The Glass Of Water At The Lobster Dinner

Not a server. Not the maitre d’. A man in white chef’s whites came out from the back, moving through the dining room the way a man moves when he already knows exactly where he is headed and is not going to let a single obstacle slow him down. He crossed past six other tables without pausing, and I watched him get closer with the strange, dislocated feeling of recognizing someone before your mind can name why.

He stopped beside my chair. He was maybe forty five, dark haired, going gray at the temples the way Gordon used to before it happened to him too fast for either of us to enjoy it. He looked at me for a long moment, and something in his face folded, like a door opening on a room he had not expected to see again.

“Ma B,” he said.

Nobody at that table had called me anything but Barbara in years, and nobody had ever called me that at all except one person, a long time ago, in a diner that no longer had my name on the sign.

“Marcus,” I said, and my voice came out smaller than I wanted it to.

Heather’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth. Roger straightened in his chair. Scott looked at me the way you look at someone you suddenly realize you do not fully know, despite thirty three years of calling her Mom.

Marcus Feld crouched down beside my chair so we were eye to eye, the way you do for a child or for someone you have decided matters more than the room around you, and he took my hand in both of his.

I need to explain who Marcus Feld was to me, because nobody else at that table had any idea, and by the time he was done explaining it himself, in front of all of them, I understood that was exactly the point.

In the spring of 1997, when Scott was still in middle school, a boy showed up at the back door of the Corbett Grill just before closing, sixteen years old, wearing a jacket two sizes too big and shoes with the soles coming loose at the toe. He asked if we needed anyone to wash dishes. He did not say why he needed the work so badly that he was willing to take it at nine o’clock at night, standing in the rain, but Gordon took one look at him and told him to come in out of the wet before he answered any questions at all.