Last Chance is a boardwalk restaurant whose modest, practical role in Auden’s summer gives it unusual narrative reach. People come there for tuna melts, burgers, onion rings, and dinner; Auden also watches the boardwalk from its window and later sits outside it to observe a beach game. The restaurant becomes a point of return where conversations about growing up, making connections, and choosing what comes next meet Heidi’s account of an earlier summer that changed the course of her life.

Setting and Place on the Boardwalk

Maggie locates Last Chance at the end of the boardwalk, on the left, and recommends its tuna melt when Hollis asks Auden to join him for a very late lunch or very early dinner. Hollis has heard from their father that the restaurant serves good onion rings, and his appetite for a tuna melt gives the invitation an easy, teasing tone. The exchange establishes Last Chance as an ordinary destination embedded in the summer’s everyday geography: people walk there from the boardwalk, consult one another about what to order, and use the restaurant as a place to spend time together.

The restaurant’s atmosphere changes with the hour and the occasion. When Auden and Hollis arrive, it is empty for once, and they take a booth beside the window without waiting. Auden looks out at the passing boardwalk crowd while Hollis begins a more serious conversation. On another evening, the restaurant is bustling; Auden sits on a bench in front of it and watches a beach game from a distance. These contrasting scenes make the location both a sheltered place for conversation and a vantage point on the social life continuing beyond its doors.

Hollis and Auden’s Conversation

At the booth, Hollis tells Auden that he is glad she came to Colby for the summer, spent time with people, and made friends. He had worried she would spend it as she had spent earlier summers. The restaurant thus hosts a conversation in which her changed summer becomes visible to someone who knew her before she arrived. The significance lies not in a dramatic announcement but in Hollis’s recognition: Auden’s choice to participate in life around her marks a departure from an established pattern.

The exchange also turns toward Hollis’s long absence and return. Auden recalls the insight that, in their family, leaving home had been necessary for him to remain a child, while returning was what finally made him grow up. The thought connects the restaurant conversation to the family’s history without making the location a place of simple reconciliation. Hollis’s presence there gives Auden a chance to see his distance from the family differently, while the relaxed meal allows a difficult understanding to emerge through ordinary talk.

Jason Talbot and a Second Meeting

Last Chance also figures in Auden’s unexpected encounter with Jason Talbot. After watching the beach game from the bench outside, Auden learns that Jason has just finished dinner in the restaurant, where he had spent fifteen minutes wondering whether he had recognized her. He is in Colby for the FCLC, a conference that has just begun, and encourages Auden to attend because he thinks she could contribute to its discussion. Before returning to his dinner, he asks whether she still has the same phone number and suggests they meet to catch up.

Auden later remembers meeting Jason at Last Chance in a booth. Over burgers and onion rings, he talks at length about the leadership conference and how well it is going. The familiar rhythm recalls their lunches and conversations about school and classes in the spring, but Auden experiences that familiarity as comfortable rather than unwelcome. When Jason clears his throat to ask her something, she agrees easily. The restaurant becomes the setting for a renewed connection that feels like a return to an earlier pattern, yet takes place after Auden’s summer has broadened her experience.

Heidi’s Earlier Summer

In a later conversation, Heidi tells Auden that she once worked at Last Chance. After graduating, she had planned to move to New York, but her mother became ill, and Heidi returned to Colby for the summer to care for her. She waited tables at the restaurant with Isabel and Morgan to earn extra money for the move. The job placed her in the path of Robert, who came in for lunch after a faculty interview at Weymar. Because the restaurant was slow, they began talking, and their relationship developed from there.

Heidi’s story gives the restaurant a history that precedes Auden’s own summer there. At the end of that summer, Heidi’s mother improved for a while, and Heidi said goodbye to Robert and left for New York. But once she was there, the plan no longer felt right; she no longer had the same hunger for it. She describes having arrived in Colby intending to leave as soon as she could, treating it as a stop along the way rather than a destination. Through this account, Last Chance is not merely where Auden and her friends eat: it is also where Heidi’s carefully mapped future began to diverge from what she eventually chose.

A Recurrent Meeting Place

The restaurant’s appearances link separate strands of the story without erasing their differences. Hollis and Auden use it to talk about her summer and his return; Jason and Auden meet there again through the familiar rituals of a meal and conversation; Heidi’s memory places the beginning of her relationship with Robert in an earlier summer, over a slow lunch after his interview. In each case, a meal provides the immediate circumstance, while the conversation opens onto a larger question of belonging, return, or choice.

Last Chance’s understated details help hold those moments together: the end-of-boardwalk directions, a booth beside the window, the passing crowd, and the specific comfort of burgers, onion rings, and tuna melts. The restaurant is also set against the beach game Auden watches from its bench, where the activity of the summer continues at a distance before she encounters Jason. Its importance is therefore cumulative. It is a familiar public place where different versions of the past and present can meet, and where decisions that might sound momentous elsewhere emerge through the ordinary act of sitting down to eat.