last stop, Fisherman’s Wharf. Any farther and you’re in the water. The Buena Vista will be on your left, corner of Hyde and Beach. It’ll take you about twenty minutes tops, unless you have a long wait for a cable car.”
I scribbled down his directions on a hotel phone pad as fast as he gave them. “What time?”
“How about twelve thirty? Actually, better make it twelve forty-five. I’ll wait for you outside. Or you wait for me.”
He hung up as Pépé walked over and stood in the doorway between our rooms. “Everything okay?”
“I’m meeting Quinn at a coffee shop. A place called the Buena Vista.”
Pépé’s eyes lit up. “Ah, the Buena Vista. I haven’t been there for years.”
“You know it, too?”
“Of course. It’s a San Francisco icon.”
“What exactly is it?”
He grinned and said, in the same teasing voice as Quinn, “You’ll find out when you get there.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m taking a shower.”
Twenty minutes later I knocked on Pépé’s door and told him I was leaving. He was sitting at a large desk in front of the picture window, coffee growing cold, papers spread out around him and fanned out on the floor. Apparently he’d gotten a second wind. The papers looked like his talk for the Bohemian Grove. I went over and dropped a kiss on the top of his head.
“I’ll be back later this afternoon. I’m not sure when. See you for dinner?”
“If not dinner, at least for a martini at the Top of the Mark.”
“I don’t drink martinis.”
“You do at the Top of the Mark,
I grinned. It would be just like my octogenarian grandfather to be out on the town hours after I got back to the hotel, outlasting his much younger granddaughter and breezing into the room, ready for martinis at the Top of the Mark whatever the hour.
“You’re such a party animal,” I said.
He chuckled, looking pleased with himself. “You’re just saying that.”
I got the last seat on an outdoor wooden bench facing the street when the dark-green-and-red cable car stopped on Powell Street ten minutes later. The conductor rang the bell, and I felt a giddy, manic thrill as we climbed Nob Hill then up and over Pacific Heights before plunging down the roller-coaster-steep street toward the water. There seemed to be no limit to the number of passengers the conductor was prepared to take on until, finally, the old-fashioned car was packed inside and out with people hanging on to the running board grab bars like barnacles on a ship. I glanced over my shoulder at the grip man inside the car, who flashed a practiced don’t-worry grin and pulled hard on the long cable handle. More people hopped on than jumped off, until finally the conductor tugged the bell and we continued our downward dive toward Fisherman’s Wharf.
I got off at the corner of Hyde and Beach, as Quinn had instructed, and watched the two men manually rotate the wooden car on a large turntable—like a lazy Susan built into the street—so it could grind its way back up the hill. Above an olive drab brick building across the street a red neon sign read THE BUENA VISTA.
Quinn wasn’t among the people milling in front of the restaurant, but I caught sight of him, the familiar way he ducked his head and balled his hands as he sprinted across Beach Street with the easy grace of an athlete. His curly salt-and-pepper hair, so long it was over his ears last time I saw him, was nearly as short as Bobby’s. He pulled off his sunglasses and scanned the crowd, grinning and waving when he caught sight of me. I waved back, smiled, and prayed he wouldn’t notice how nervous I was.
Until this moment I hadn’t wanted to imagine our reunion, whether it would be stilted or awkward or, worst of all, excruciatingly polite and formal after our painful goodbye in my bedroom that April morning. But he pulled me to him in a swift, fierce embrace, and my arms automatically went around his neck gripping him tight. We stayed locked like that for a long time without speaking, clinging to each other in the middle of the sidewalk, as the crowd brushed past us.
Finally he said in my ear, “I can’t believe you’re in San Francisco. It’s great to see you. You look terrific, Lucie.”
He stepped back and I let go of his neck. He was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt—he owned a closetful of them, even collected them—and jeans. I knew every one of his shirts; this one—sage green with blue and tobacco-colored palm fronds and coconut shell buttons—was new.
“Thanks. You look pretty terrific yourself. California agrees with you.”
I regretted it the moment I said it, but it was true. He looked happy, content. The haunted, defeated look I remembered from back home last spring was gone. Here he’d made peace with himself, found a purpose, seemed fulfilled.
Something new and self-conscious flashed in his eyes. I pretended to fiddle with my cane and wondered if, or when, he was going to tell me he wasn’t coming back to Atoka after all. This time it wasn’t about the vineyard and whether he would return as the winemaker. This time it was about us and where we were going from here. I felt like I was back on that dizzying downward cable car—this time with no brakes.
He brushed my arm with the back of his hand, a familiar, remembered gesture. “How about a drink?”
I managed to smile. “I thought you’d never ask.”
He grinned back and suddenly we were on our old footing—the safe territory where we kidded each other a little but kept our guard up and our emotions locked down.
“This isn’t exactly a little coffee shop,” I said. “Pépé knew about it, too. He said it’s a San Francisco icon.”
Quinn took my elbow with one hand and reached for the door with the other.
“Best Irish coffee outside of Dublin. And breakfast all day. You hungry, Virginia lady?”
“Starved,” I said. “The last real meal I had was Dominique’s French onion soup at our July fourteenth party last night.”
He faltered as he followed me into the restaurant. Then he recovered and said, “I love her French onion soup. Fireworks good?”
“The best yet. Next year will be even better. You’ll see.”
“Yeah, pretty soon we’ll be outrivaling the ones on the National Mall on the Fourth.”
I was glad he said “we.”
The Buena Vista was packed and noisy, an old-fashioned place of dark woodwork, mustard-colored walls, lazily spinning ceiling fans, and a long row of picture windows overlooking a leafy park with the Bay as a backdrop. People stood three deep at the bar, which ran the length of the restaurant, or sat jammed together around small tables lined up underneath the windows. The high tin ceiling amplified the laughter and chatter until it overflowed the room, absorbing Quinn and me into the easygoing crowd.
“Come on,” he said in my ear. “You’ve got to see this.”
A couple moved away from the bar and Quinn shouldered us into their places, ordering two Irish coffees from a white-jacketed bartender who nodded and lined up a row of glass mugs. I watched the blur of movement as he made our coffees and about a dozen others, assembly-line style, pouring and sloshing hot coffee and Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey from a few feet in the air with flair and the absolute abandon of one who didn’t have to mop up the counter or floor at the end of the day. With maestrolike finesse he finished by pouring a thick head of cream into the mugs off the back of a silver spoon. I waited for the cream to turn the drink caramel-colored but instead it remained a perfect two-inch layer that sat on top of the coffee.
“How’d he do that?” I murmured to Quinn.
“Magic.” He took our mugs and said, “The table behind you just opened up. Grab it while I pay for this, okay?”
We sat across from each other at a scarred table as the jostling crowd closed in around us. A waiter came by and opened a small ventilation window above our heads with a long wooden pole.
