The Hotel Nantucket (49)

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?

Beatriz appears behind the bar, holding a tray of chilled shot glasses.

“Here’s our whipped cream concierge,” Petey says.

Whipped cream concierge! The third Heartbreaker has gone to Lizbet’s head and she gives a little shriek. What a gifted idea!

“Our flavors tonight are coconut and caramel apple,” Beatriz says. “Would you like one?”

“You betcha!” Lizbet says. “One of each, please and thank you!”

Beatriz arranges the shot glasses in front of her and hands her a demitasse spoon. Lizbet starts with the coconut, which tastes like a mouthful of coconut cloud, then moves to the caramel apple.

A man takes a seat two over from Lizbet. “Hey, hot stuff,” he says to her, extending a hand. “I’m Brad Dover from Everett.”

“Hi?” Lizbet says. Brad Dover has a thick Southie accent and a meaty face and, no doubt, a closet filled with Bruins jerseys and a bone to pick with Tom Brady.

He turns to Petey. “I’d like an Irish car bomb, please, dollface.”

The only problem with the Blue Bar, Lizbet decides, is that it’s open to the public, including people like Brad Dover from Everett, men who order Irish car bombs and call complete strangers “dollface” and “hot stuff.” It’s definitely time for her to go.

“I’ll take my check, please and thank you,” she says.

Petey raises her palms. “Everything is on the house.”

“You’re kidding,” Lizbet says. “Well, thank you, it was extraordinary.”

“You can’t leave yet,” says Brad Everett from Dover—or is it Brad Dover from Everett? She neither knows nor cares. “I just got here.”

Exactly, she thinks. She pulls out two twenties to leave for Petey as a tip, swivels away from Brad Dover, and comes face-to-face with the person who has taken the seat on the other side of her, and that person is Mario Subiaco. He’s in a white chef’s jacket and a White Sox cap, and he’s a little sweaty, which only serves to make him even hotter than she remembers.

“Hey there, Heartbreaker,” he says.

She reels back in surprise. “I thought you didn’t come out of the kitchen.”

“There’s an exception to every rule,” he says. “How was your food?”

“It was…it was…”

“That good?” he says.

“Better than that good,” she says—and to her mortification, she feels tears gathering. It’s the vodka, obviously; she’s had three Heartbreakers in just over an hour—who does that? A woman who is eating out for the first time in months, a woman who has had her shoddily stitched-up heart ripped apart at the seams again. It’s not Christina’s gloating that’s making her cry. It’s kindness—the food itself and someone caring what she thought of it.

Mario smiles into his lap. “Well, thank you. I know you have high standards, so I was trying my hardest. I wasn’t sure about the cafeteria tacos.”

Lizbet laughs and discreetly wipes under her eyes. “They were a hell of a lot better than the ones our lunch lady Mrs. MacArthur used to serve up.”

“Good, good,” Mario says. He clears his throat. “So, listen, I have the night of the fifth off and I was hoping I could take you to dinner.”

“Hey, buddy boy,” Brad Dover from Everett says. “Buzz off. I’m taking her out.”

“No,” Lizbet says to Mario. “He’s not. And yes, I’d love to have dinner.” She grins. There’s no point trying to keep her cool, if she ever even had any, because Mario Subiaco is asking her out, which is a sentence that should be punctuated by ten exclamation points. “Where shall we go?”