He read the inside cover first. Drew watched him read it twice. Then Gus turned the November pages himself, slowly, not all of them — he stopped at 1971, and at one of the years with his grandmother's hand still in it, and at the last three, the solo years — and then he closed the book and put both hands flat on the pass on either side of it, and stood there a moment with his head down, a big man gone quiet in his own kitchen.
"My grandmother wrote that rule because of a hostess named Cora," he said at last, to the book, not to them. "Cora seated a walk-in at table four one November first, 1978, because the Thibodeaux weren't in that year's book — they'd called, and Cora wrote it on a slip, and the slip was lost. When Emile and Bea arrived, the table had a couple at it eating salads. My grandmother took the salads off that table herself. Paid for the couple's whole meal at table nine and apologized in the dining room, out loud, where people could hear the owner apologize. Then she wrote the rule in the new book in ink, so the slip could never be lost again, because the rule would not be on a slip. It would be on the book itself." He laughed once, without humor. "She thought of everything except the book itself being thrown in a box."
"Auguste—" Mireille said.
"No, let me have my whole turn, Mireille, I've been rehearsing it since you told me at four o'clock and then wouldn't tell me the rest." He looked up then, at Drew, and Drew understood that the reckoning, when it came, was not going to be aimed where he had braced for it. "Two years ago I took an investor partner because the roof and the walk-in went in the same spring and I would not borrow from a bank at those rates. The partner brought Sanderson. Sanderson brought the platform, and the doctrine — turnover, yield per seat, the door run like a gate at an airport. And I let it happen, because the kitchen had me. Because it was easier to be told the front of the house was handled. My grandmother built the front of the house. The kitchen was her husband's. I inherited the wrong half and neglected the right one." He put one hand on the book. "That book sat in a discard box in my own building for two years while I signed the platform invoices. So when we decide whose shout that was at noon, we are going to be accurate, the way my grandmother was accurate. The doctrine was Sanderson's. The door was mine. The shout—" he looked at Drew steadily, "—the shout was the system's, son. Spoken in your voice. A system I paid for, that put a twenty-four-year-old at a stand with a screen instead of a book and a line instead of a welcome, and taught him to count covers while an eighty-four-year-old woman stood in front of him with fifty-five years of Novembers in her pocketbook."
Drew said, "Sir—" and stopped, because there was nothing after *sir* that wasn't an escape.
"Nobody is fired tonight," Gus said. "I want that understood before anything else, because I will not have this kitchen learn that the way out of a shame is to hand it to the youngest person in the room. Sanderson's doctrine will be answered for separately, on a weekday, with the partner on the phone, and I expect that conversation to cost me money. That is my part and I am taking it home with me." He slid the book an inch toward Drew across the pass. "Now yours. Listen to me carefully, because I am only going to assign it once. You will fix the part that's yours. Go and find her. Not a letter. Your face. She reads faces. You will go to her house, and you will stand where she can see you, and you will say what happened in words she can watch you say. Whatever she decides after that is hers."
"Yes, sir," Drew said. "How do I — I don't have her address. The system wouldn't—"
"No," Gus said. "The system wouldn't. Mireille."
Mireille had been waiting with the patience of a woman who had known the ending of this conversation since four o'clock. She opened the book to its back, past the last ruled page, where the endpapers were a small museum of the house's practical memory — a plumber's card, a wine merchant's holiday schedule from 1997, a child's drawing gone soft — and pasted squarely among them, a delivery note on the restaurant's old letterhead, the ink faded to the color of weak tea.