Last Night at the Lobster

by Stewart O'Nan

  He does the wing toward the mall first, afraid he’ll run out of gas. He can’t remember the last time it was serviced, but the engine is racketing, and he wonders—as he wonders about the marlin, and the live lobsters—where it will end up. After his abuelita died, he had to clear out the house, and since he knew he was moving to an apartment, he sold her clattering old Lawnboy at a weekend-long yard sale. It’s in some Salvadoran family’s garage, waiting for spring, or so he hopes, and not cannibalized for parts.

  Following along, blinking and sniffling, shuffling to keep up, he thinks that may have been why he fell for Jacquie. Losing his grandmother and the only home he’d known, he needed something to cling to. But then, why not Deena? Why not Deena now?

  That’s the question he can’t answer, just as he can’t say exactly what he feels for her, or what future they may have together, and he thinks with a sudden weariness that he doesn’t love her enough, and probably never will, and that later they’ll both have to pay for this fault of his, more than he and Jacquie already have.

  It’s too easy to think outside, by himself, and he wishes he had his iPod, Café Tacuba grooving (but even they might lead him in the wrong direction today, the wrong car, the wrong room, the wrong bed).

  Dom’s gone, just Roz’s CRV stranded out there by itself, drifted to the hubs. The gas is going to last, except he’s cold now, finishing the far wing (where no one will ever set foot, he thinks), and hungry from skipping lunch, a headache tightening his sinuses. Still, he wants to do a good job and doesn’t cheat, edging the curb perfectly. He’s not coming out here again unless he absolutely has to.

  Spreading the ice melter, he notices his right arm is shaking. His fingers are numb and then tingly, cramped from fighting the vibration. Inside, putting the snowblower away, the cover keeps slipping out of his grip, and even after he rubs and flexes them, his hands feel weak.

  The kitchen is quiet besides the radio. Ty and Rich and Leron are arranging their chafing dishes by the hot plate as if to show him they’re all done.

  “Lemme have the usual,” he orders.

  Ty’s surprised, it’s so late, but for just a second, and does an about-face.

  “What’s the vegetable?”

  “Cauliflower.”

  “That was lunch.”

  “Okay—albino broccoli.”

  “Make that no vegetable.”

  Manny goes to the bar and pours himself a Diet Coke with lemon, then has to pick it up with both hands. The UConn game is over and the new game is close to halftime. On the other TV, the Weather Channel is showing exactly what it showed three hours ago, and he reaches up and changes to Channel 30, right down the road from them, and gets the national news, video of shoppers milling around malls—the usual story about retailers counting on the Christmas season, as if the economy is solely dependent on the holidays. The other local channels tell him nothing, so he settles for ESPN with the sound turned down and stands there sipping. The teams mean nothing to him, and by the first commercial he’s paying more attention to the liquor bottles tiered three deep across the mirror, worried that his inventory won’t match. Even wholesale, a fifth of Chivas costs a lot, and while the amount won’t be held against his check, if he wants his own place again, Manny needs to show headquarters he can manage his resources. After the Lobster’s per formance, he can’t afford much spillage.

  He keys on the top shelf of scotches, the colors designed to draw the eye like fine wood. The Chivas is almost full, but he doesn’t remember the Crown Royal being so low, and he’d swear he just replaced that Dewar’s, down to a couple fingers. Yes, this morning, because Dom was late. Before he can investigate, Roz calls from the break room that his dinner’s ready.

  He can’t quite rid himself of the suspicion as he eats, pulling a stool up to the far end of the table, way down by the Frialators (he has to get his own napkin and silverware, and from habit sets himself a place). The fear, of course, isn’t that Dom’s pouring himself drinks but stealing whole bottles—open, for his own consumption, or sealed, for resale. A few years ago they had a problem with a summer replacement hiding wine in empty boxes behind the dumpster. Manny has no reason to think Dom has been anything but solid, but strange things happen when people know it’s the last day, as if the rules have been suspended.

