. Now the same silence between them carries a negative charge, and a dull one, as if they’ve agreed to keep their emotions muffled, or pretend they have none. He keeps forgetting, they’ve declared a truce. He’s supposed to be neutral.

  They arrange the chairs, and Manny signals Kendra to send the party in. The guy with the bow tie nods as he passes, one boss to another, as if Manny’s done all this for him.

  Nicolette brushes by with an empty tray. With the big party taking up so much space, Kendra will have to double-sit her section, and one of her four-tops is a pair of moms with a toddler who stands on the banquette, bouncing up and down and waving his fists, stopping only to crane over the table and sip soda from a straw. He’s too big for a high chair, so Manny detours for a table touch and asks the mother if he can bring her a booster seat.

  “That would be wonderful,” she says.

  He makes sure to wipe off the one he takes down from the top of the coatrack, pebbly brown plastic with twin indents for a tiny bottom. At first the boy sits, interested in the novelty and the attention, but by the time Manny loops through the bar to help Dom with the office party’s drink order, the kid’s standing on the booster seat, even more precarious than before. Again, Manny’s thoughts drift to lawsuits, hefty settlements, the lottery-winning dream of a house in the country and never having to work again. A flash of lightning through the room brings him back—someone in the party taking pictures. Maybe a birthday. They’re already loud, blasts of laughter that make the other customers glance over, and again he’s glad he didn’t give them to Nicolette.

  Dom drains one bottle of chardonnay and opens another, while Manny spaces the glasses in a daisy pattern on a tray for Jacquie. They’ve got it covered, so he heads for the kitchen, noticing on the way a lamp in Nicolette’s section is burned out. He unscrews the bulb and takes it with him, shaking it near his ear to hear the filament jingle, then fending off the swinging door with his free arm.

  The kitchen’s in business, sizzling and chinking and clattering, but with so many no-shows it seems empty, and though he knows better, he’s afraid they’re not ready. Ty’s got Leron beside him on the line and Fredo on backup, shuttling to the walk-in. Rich is baker, while Eddie’s racking the very first dishes from the early birds’ starters.

  “How we looking?” Manny asks Ty, who’s stockpiling skewers of grilled shrimp in a chafing dish.

  “We’re out of king crab.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Maybe for you. I guess we’re pushing the shrimp then.”

  “All-you-can-eat.”

  Ty gestures with his tongs at Leron pulling a dripping basket from the Frialator. “Tell the ladies they better tie up their sneakers.”

  In the stockroom Manny finds the right size bulb. He ditches the old one on his way through the break room, passing Jacquie coming the other way with a bus tub.

  “I need someone to clear that four-top for me,” she says.

  “There isn’t anyone,” he says, and they fly through their separate doors.

  The new bulb works—and helps, since it’s even gloomier outside, snow flying sideways across the windows, the mall just a shape. Manny stops for a second and watches the cars crawl along the rows as he clears Jacquie’s booth. Shouldering the full tub, he catches a disgusted look from Roz. To even things up, he does one of hers next, then one of Nicolette’s. It’s just that kind of a day when everyone needs to pitch in.

  “Damn,” Ty says when he comes in with his third tub. “They riding you like My Little Pony. Giddyup!”

  And it’s true, he’s sweating a little—his size catching up with him, plus the tropical climate of the kitchen. He wets a paper towel at the hygiene sink and dabs his forehead.

  When he returns, the little kid has abandoned the booster seat and is hanging off his mother’s neck like a possum while she talks with her friend. The mother orders another Sprite for him, which he immediately spills, the ice sliding across the table, wetting everything, dripping off the side. Manny helps Nicolette slop it up. After they change the silverware, the mother asks them to replace the Sprite at no charge because he’d barely touched it. The kid’s still climbing all over the booth, snapping crayons in half, tossing gnawed-on oyster crackers. On her way to the bar, Nicolette smiles with gritted teeth at Manny.

  “I’m going to fucking kill him,” she says like a ventriloquist.

  “Let the mother take care of it.”

  “I’m going to kill her first.”

