She had served that pudding to the same woman across all the weathers a long life contains. She had served it in years when the woman came on a husband's arm, and in the years after, when she came alone and wore her aloneness like a good coat — the same coat, Mireille had catalogued privately, tended and kept, the way certain women keep everything that has ever held them. She had served it in years of flood and years of drought, in a year when the restaurant had no gas and cooked the lunch on a borrowed burner, and the woman had come anyway, because November first was November first and the table by the window was the table by the window. Fifty-five years, the woman had kept the appointment. It had not occurred to Mireille, on any morning of her thirty-seven years in that corner, that an appointment kept fifty-five times could be broken by anything so small as a list.
She did not open the book this morning. She did not need to open it. She knew what was in it the way she knew the pudding's timing. There are books a person keeps by keeping, not by reading.
At the service door, Tee Baptiste was laying out the bus station with the concentration of a boy defusing something.
Tyrone Baptiste was nineteen and called Tee by everyone including his grandmother, and he held the job of busser the way a good fullback holds a job nobody applauds: completely, and earlier than anyone asked. He said little. The building had early on mistaken this for simplicity, and the building had been wrong, and the building — which was old, and had seen a great deal — had corrected itself. Tee saw everything. He saw which waiter's section was drowning before the waiter did. He saw the moment a table's evening turned, the exact sentence after which a couple would not recover. He saw Sanderson's doctrine for what it was, because he emptied its baskets. And he held doors — for the delivery men, for the old cooks, for the guests in rain — with a timing so natural that people passed through them feeling the building itself had been courteous.
"You ready, Tee?" Drew said, passing with an armload of menus that were decorative only; nobody had ordered off a paper menu in two years, but Sanderson kept them at the stand the way churches keep hymnals.
"Born ready," Tee said, "eleven-thirty seating. That's what the man said."
"The man said a lot of things," Drew said.
"He says them at the same speed every day," Tee said. "Like a train. You could set a soufflé by him." And he went back to his tubs, and Drew laughed despite himself, and took his place at the stand at eleven-fourteen by the tablet's immaculate clock, and arranged his face into the face of the room's throat.
The doors opened at eleven-fifteen.
They came the way weather comes to New Orleans in November — all at once and in layers. The 11:30 seating was not a seating; it was a population. Women in good dresses with the particular shine of people who had dressed for a photograph. Men already loosening into the second hour of their appetites. A christening party of eleven that the platform had recorded as nine. A judge. Two tables of tourists who had read about Chez Odette in a magazine on an airplane and arrived with the dazed reverence of pilgrims at a shrine that served lunch. A woman celebrating seventy years of being alive, with her daughters arranging her like a monument. Names were checked. Names matched. The column on the tablet emptied itself name by name with a soft, satisfied orderliness, and Drew worked the stand the way he had been trained to work it and the way his rent required him to work it: precisely, quickly, without a wasted motion or a wasted word, and the little waiting area filled and drained and filled again.
Sanderson moved through it like a floor general in a war he was winning, tablet in hand, touching a shoulder here, a timetable there. "Beautiful," he said to Drew, passing the stand at eleven-twenty-two. "Look at it. Not a gap in the room. This is what a Sunday is supposed to look like." And then, because the war always sends up one more dispatch: the noon party of six, the Fournier table, had sent word they might be eight after all, and might be early — eleven-fifty. "Which means Four turns like a top," Sanderson said, with relish. "Whoever's on it at eleven-thirty, they're out by eleven-fifty. Sweetly. Firmly. Out."
At eleven-nineteen, the system sealed a leak, and Drew sealed it, and it was so smooth that nobody, including Drew, felt a thing.