  He frowns over Ty’s scampi, plated as if for a critic, the headless necks of the shrimp pointed toward the center of the dish, bodies arranged in a symmetric swirl, tails overlapped around the edge counterclockwise, parsley flakes for garnish. It’s the chain’s most popular dish, simple, and horribly boring for any real chef. Ty’s been making it for Manny nearly ten years, and to night it’s as fine as ever, the garlic biting through the buttery richness, a breathless hint of white wine to finish. The pilaf is fluffed and light, not wet and heavy as he’s had at other Lobsters. It’s not Ty’s fault they’re closing—but Ty knows this; Ty would never doubt himself. And it’s not their last scampi either: It’s on the Olive Garden’s permanent menu.

  Ty’s farther up the table on his own stool, chewing a toothpick and leafing through an old Old Car Trader.

  “Chieftain,” Manny says to get his attention, then waggles his hand palm down to show it’s only so-so, earning him a quick finger.

  The deejays change at six, the new guy making a big deal of how long it took him to drive in, telling everyone to avoid the roads if they don’t absolutely have to be out, advice Manny silently rejects. This is the beginning of the Lobster’s volume hours. Now he wonders if their numbers were hurt not only by the construction on 9 but all the snow last winter. He tells himself he’s giving up the guest count (sixty-one, pathetic for a Saturday, honestly not worth opening for).

  In the corner by the dishwasher, Rich and Leron are playing a form of horse with the dead biscuits from lunch, using the garbage can as a basket. When Manny’s finished, Rich comes over and takes his plate, sliding it expertly down the counter to Leron, who blasts it with the sprayer and racks it so they can get back to their game.

  Roz and Jacquie have settled into the break room—Roz smoking, using her coffee saucer as an ashtray. She’s complaining about her middle daughter bringing her boyfriend home for Christmas. This is the daughter in Florida who got in a bad car accident, stopped drinking and found religion. The boyfriend’s part of the church and twenty years older. “I don’t know,” Roz says, “he’s nice, but he’s nice all the time. It’s kinda creepy.”

  “That is kinda weird,” Manny says.

  “You don’t know,” Jacquie says. “Maybe she needs that right now.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Roz says. “It’s my vacation too. I don’t need Jesus ruining it for me. How ’bout you, you going anywhere?”

  “I might go down to the city for a couple days. Depends on what I get.”

  Manny can counter with Bridgeport, but doesn’t, imagining Jacquie at Rockefeller Center (not Rodney, just Jacquie), watching the skaters circle under that funky gold statue of the guy lying on his side and the big tree with the GE building behind it, where they make Saturday Night Live. His abuelita took him once when he was little; he still remembers the flags and the glass elevator that went down into the ground. He wanted to skate, but the line was too long, and he didn’t know how anyway.

  “Hey,” Roz asks him, “you making the lunch schedule next month?”

  “No one’s talked to me about it, so I’m going to say no.”

  “So where all are you looking?” Roz asks Jacquie.

  He’d meant to just breeze through, and now, standing there while they’re sitting, he feels like an intruder on their conversation. No one’s manning the host stand, and he uses it as an excuse, ducking through the swinging door into the empty dining room, where the candles waver on the tables and Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell are harmonizing—“Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby.” The lights blink around the live tank, the tinsel and the marlin’s belly echoing their colors. Outside, the walk is still pretty bare, just a downy lay
er he can see through, and while the odds are against it, Manny takes some minor satisfaction in knowing that they’re ready if somebody comes.

  No one does, giving him time to miss Eddie (he still has his Powerball tickets—or ticket) and to fret over whether Dom snuck anything out while he was in the mall. He paces the main room and back into the foyer, glancing out at the parking lot, rehearsing what he might say to Jacquie if he gets the chance to be alone with her. Every pair of headlights could be Rodney, come to take her away forever, unless he does something, but what can he do or say that he hasn’t tried already?

