Teddy, the new sous chef with the crooked teeth, is on fire again. It’s the second time in a week. I’m not even supposed to be here, but I’ve agreed to cover my cousin Megan’s shift because she has a date tonight with a townie named Ralph. Jessica, the other hostess on duty, smelled burning and went into the kitchen to help, so I’m all alone greeting people—which strictly speaking isn’t allowed until your tenth shift, and this is only my fifth. But there’s no one else.
It’s July third, a Sunday, and the place is packed. The Catfish Grille doesn’t take day-of reservations, so anyone else who’s managed to get a table must have waited in line or else slipped a big one to Cody, the skinny afternoon bartender who mans the greeting stand before the hostesses clock in at six. Argus, a tall, mustached waiter with a vaguely European accent, carries plates of crab cakes and coconut shrimp back and forth from the dining room as if nothing’s happened. Like most people here, he generally ignores me.
Out the window the sun is starting to set, leaving a tail of white-pink light that ripples across Currituck Sound like a flame. Smoke curls around the railings of the boardwalk that encircles the nearby shops, chasing the last few visitors indoors. All summer a gray haze has hung over the beaches and the dunes, the air reeking of the ash that blows up over the ocean from the south. Jessica, who grew up here and whose parents still live in a tiny duplex in Kill Devil Hills, said recently that it was from wildfires down along the Hatteras National Seashore. I told her that when I used to come here on vacation as a kid, the sky was so clear you could see the stars even in daytime, that my father would hoist me onto his shoulders to point out a constellation that looked like a swan. “Cygnus,” she said, nodding in recognition. For a moment I thought maybe we’d be friends.
