More mimosas. More Bloody Marys. Coffee for Baker, who is falling asleep at the table. Ayers elbows him in the ribs. “You think you’re tired now, wait until the baby comes.”
Josephine sings Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which has long been one of Teresa’s favorite songs. It’s a hymn, an anthem, and it only adds to the cinematic quality of the scene, the restaurant perched high above the streets of Cruz Bay on a summer Sunday morning.
I’ve heard there was a secret chord…
Churches across the island will be letting out about now, so the restaurant will get a little busier, but not much. Teresa always jokes that, for Jake’s clientele, pancakes are their religion. (As is strong coffee. And vodka.)
Teresa takes a minute to gaze out at the water—the ferry coming in from Red Hook, the Singing Dog heading out for a sail, maybe with a stop at Carval Rock for a snorkel. When Teresa gets in the weeds at the restaurant, she always imagines herself afloat, her mask submerged in the clear turquoise water, taking in the teeming life of the coral reef. Other people like the fish, the rays, the turtles, but Teresa is fascinated by the coral itself: the intricacies of the brain coral, the grooves of which look like a maze; the staghorn; the boulder star; the elkhorn (Teresa’s favorite); the layers of lettuce coral; the ivory bush; the clubbed finger. It’s a city down there, a world, a universe that manages to be productive but very, very quiet.
That David played, and it pleased the Lord.
Teresa doesn’t remember every detail of the night she first hooked up with Captain Huck Powers, but certain things stand out. She’d met her coworker Diane at High Tide, then they’d cruised down to the Beach Bar with a stop at Joe’s Rum Hut. There was a band at the Beach Bar, and Teresa danced with a charter captain named Pat; he was a full head shorter than Teresa and a little handsy. She escaped to the bar, and that’s where she found Huck.
“Why the long face?” Teresa asked. As soon as the words were out, she realized her mistake. She had heard that LeeAnn Powers, Huck’s wife, had died a couple of months earlier. She didn’t know Huck well, though he would, on occasion, come into Jake’s for a cup of coffee and the breakfast sandwich to go, or he’d bring his granddaughter in for the chocolate pancakes. (That was back when the girl was small, five or six years old; Teresa can’t believe how grown-up she looks now, and how much like her mother.)
To cheer Huck up, Teresa asked Mick to hand over the dice to roll, but the dice did nothing but take Teresa’s fiver, so then she asked for the Connect Four. It was a kids’ game but everyone at the Beach Bar was so far gone that it was just about all they could handle.
Huck and Teresa split the first two games and then Huck won the third, which cheered him a bit. They headed over to Drink for a shot—a prairie fire, which was whiskey with tabasco—and then, feeling no pain, they went to 420 to Center. Pat was there. He bummed a cigarette off Teresa and tried to engage her in conversation, and Huck took over then, wheeling Teresa out of the bar, saying, “Let’s get you home.”
He spent that night with her and was up and out at five thirty, which was when she left for work. He didn’t ask for her number and she didn’t offer it—but the next week, she was drinking up at the Quiet Mon and Huck took the stool next to hers. That was how he found her the third time as well, only the third time he suggested stopping by the side door at Castaways to get a couple of orders of the blackened mahi tacos and, why not, the disco fries. They ate on Teresa’s tiny deck and they talked. Teresa told him about her kids, Jasper and Graeden, both working as bartenders in Sun Valley, Idaho, and their dad, Teresa’s ex, a former member of the U.S. ski team who’d become a sales rep for Salomon and who lived it up, bouncing from one ski resort to the next, good for him. Huck didn’t talk about LeeAnn but he did talk about Rosie and Maia and how he knew Rosie probably wanted to move out and get her own place now that her mother was gone but that he hoped to God she didn’t.
Although I’d like her to meet someone, he said. A good man.
After that third time, Teresa thought maybe their relationship would continue; maybe she would be a rebound for a while or maybe it would become something more. She wanted that, naturally, because Captain Huck Powers was—excuse the pun—a catch in anyone’s book.
But Huck must have gotten scared about sharing as much as he had, by their talking and breaking bread (stuffing cheese-and-bacon fries into their mouths) in addition to sleeping together. Teresa never heard from him again. There were a couple of times she felt someone take the seat next to her at the Quiet Mon and thought it was him, but it was just Pat—at which point, she got up and made the lonely walk home.
She didn’t think much about Huck after that—not until Rosie was killed on New Year’s Day. Teresa was serving up breakfast to a very hungover clientele when Clover, the
