“Your mom was right. You need supervision.”
He clutches at his heart. “I’m just doing my job, Quinn.”
Quinn. The way he says my name sends a shiver of something up my spine that could be the AC. It’s just my fucking name. It shouldn’t make me react like this.
“Did you play earlier?” he asks after selecting three boxes of the superior Oregon tofu, staring down at the expiration dates instead of at my face. “The harp, I mean?”
“Oh. Yeah, I did,” I say, realizing he wouldn’t have heard me since he wasn’t at the church.
“I haven’t heard you play this summer yet,” he says, like it’s some crucial element of the season. Sun, ice cream, Quinn Berkowitz on the harp. “I guess it doesn’t feel like summer without it.”
Another statement I have no idea how to process. “I’m sure the harp sounds just as mellifluous as it always does.” The idea of him looking forward to hearing me play… I have to push it away before I start to obsess. He likes the sound of the harp. So do most people, Salty Sequin Lady excluded.
“Right.” He tosses the tofu into my basket, and we head to the rice and beans aisle.
I reach for a box of instant Spanish rice, the kind with the spice packet inside, but he holds out a hand to stop me. His fingers graze the exposed skin on my arms, and I fight another AC-induced shiver. They should really turn it down in here.
“Spanish rice. Like your dad said?”
“From a box?” He lets out this horrified-sounding scoff. “Mansour’s is not serving boxed rice.”
I follow him around the store as he picks up a quart of vegetable stock, a bag of rice, and a can of tomato paste. Again, I’m struck by this easy confidence he has. This request turned me frantic, but there’s none of that in the way he glides through the aisles. Maybe he’s able to remain so calm because he loves this work. It’s never been a chore for him, the way it is for me.
“It’s going to be fine,” he says while we’re waiting in line to check out, as though the reason I’m so tense is because I’m worried about the food. If only it were that simple to fix what’s wrong. “We’ve dealt with worse. Remember that couple who changed their whole menu a few days before the wedding?”
“From small plates to barbecue? I can’t believe you guys let them get away with that.”
“Oh, we made sure they paid for it. And sustainably raised meat is not cheap,” he says with another little half smile. “Anyway. These guests probably won’t even know it’s different from the other veggie meals.”
“That’s our job, right? To make all of this look effortless, even when it isn’t?” The questions slip out before I can catch them, tinged with a sharpness that seems to make him suspicious.
He gives me an odd look, his dark brows drawn together. “You make it sound like ‘yes’ is somehow the wrong answer.”
“I—I don’t know.” Now we are standing too close together, and I’m feeling the same kind of feverish I did on the walk over, the sun beating down on my un-sunscreened skin. “Forget I said anything.”
“Okay,” he says, and then we’re at the front of the checkout line.
Tarek knows I don’t love being my parents’ on-call harpist, but not about the six months my mom spent apart from us, not my existential college-and-beyond panic. It’s been a long time since we could talk to each other like that. Maybe I could, if we’d exchanged a single word over the past year. But I’m not sure what our relationship looks like in that alternate universe. If we’re close friends or if we’re… something I shouldn’t think about while standing right next to him. Something there’s no way I can want when he’s still hiding so much.
Last summer, after he and Alejandra broke up, it didn’t take long before he found his next target: Elisa, another cater-waiter who’d been with Mansour’s for a few years. I watched them joke around in the kitchen and trade smiles from across a room. A playful hand on his arm. A hug at the end of a shift. He always confided in me about his crushes, probably because we didn’t go to the same school and that made it safer. I assumed the only reason he didn’t tell me about Elisa was that we all worked in such close proximity. Even when he and I spent time together, my own feelings spiraling, I couldn’t help wondering whether he was counting down the minutes until he could be spending time with her instead.
I had to know. It would be torture, hearing him confirm it, but it had to be a more pleasant torture than uncertainty.
So I asked him—not specifically about Elisa, but if he was working on any grand gestures. Because if he wanted to date her, that’s what he would do. “I’m planning something big,” he said. “Right before I leave for school.”
One evening a week before he left for California, he asked me to meet him at the Shilshole Bay Marina. He was cryptic about it: “I want to get your opinion on something,” he said at our last wedding of the summer.
The fight that happened there is so fresh in my mind that sometimes I swear it happened only yesterday. He and Elisa had been hard-core flirting at our past few weddings—I should have seen it coming. I showed up at the marina at seven o’clock, just like he’d asked. He looked so cute with his hair still damp from a shower. My stomach dropped when I saw the boat he rented all strung up with lights, soft jazz music playing from it, and realized why he’d asked me to meet him here.
I want to get your opinion on something.
I was a guinea pig for his
