The bus let her off at Prytania and Josephine at twenty minutes past eleven, the way it had let her off every November first for as long as the route had run, and Bea stood a moment on the sidewalk with her handbag over her arm, getting her bearings by looking for the things that did not move. The oak on the corner. The iron fence with the one spear bent since the storm year. The awning of Chez Odette, dark green, lettered in gold that had gone modest with age. The sky had been threatening since Mass, and she had brought the good coat, the one with the deep pockets, because the air had that iron smell that meant the rain was not going to wait for anybody's plans.
Fifty-six Novembers. Nineteen seventy-one, the first one: Emile in the suit he had bought for the wedding, both of them twenty-nine and so poor that the lunch had been a strategy, a whole month of small economies folded into one white tablecloth. He had walked her past three cheaper places to get to this door. A man should take his wife somewhere with cloth napkins once a year, he said, so the year knows it was seen. She had thought it was foolishness. She had let him think so for fifty-two years, and every year she had polished her shoes the night before.
Emile had been gone three years. The lunch had not missed a year. Grief, Bea had learned, was mostly a matter of keeping appointments on behalf of people who could no longer keep them. She came at eleven-thirty. She sat at Table 4, by the window, where she could watch Prytania go past and the light was good for her eyes. The restaurant held it for her — through three generations of Boudreauxes and one fire and the long shuttered months of the flood year, when she had come anyway and stood outside the boarded door a minute, and Alphonse, the host in those years, had found her there and sworn that when the doors opened, her table would be the first one set. It was. It always was.
The envelope was in the left pocket of the good coat, counted twice at the kitchen table that morning, once forward and once backward, the way she had counted lunch money for thirty years in a school cafeteria. The tip was folded separately into the small pocket of the handbag, so her hand would not have to hunt for it in front of anybody. A person should never have to count at a table. Count it before, baby, she had taught four hundred children a year. At the table you just be a person.
She went up the steps slowly, one hand on the rail, and a young man — a boy, really, with a busser's apron and a tub of glassware balanced against his hip — moved out of her path and held the door wide with his free hand, nodding to her as she passed. She did not catch his face. The doorway swallowed her into noise.
That was the thing nobody who hears properly understands about a place like this at the start of service: the doorway is the worst room in the world. The dining room behind the stand had its music and its linen hush, but the entry was a collision — the bell over the door, the street behind her, the kitchen's percussions through the pass, six conversations braided together, the host stand's little printer worrying out its tickets. Sound came to Bea the way light comes through a dirty window: all of it at once, none of it in order. Her hearing aid, which was old, took the whole braid and amplified it faithfully, which was worse than nothing. She had read lips since she was sixty, and reading lips is a skill with rules, like driving: the speaker must face you. The speaker must not turn away mid-sentence. The speaker must not talk to a screen.
The stand was busy. There was a young man behind it she did not know — and she knew, by sight if not by name, nearly everyone who had ever worked this door — working a tablet mounted on a brass arm, with a paper list and a pencil beside it and a line already forming behind her in the vestibule. He was twenty-four, perhaps, with a waiter's apron over his shirt, which told her he was not the usual host. The usual host was Denise, who called her Miss Bea and always leaned in close, bless her, the way you are supposed to. He looked up as she reached the stand, and his smile arrived a fraction before his attention did.
"Welcome to Chez Odette," he said. "Do you have a reservation, ma'am?"
She would have known the shape of that question in any doorway in America, and she smiled and gave him the answer she had given at this stand since before he was born.