Drew did not entirely believe this. He believed it the way you believe weather reports: he organized his day around it while reserving the right to complain. He had taken the job at Chez Odette because his grandmother spoke of it the way people speak of churches, and he had discovered that a church and a restaurant have this in common: everybody at the door believes their occasion is the important one.
The old woman at the stand was small and upright in a dark green coat that had been a good coat for a long time, and she had the bearing — he noted it professionally, the way you note a party's size and patience — of a person who has never once considered that she might not be expected. She had given her name twice. The second time she had spelled it, slowly and precisely, like a woman reading out a recipe she intends you to get right, and he had typed it in letter for letter because something about the spelling made sloppiness feel like a moral failure. The platform had nothing. The paper backup list had nothing either. No Thibodeaux. No eleven-thirty party of one at all.
Table 4 was the problem underneath the problem. Table 4 — the window two-top, the best deuce in the house — was committed at noon to a party of six, a birthday booked three weeks out under the name Gail Fournier, its notes field in capital letters: WINDOW TABLE REQUESTED, GRANDMOTHER'S 80TH. The six would be seated around a pulled-together arrangement anchored on Table 4, which meant Table 4 had to sit empty and visibly perfect through the entire eleven-thirty seating, a held breath in the middle of the room.
"Eleven-thirty," the old woman said. "Every year. They hold Table Four for me. By the window." And she pointed — past him, into the room, with a straight arm and no hesitation at all, the way you point at your own house from the street — directly at the empty table in the window light. "There. That's the one."
Drew felt the whole shape of the next five minutes assemble itself in front of him, and he did not like any of it. He was aware, at the edge of his awareness, of Sanderson on the floor — working a table near the kitchen door, water pitcher in hand, and somehow, without appearing to look anywhere near the stand, taking in the stand the way a lighthouse takes in weather. Sanderson had a theory of the door. The theory was pace: nobody stood still long enough to understand that standing still was an option; the line breathed, the smiles moved, the vestibule never reached the temperature at which people begin to compare their treatment to other people's.
"Ma'am, Table Four is reserved at noon," Drew said, keeping his voice at the level the stand had taught him, bright and procedural. "It's committed. I don't have anything at eleven-thirty at all — the next opening I could give you is two-thirty."
She did not react to this the way people react to information. She watched his mouth, the way a person watches a television through a shop window, and he understood — too slowly, in pieces, the way you understand anything you are ashamed of later — that she was not ignoring him. She was reading him. She was following his lips like a line of print.
The old woman stepped closer to the stand.
It was a small step — half a step, really, the distance a person closes to hear a confidence — but it closed the working space between her and the tablet, and behind her, as if the day had been waiting for its cue, the vestibule door opened on a gust of wet-smelling air and a family came in out of the brightening gloom: a tall man shaking rain off a blazer that hadn't caught any yet, a woman with a gift bag held high like a lantern, an older woman in a corsage — the corsage, God help him, the grandmother, the eightieth birthday — and two more behind them with a cake box carried flat and careful as a tray of communion. Fournier. The party of six. Early by twenty minutes, and already the tall man was doing the arithmetic of the vestibule with his eyes: the stand, the old woman at the stand, the wait that the old woman at the stand represented.
Drew's body reacted before Drew did. He felt the line in his shoulders — the Fourniers arranging themselves, the Saints man finding in this new development a confirming outrage. And through it all the old woman stood close at his elbow with her handbag in both hands now, watching his face, waiting with the patience of a person for whom this conversation was the only one happening.
"Ma'am, do you have a reservation?" Drew said. It came out brisk — that was the word he would use later, in the version he told himself at midnight; brisk — and it was the third time he had asked her some version of the same question, and some part of him knew it even as it left his mouth. He was no longer asking her anything. He was asking the line to hold. He was performing solvability.