  The office party is a farewell lunch, complete with presents and speeches. The guest of honor is a pixieish gray-haired woman wearing bright red lipstick and a sheer black scarf to cover her neck. One by one her colleagues stand and toast her accomplishments. She sits at the head of the table, her back to the falling snow, hands clasped with childish delight at each joke and anecdote. She’s retiring, which explains the gag gifts: a rattling weekly pill reminder full of Tic Tacs (the same pink one he used to have to help his abuelita open), a pair of chattering wind-up dentures, a jumbo package of Depends. Manny tries to smile but imagines his own retirement party. What kind of gifts would Leron and Rich and Nicolette give him? The applause drives him up front, where he checks in with Kendra.

  “Doing okay,” she says. “It’s getting really bad out.”

  “Hey,” he says, “can you do me a favor and take it easy on Nicolette?”

  “I’m just following the rotation. If I didn’t sit anyone there, she’d bitch about that. She doesn’t even have to deal with the big table.”

  “I know, I know. This isn’t for her, this is for me.”

  “Fine,” Kendra says, pissed off now.

  The walk’s almost entirely white again, and the tracks in the lot are starting to pack down solid. He’s angry, but only partly at himself. He shouldn’t have to call the plow guys when it’s this bad, they should just come.

  He uses the phone on the host stand and gets their answering machine, waits while the message plays, studying the muscular curve of the marlin’s body, its hinged mouth and tiny teeth disappointing beneath the spear of a beak. Somewhere under the dust and shellac there must have been a real fish once. How long ago? He can almost see it swimming, thrashing in water blue as a swimming pool, the last minutes before it was hauled on board.

  The beep beeps.

  “This is Manny at Red Lobster. It’s twelve thirty-five and I need someone out here now. Thank you.”

  Kendra sympathizes—or is she criticizing his ineptitude?—shaking her head as he pushes into the vestibule and grabs the bag of ice melter.

  “Hey,” he says through the open door, “if you have time, could you help clear?”

  “If I have time.”

  “I’ll make sure they tip you out on whatever you do.”

  She laughs, just a puff, as if that will never happen, because it’s been a point of contention forever.

  Outside, the wind cuts through his thin shirt, lacy flakes catch in his eyelashes. The slushy ghosts of footprints bleed through the new cover. It’s noticeably warmer, the snow heavy as wet cake, crystals stic
king together as they fall. He should probably break out the snowblower, but for now he sows handfuls of ice melter, a quick fix so no one from lunch ends up breaking a hip. Far across the lot, a big town plow roams the aisles, blade scraping all the way down to asphalt, yellow light wheeling. It peeps as it backs up, then gores forward again, the diesel softened by distance and the veil of snow, almost like fog, obscuring the mall, a dark block with flood-lights burning at the corners, like a fort or a prison. He tramps out to the end of one wing where Dom’s and Roz’s cars sit in exile and works back toward the Lobster, the illusory movement of the colored string through the front doors and the glow from the windows and the candlelit faces of people eating inside all suddenly, surprisingly beautiful to him, as if he’s still stoned. He rests for a moment to appreciate the vision and hears, in the hush, at a distance, the frantic whizzing of a car spinning its wheels. In the storm light, the restaurant looks warm and alive and welcoming, a place anyone would want to go. It looks like a painting, and he feels proud, as if this is his work, and in a way it is, except it’s over, like him and Jacquie, lost, gone forever. Is that why he loves it so much?

  There’s still to night, he thinks.

  There’s still today. He still has no idea what to get Deena, and thinks that at this point he really should. He better figure out something soon. He knows from all-too-recent experience there’s nothing worse than a guilty present.

  The bag runs out before he can finish the slot between the handicapped spots, and in good conscience he can’t let it slide. He follows his own already-vanishing tracks up the walk and opens the door. A foot into the foyer the heat and noise and background music surround him. The kitchen’s even louder with the grill seething, the radio pumping, the dishwasher cycling. “Where’s the salsa for this Aztec Chicken?” Ty hollers at Leron as Manny lugs a new bag from the stockroom, passing the ice maker and the snowblower under its dusty cover. “Goddammit, Frito, where’s my linguini?”