  The worst thing is that at heart he knows she’s right, that what he wanted was childish and impossible, and that he was lucky just to have her for even a little while. He’s never seen himself as the kind of person who’d throw away everything for an entirely new life, and that’s what both of them would have had to do. Jacquie understood that—from the beginning, it seems, so that throughout their time together she had to remind him this was just temporary, even when she wanted to believe in it herself. For once in his life he was the dreamer, forcing her to be the responsible one, and naturally she resented it, attacking him when they should have been happiest, confusing him, making him think their problems were all his fault when he was willing to give up anything to be with her. Now he realizes how crazy that sounds—and how cruel, with the baby on the way and Deena relying on him—but he’d really believed it then, and would have gone through with it if Jacquie hadn’t thought it all out for both of them. And while she was right—is right— sometimes he wishes she hadn’t. Sometimes, selfishly, he wishes she was so lost in him she wouldn’t have been able to save them from doing something stupid.

  Turning in to the hall, he comes across a scarf left on top of the coatrack—black, knitted and soft, with a tag from Nordstrom’s (not a bad gift, he thinks). Probably belongs to someone from the retirement party. In back they have a box that serves as a lost & found. Manny parades the scarf by Roz and Jacquie before adding it to the two Totes umbrellas and the sweat-stained Yankee cap and dirty plastic rattle, even though tomorrow they’ll probably chuck the whole thing.

  Above the box his tie hangs over the rod, still damp but close enough to dry that he takes it to the bathroom and holds it under the blower for a couple of cycles, then puts it on hot, fixing the length in the mirror. In the massive handicapped stall he flips it over his shoulder before he sits, then waits, staring at the black-and-white tiles between his feet, the rare red one tossed in as an accent. He’s linking them together like a word search, his thighs going numb, when the bathroom door thumps and then squeaks open, letting in a gush of Celine Dion.

  “Hey boss,” Roz calls.

  “Yeah?”

  “Get off the pot. We got customers.”

  Pulling the cheap toilet paper gently so it won’t rip, his first thought is a daydream so stale he automatically fast-forwards through it. The car creeping across the lot is full of robbers or terrorists taking advantage of the bad weather to lay siege to the place. They take everyone else hostage while Manny hides in the men’s room, ultimately sneaking out and saving the Lobster by his guts and wits like Bruce Willis in Die Hard.

  In reality, the customers are a frail old couple who have no business being out in this weather. The woman totters up the walk, the husband leading to one side like an orderly, both hands clamped around her arm to steady her, and still she lurches and wobbles as if she’ll topple over. Manny goes out in the cold and holds the door for them, and has to restrain himself from doing more. He thinks they’re just leaning into the wind, but as they pass he sees they’re both hunched, the woman slope-shouldered, the man actually hunchbacked, his shoulders up around his ears.

  Inside, the man helps the woman off with her coat and nearly pulls her over backwards. Manny sticks close, ready to catch them—a different kind of hero.

  “You folks traveling?” he asks, slipping two dinner menus from the holder on the side of the host stand as if it’s natural for the restaurant to be completely deserted.

  “I guess you could call it that,” the man says loudly, as if still in the storm. “We were s’posed to be home by now.”

  “It’s bad out,” Manny agrees, and leads them into the dining room, giving them a window booth with a view of their car, a new Lincoln. As he leans in to set their menus down, he catches a piercing loop of feedback like the wow of a distant late-night radio station and realizes it’s coming from the man’s hearing aid. In the lamplight, the man’s hands are swollen, a black and gold Masonic ring cutting into one finger. The woman puts her whole face into the menu, tilting one eye close to the print. On her wrists she has grape-colored bruises and blotchy, paper-thin skin like his abuelita that last year, and reflexively Manny wonders what the man will do when she’s gone.

  “What’s the soup?” the man asks.

  Manny adjusts his own volume. “New En gland clam chowder and Bayou seafood gumbo.”

  “I mean the soup of the day.”

  “We don’t have a specialty soup today, I’m afraid.”

  “Huh,” the man says, as if he’s been cheated.

  “What?” the woman says.

  “There’s no soup of the day.”

  “Well that’s a pity, isn’t it?”

