On the Rocks(46)

“You’re most certainly not. You’re better than that. At least hold out for a box of Omaha steaks or something,” Bobby suggested. I was beginning to see his motivation. He wanted to see what else JF would send us to eat.

“Or the wine of the month club,” I added. It wasn’t the worst idea I’d ever heard.

“Now you’re talking,” Bobby said. “Is there such a thing as the bacon of the month club? Can you register for that?”

I wrapped my arm around Grace’s shoulder as we walked. “I’m really happy for you, Grace, but be careful. I know how hard this has been for you, and I know you’ve been through hell. I just think you need to tell him his time is up. He needs to leave his wife, or you’re going to walk.”

“That will be tricky since I work in the neighboring office.”

“I didn’t say that plan was perfect.”

We drove the five minutes back to the house, brushed sand off our feet at the bottom of the stairs, and walked upstairs to the deck. Wolf was sitting on a lounge chair with his mirrored sunglasses on, sipping a glass of wine and listening to European techno music on the speaker dock.

“So, umm, was there a card?” Grace asked Wolf as she approached him.

“Oh, he could have attached a really cool love note,” Bobby mused. “ ‘Roses are red, live lobsters are blue, come back to Boston, so I can bang you,’ ” he sang.

“That’s touching,” I said, smacking his bare shoulder with my magazine. “Move over, Shakespeare.”

“Not bad for an on-the-spot poem, huh?” Bobby asked.

“Yeah, there was a card. It’s over there,” Wolf said as he gestured to the table. “It said something like, ‘The best is yet to come, love JF.’ Who’s JF?”

“Her boyfriend,” I said, once again feeling funny calling him that when he was someone else’s husband.

“The one with the wife?” Wolf asked, surprised.

“The one with the soon-to-be-ex-wife,” Grace clarified with a smile. “He’s ready to divorce her, I know it. I can feel it.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Bobby said. “This is what I’m talking about, Grace. It’s just a box of fish. It’s not divorce papers.”

“Must you rain on my parade?” Grace asked. “It’s going to happen,” she said.

“I don’t care if he has three other wives, please don’t ever break up with the lobster guy, okay? I like him!” Wolf exclaimed.

“You never met him,” I pointed out.

“I met his lobsters and I like them,” Wolf said. “Here, come see!” Wolf was so excited, you’d have thought someone had just air-dropped forty pounds of schnitzel from the motherland onto our deck and not a few lobsters that had probably been dredged out of the Atlantic a few miles away. Funny what gets guys going.

We followed him into the house and made our way to the hallway bathroom. Bobby pushed in from behind, basically knocking me into the wall as he made his way into the center of the room. You’d think he’d never seen live lobsters before. In a tub. In our house.

“Here they are!” Wolf said proudly as he slid the clear plastic shower curtain over to reveal a dozen ugly blue lobsters crawling all over each other. Thankfully, giant rubber bands were clamping their humungous claws shut. “I named them. See, this one is Snappy, this one is Claw, that’s Fang, and the little one over there I call Travis.” Grace and I stared, trying to process what we were looking at and wondering if any of us could ever bring ourselves to step foot in that shower again. It was like Red Lobster was using our bathroom to store its inventory. I had a flashback to the fish store my mom used to take me to when I was little. I used to look at those disgusting lobsters in the tank—lying all over each other, wiry antennae and claws and tails intertwined as if they were having some sick and twisted lobster orgy in a glass case for all the world to see.

How anyone figured out that these disgusting-looking things actually tasted good I will never understand.

“Why would you name them?” I asked.

“I thought we should try to get to know them before I throw them in boiling water and eat their tails with garlic butter. Back in Germany, we had a farm with chickens. I used to name them when I was little. So, I figured, why not name the lobsters too?”

We shrugged. Trying to explain to Wolf that naming animals you were going to eat a few hours later was creepy seemed as futile as trying to explain what it meant to shoot fish in a barrel.

“I think I’m going to go up to the store right now and get some butter for them and, what do you think, some corn?”

“This is going to be awesome,” Bobby said as he reached into the tub and grabbed a lobster, holding it up to his face as if he wanted to meet it before he ate it.

“I’m so happy, I’m in heaven number seven,” Wolf said as he smiled wide.

“You mean seventh heaven?” Grace asked as she stifled a giggle.

“How does anyone speak your language?” he asked. He shook his head as he shuffled out of the bathroom, grabbed his car keys, and headed into town, leaving us alone to stare at the lobsters crawling around our porcelain tub.



FOUR HOURS LATER WE SAT at the table on our deck with bottles of wine, citronella candles, paper plates, rolls of paper towels, bowls of garlic butter, and lobsters with claws the size of Rhode Island splayed out all over the place. For most people, lobsters are a high-priced luxury item: leave it to us to trash them up by not even using napkins or real silverware to eat them.