Table Four

It was not large. It was the size of a ledger cut down, bound in a dark red cloth that had gone soft and pale at the corners, and the spine had been repaired once with tape that had itself grown old. She carried it the way people in this building carried full stockpots — level, attended to — and she set it down on the service station counter between the silverware and the salt cellar, and stood with her hand flat on the cover a moment, as if it were an animal that might startle.

"When the revival came in," she said, "two years ago, with the platform and the consultants and Mister Sanderson's — system." She said the word without pleasure. "They cleared the host stand. Everything paper went into boxes for the discard. The menus from before. The seating charts. This. It was in the box on top, because it was the last thing taken out of the stand drawer, I think. I was bringing the box to the back myself — they had me bringing boxes, Drew, at my age, because it was all-hands — and I saw the cover, and I put the box down, and I took this out, and I put it in my cupboard, and I have kept it there two years like a woman hiding a cat in a rented house."

"Why?" Drew said.

"Because it is the book," she said. "Because somebody had to. Open the cover."

He wiped his hands on his apron first, without being told to, the way you do before touching something in a church. The cover opened on a page of thick paper, and on the inside of the cover itself, in a hand that was not Mireille's — an older hand, upright, black ink gone brown at the edges — someone had written, carefully, the way you write a thing meant to be read by strangers after you:

*Table 4, November 1 — the Thibodeaux table. Held until noon whether booked or not. Some reservations are older than the book. — O.*

"Odette Boudreaux," Mireille said. "The founder. Gus's grandmother. That is her hand. She wrote it the year they rebound the book, which I believe was 1988, because she was tired of explaining it to new hostesses." Her mouth did something that was almost a smile. "She was tired of explaining most things. Read the November pages, Drew. Not all. Just — turn."

He turned.

The book was not arranged the way the platform arranged things. It was a year at a time, a season at a time, in hands that changed like weather over decades — a fine copperplate early on, a hurried ballpoint later, a year in pencil, a year in somebody's green ink. And Mireille, standing beside him, put one finger down at the first of November, 1971, and the entry was in the copperplate, in Odette's own hand:

*Thibodeaux, E. + wife — Table 4 — anniversary.*

"Emile and Beatrice," Mireille said. "Married November first, 1952, in the Upper Ninth, at the church on Desire her father helped build. They came here for the first anniversary after this place opened its doors — no. Listen to me, I am doing the thing old people do. They came in 1971 because Emile had heard a Negro chef's granddaughter had opened a fine room on Prytania and he wanted his wife to eat in it, and Odette sat them at table four because it was the only table free, and Bea — Miss Bea — said the light there made Emile look like the photograph on her piano. So it became their table. Every November first. Turn the pages."

He turned them. 1972. 1973. The entries had the steadiness of a heartbeat in the book's front section, and then the book changed and thickened and the hands began to rotate — birthdays, christenings, a christening party of fourteen with *Table 4 + 6 pushed together* in a hand that leaned hard — and still, every year, arriving like a train in the front of November:

1. *Thibodeaux — 4 — anniversary. E. wears the gray suit.* 1986. *Thibodeaux, E. + B. — Table 4 — 34 years. She asked for the pudding recipe again. No.* 1994. *Thibodeaux — Table 4 — held till noon.*

"That hand," Mireille said, and her finger rested a moment on a page from the early nineties, on letters younger and quicker than the ones she wrote now, the i's dotted with small decisive stabs. "That one is mine. I was twenty-six and thought I was being trusted with state secrets. I suppose I was."

He turned pages the way you turn pages in a room where somebody is sleeping. 2003. 2011. A year where the entry said *Emile not well — send the pudding home with them — no charge — O. would say charge. Charge nothing.* A year with a small drawing in the margin, a child's crayon turkey, initialed by a grandchild allowed behind the stand on a slow night. And then the last three years, in Mireille's current hand, the entries changing the way a duet becomes a solo:

*Thibodeaux, B. — Table 4 — held till noon.* *Thibodeaux, B. — Table 4 — held till noon.* *Thibodeaux, B. — Table 4 — held till noon.*