Drew seated them. He seated them beautifully — this is the part he would remember with the purest disgust, the clean competence of it, the host-stand waltz performed flawlessly in the immediate aftermath. He pulled the tables together himself around Table 4, distributed menus, told the grandmother happy birthday and meant it — she beamed at him, the corsage trembling — poured the water, lit the little candle in its glass, and the window table came alive with six people and a cake box and a story they would tell, and nobody at it knew, or would ever know, whose chair the grandmother was sitting in.
His relief was real. He would not have admitted its existence for money, but it was real and ugly and it sat in his chest for as long as it took to pour six waters: the line was moving. The door had pace again. Sanderson, passing with a tray, gave him a nod so brief it could have been a blink — good recovery — and Drew stood at the stand with his hands flat on either side of the tablet and felt the day close over the incident the way water closes over a stone.
And then, because it was part of the job to watch the street for the twelve-fifteen's arrival, he looked out through the glass of the door.
It had started to rain in earnest while he was seating the six-top: not a storm, just the beginning of one, that fine, slanting, November rain that finds the seams of coats. Prytania glistened. The awning dripped in a bright line along its edge.
She was standing at the bus stop at the corner, thirty yards away.
She had no umbrella — Bea had never in her life carried one, regarding them as a technology for people who did not plan around weather — and she stood in the rain in her good coat with her handbag held in both hands in front of her, formally, at the center of the body, like something entrusted. Her hair, which she had set that morning, was beginning to take the rain. She was not looking at the restaurant. She was looking down the street in the direction the bus would come from, when it came; the Sunday schedule was the Sunday schedule, and it would not hurry for her either, and she stood in the attitude of a person who has subtracted herself from all expectation of being hurried for.
Waiting the way people wait who have nowhere in the world they are expected.
Drew stood at the door with the platform glowing at his elbow and the birthday party laughing behind him at Table 4, and the crack went through his relief — not loudly, not all at once, but the way a crack goes through ice on a pond: a sound you feel in your feet, and then the knowledge that the surface you have been standing on has been a surface all along, and that the water underneath it is very cold, and very deep, and does not care about your arithmetic.
The last table left at ten-forty, an anniversary couple who had lingered over a bottle and then over the check, as if signing it would end something larger than dinner. Drew walked them to the door because Sanderson liked the door walked to, and he held it while the man helped the woman into her coat, and he said enjoy the rest of your evening in the voice he had been trained to say it in, and the night air that came in around them was cool and smelled of rain that had finished falling somewhere else.
Then the dining room was his to close.
He worked the way he always worked when the room was empty: fast, in order, without thinking, because thinking was the thing he had been outrunning since noon. Chairs up on the two-tops along the wall. The candles pinched out row by row, the little glass chimneys warm in his palm. Table four he did last without knowing he did it last. He set its chairs straight, brushed a crumb off the cloth that was not there — the cloth had been changed at five, and nobody had sat at it all through the dinner service; it was the cleanest table in the house — and moved on before the fact could arrange itself into a sentence.