with little mints and a postcard of the restaurant. I told people it had been great seeing them, and to drive safe, and wiped the table down in preparation for the next family or young couple or trio of wizened oldsters celebrating sixty years of mutual dislike.
After two cycles of this, the evening ended and we cleared the place up, and everyone started for home.
It was dark by then. Unusually humid too, the air like the breath of a big, hot dog who'd been drinking sea water all afternoon. I nodded goodbye as rusty cars piloted by other staff crunkled past me, on the way up the pebbled slip road from the Pelican's location, to turn left or right along Highway 101.
The cooks left jammed together into one low-slung and battered station wagon, the driver giving me a pro-forma eye-fuck as he passed. I assumed they all boarded together in some house up in Astoria or Seaside, saving money to send back home, but as I'd never spoken to any of them, I didn't actually know.
As I reached the highway I realized Kyle was a few yards behind me. I glanced back, surprised.
‘You walking somewhere?’
‘Yeah, right,’ he smirked. ‘Mission control's on the way. Big party up the road tonight. We're headed in your direction, if you want a ride.’
I hesitated. Normally I walked the two miles north. The other staff know this, and think I'm out of my mind. I look at their young, hopeful faces and consider asking what else I should be doing with the time, but I don't want to freak them out. I don't want to think of myself as not-young, either, but as a thirty-five year old amongst humans with training wheels, you can feel like the go-to guy for insider information on the formation of the tectonic plates.
The walk is pleasant enough. You head along the verge, the road on your right, the other side of which is twenty feet of scrubby grass and then rocky outcrops. On your left you pass the parking lots of very small, retro-style condos and resorts, three storey at most and rendered in pastel or white with accents in a variety of blues, called things like The Sandpiper and Waves and Trade Winds; or fifty-yard lots stretching to individual beach houses; or, for long stretches, just undergrowth and dunes.
But tonight my feet were tired and I wanted to be home, plus there's a difference between doing your own thing and merely looking unfriendly and perverse.
‘That'd be great,’ I said.
Within thirty seconds we realized we had squat to say to each other outside the confines of the restaurant, and Kyle reached in his T-shirt pocket and pulled out a joint. He lit it, hesitated, then offered it to me. To be sociable, I took a hit. Pretty much immediately I could tell why his pizzas were so dreadful: if this was his standard toke, it was amazing the guy could even stand up. We hung in silence for ten minutes, passing the joint back and forth, waiting for inspiration to strike. Before long I was beginning to wish I'd walked. At least that way I could have headed over the dunes down to the beach, where the waves would have cut the humidity a little.
‘Gonna rain,’ Kyle said suddenly, as if someone had given him a prompt via an earpiece.
I nodded. ‘I'm thinking so.’
Five minutes later, thankfully, Becki's car came down the road as if hurled by a belligerent god. It decelerated within a shorter distance than I would have thought possible, though not without cost to the tyres.
‘Hey,’ she said, around a cigarette. ‘Walking Dude's going to accept a ride? Well. I'm honoured.’
I smiled. ‘Been a long day.’
‘Word, my liege. Hop in.’
I got in back and held on tight as she returned the vehicle to warp speed. Kyle seemed to know better than to try to talk to his woman while she was in charge of heavy machinery, and I followed his lead, enjoying the wind despite the significant G-forces that came with it.
The journey didn't take long at all. When we were a hundred yards from my destination, I tapped Becki on the shoulder. She wrenched her entire upper body around to see what I wanted.
‘What?’
‘Now,’ I shouted, ‘would be a good time to start slowing down.’
‘Gotcha.’
She wrestled the car to a halt and I vaulted out over the side. The radio was on before I had both feet on the ground. Becki waved with a backward flip of the hand, and then the car was hell and gone down the road.
This coast is very quiet at night. Once in a while a pickup will roar past, trailing music or a meaningless bellow or ejecting an empty beer can to bounce clattering down the road. But mostly it's only the rustle of the surf on the other side of the dunes, and by the time I get home, when I've walked, the evening in the restaurant feels like it might have happened yesterday, or the week before, or to someone else. Everything settles into one long chain of events with little to connect the days except the fact that that's what they do.
Finally I turned and walked up to the house. One of the older vacation homes along this stretch, it has wide, overgrown lots either side and consists of two interlocked wooden octagons, which must have seemed like a good idea to someone at some point – I'm guessing around 1973. In fact it just means there are more angles than usual for rain and sea air to work at – but it's got a good view and a walkway over the dunes down to the sand, and it costs me nothing. Not long after I came here I met a guy called Gary, in Ocean's, a bar half a mile down the road from the Pelican. He'd just gotten unmarried and was in Oregon trying to get his head together. One look told you he was becalmed on the internal sea of the recently divorced: distracted, only occasionally glancing at you directly enough to reveal the wild gaze of a captain alone on a lost ship, tied to the wheel and trying to stop its relentless spinning. Sometimes these men and women will lose control and you'll find them in bars drinking too loud and fast and with nothing like real merriment in their eyes; but mostly they simply hold on, bodies braced against the wind, gazing with a thousand-yard stare into what they assume must be their future.
It's a look I recognized. We bonded, bought each other beers, met up a few times before he shipped back east. Long and short of it is that I ended up being a kind of caretaker for his place, though it doesn't really need it. I stay there, leaving a light on once in a while and being seen in the yard, which presumably lessens the chances of some asshole breaking in. I patch the occasional leak in the roof, and am supposed to call Gary if the smaller octagon (which holds the two bedrooms) starts to sag any worse over the concrete pilings that hold it up on the dune. In heavy winds it's disconcertingly like being on an actual ship, but it'll hold for now. In theory I have to move out if he decides to come out to stay, but in two years that's never happened. I last spoke to him three months ago to get his okay on replacing a screen door, and he was living with a new woman back in Boston and sounded cautiously content. I guess the beach house is a part of Gary's past he's not ready to divest, an investment in a future some part of his heart has not yet quite written off. It'll happen, sooner or later, and then I guess I'll live somewhere else.
Once inside, I opened the big sliding windows and went out on the deck, belatedly realizing it was a Friday night. I'd known this before, of course, sort of. The restaurant's always livelier, regardless of the season – but Friday-is-busy is different to hey-it's-Friday! Or it used to be. Perhaps it was this that made me grab a couple of beers from the fridge; could also have been the half-joint floating around my system, coupled with a feeling of restlessness I'd had all day; or merely that I was home a little earlier than usual and Becki and Kyle had, without trying, made me feel about a million years old.
I decided I'd take the beers down onto the beach. A one-man Friday night, watching the waves, listening to the music of the spheres. Party on.
I walked to within a few yards of the sea and sat down on the sand. Looked up along the coast for a while, at the distant glow of windows in the darkness, listening to the sound of the waves coming up, and going back, as the sky grew lower and matt with gathering cloud.