  Manny assures them a server will be out with some hot Cheddar Bay biscuits for them in just a minute.

  Technically it’s Roz’s section, but they flipped a coin and Jacquie lost.

  “I figure she’d want to take one last one for old time’s sake. Plus she can use the money more than I can.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Jacquie says. “He looks like a big tipper.”

  It may not be a big table for Jacquie, but Manny has to squash the urge to hover and retreats to the kitchen, where Ty is still bent over the Old Car Trader, admiring Corvettes.

  “Check this out,” Ty says, pointing to a Stingray convertible from the midsixties that costs almost double what the bank wanted for his grandmother’s house.

  “We’ve got cottonheads.”

  “I heard.”

  Jacquie swings in. “Two broiled flounder, one baked, one rice.”

  “That was fast,” Manny says.

  “They’re hungry. It’s almost their bedtime.”

  “No flounder,” Ty says, tipping the page.

  “Haddock?” Jacquie circles, stopping at the coffee urn.

  “Tilapia.”

  “You’re going to make me sell them tilapia.”

  “Can’t sell what you ain’t got.”

  “You need drinks?” Manny asks.

  “Got ’em.” And she’s gone.

  Manny wants to follow and apologize, table touch with the old folks to let them know they’re not always this poorly stocked, as if he wants their return business. He has to content himself with getting their salads, choosing the best two, tossing out a white spine of lettuce. He micro waves an extra set of biscuits, just in case.

  When Jacquie returns, everyone waits for her order. She crosses all the way to the hot plate.

  “So?” Ty has to ask.

  “So tilapia.”

  “Thass my girl.”

  The line kicks into gear, Rich and Leron taking their stations. With such a small order, they’ve got it covered, and rather than watch them, Manny rolls around front and mans the host stand as if he’s expecting the usual dinner rush. Outside, the snow falls steadily, endlessly. The couple hunch over their salads, the woman losing a few pieces of lettuce off her fork, gathering them back to her plate with her hand. Jacquie has just delivered their second set of biscuits when the lights dim and blink, making everyone, including Manny, look up.

  Kool & the Gang stop celebrating in midchorus. The lamps and overheads flicker, and the string around the live tank, the shaded tube on the host stand. All of them go dark at once, then pop on, surging even brighter, to fade again, swelling, cycling as if trying to find the right balance, a tease, finally dying and staying off, leaving only the candles mirro
red in the windows and a strange quiet.

  “It’s all right,” Manny broadcasts, just as the emergency lighting clicks on—a battery-powered box on the far wall that throws more shadow than light.

  He goes over and reassures the couple that this is merely temporary, not a problem at all. And it shouldn’t be: The grill should still work, and the furnace, and the water. He jokes that with the snow and the power failure, they’re having some kind of adventure.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t see a thing,” the woman says, setting down her fork and leaning back as if she’s quitting.

  “Hold on,” Manny says like he has an idea, and with Jacquie moves candles from the neighboring tables until their faces glow.

  “Very romantic,” Jacquie shills, though from Manny’s vantage point, recalling the last time he saw her skin softened by this rich light, she doesn’t have to.

  The man breaks a biscuit in half and butters it. The woman bends and picks up her fork again.

  In the kitchen Roz is setting out candles while Ty plates the tilapia. He shoos Leron and Rich; it’s easier to do all the garnishing himself. Manny’s glad to see he’s serious, lining up his three best lemon slices like a stoplight down the center of the fillet, plucking a stray grain of rice from the rim. This could be the last meal they serve, and like everything today, he wants it to be perfect.

  He hangs back as Jacquie takes the tray out. It’s only seven twenty but with the darkness it feels later. Any other night Manny would be calculating his pars for tomorrow and placing his produce order. Instead, he leans out the back door and smokes, looking up at the blackness over the trees behind the dumpster, where there should be the glow of their neon sign by the highway. No one can see them, so no one knows they’re open. There’s no better argument for closing, and nothing Manny can do but hope power comes back on soon. For now he just flicks his filter into the snow and shuts the door.