"Thibodeaux," she said. "Beatrice Thibodeaux. Eleven-thirty. Table Four."
He bent to the tablet. She watched his thumbs move. This was the new way and she bore it no malice; two years ago there had been a book, a great leather book with the day's pages ruled by hand, and in the earliest years nothing at all but Mr. Alphonse's memory, which had been the best system of the three. The book had gone in what the letter had called the revival — the restaurant bought and brightened, and a kind letter to valued guests promising that nothing they loved would change. She had put the letter in the drawer with Emile's papers. Some things had changed anyway. The napkins were a different fold now, and Bea had not seen Denise at the stand since the spring.
The young man frowned at the screen. He scrolled. He frowned with more commitment.
"I'm sorry," he said, turning half away from her toward the dining room, as if the answer might be standing somewhere behind him holding a menu. "What was the name again?"
Bea had heard none of that cleanly — the turn of his head took most of it away from her — but a lifetime of doorways had taught her the choreography, and she leaned in a careful inch and spelled it, the way she had spelled it on a thousand forms.
"Thibodeaux," she said. "T. H. I. B. O. D. E. A. U. X."
He typed it in — she watched his thumbs, getting it right, she could tell he was getting it right, careful boy — and the tablet considered the name and produced nothing. He tried again with some shorter version. He checked the paper list with his pencil, and the pencil slowed and stopped and went back up and came down again, and Bea watched his face change in a way she had seen on faces all her life: the small tightening of a person who has looked twice and found nothing and is beginning to understand that the nothing is going to be his problem.
"I don't have a Thibodeaux today," he said.
He said it to the screen, the way you report weather. Bea caught the vowels of it and the shake of his head and understood the fact before she understood the sentence, the way you understand a closed door before you read the sign on it. But understanding a thing and believing it are different countries.
"Eleven-thirty," she said. "Every year. They hold Table Four for me. By the window." She turned a little and pointed past the stand, into the room — and there it was, set and waiting in the window light: the small table with its cloth and its two settings, close enough to see and far away as another parish. "There," she said. "That's the one."
---
Drew Callahan had been on the stand for exactly forty-one minutes, and the day already intended to go wrong in installments. Denise was home with the flu — Denise, who could run this door blindfolded, who knew the regulars and the liars and the difference — and Sanderson had caught Drew coming out of the locker room at ten-forty with his apron still in his hand. Host stand, he'd said. We're thin. Just work the list, Callahan. The list is the job.
The list was not the job. The list was a door, and a door, at eleven-thirty on the first Sunday of November with the sky fixing to open, was a physical problem: a vestibule eight feet deep and a room promised, by the platform's count, to a hundred and nineteen by one o'clock. There was a man in a Saints windbreaker explaining to his wife, at a volume intended to reach the stand, that he had made his reservation a month ago, a month, and if corporations could keep track of his credit card they could keep track of a table for two. Drew smiled the smile and seated people the way a man bails a boat.
He owed four hundred and ten dollars on the rent by Friday. He owed eleven hundred on the card that had covered the last rent, and the car's transmission had begun making a sound like a spoon in a disposal. He was twenty-four years old, with a degree in hospitality management finished in the spring, and the degree had taught him many things, among them a vocabulary: yield, cover, capture rate, leak. A leak was an unmonetized event. A leak — this was Sanderson's formulation, delivered with the air of scripture — was any human being in this doorway who was not on the list, taking up the door's time, because the door's time is the one thing the house cannot get back. Walk-ins are leaks, people. We don't do charity at the door. We do arithmetic.