He turned the tap off. The house settled. Somewhere down the block a streetcar was not running anymore and somebody's radio was, faintly, and he stood in the middle of his one room with his wet face and his coat still on, rehearsing nothing, memorizing an address on Desire Street, saying the sentence once more — quietly this time, to learn where its cruelty lived, so that tomorrow he would know exactly what he was going there to answer for.
Drew Callahan rehearsed in the mirror of the men's room at Chez Odette, and every version sounded like a man reading a card someone else had written for him.
He had written three speeches on the back of a prep list the night before, standing at the pass after service with a pencil gone soft in his hand. The first began with the word *unconscionable*, which he could not pronounce reliably even when he was calm, and which belonged, he understood by the second reading, to a different kind of man in a different kind of coat. The second began with the anniversary itself — with November first, 1971, with the photograph he had never seen — and Gus had taken one look at it over his shoulder and said, "You don't get to use their history, son. You weren't there for any of it. You were there for about forty seconds of it, and you know what you did with those." The third speech was the shortest and the worst, because it was built entirely out of the lunch rush, the station being slammed, the new girl on pantry calling out orders in the wrong order, and Drew could hear, even rehearsing it in his own head, that it was not an apology at all. It was a weather report. It said: conditions were such. It said: anybody would have.
He tore the prep list into pieces small enough to be honest and fed them to the trash under the hand sink.
The restaurant was dark on Mondays, as it had always been, and in the dark, with the chairs up and the silver resting, Gus had given him the only instruction he was taking with him across the city. The old paper reservation book lay open on the host stand where it had sat since Saturday night, rescued from a back office cleanout by Mireille, who threw away nothing that had handwriting in it. There, in blue ink gone the color of old denim, under a date years gone, was a delivery note in a waiter's hand Drew did not recognize: a name, *Thibodeaux*, a street in the Upper Ninth, a house number, and beside it, in smaller writing, *she reads lips — knock hard, then wait.*
"You will fix the part that's yours," Gus had said. "Go and find her. Not a letter. Your face. She reads faces." He had closed the book with a care that made Drew understand the book was not really a book to him anymore. "And Drew. Don't bring her anything she has to thank you for. No flowers. No box. You go over there with empty hands and a plain account, and whatever she does with it is hers."
So he went with empty hands, on the bus, because his car was in the shop on Tulane and because it seemed wrong, somehow, to arrive at a thing like this in anything faster than the way she would have come to them. November 2nd, a Monday, the sky the color of dishwater over the river. He got off on St. Claude and walked the rest under live oaks and past houses sitting low behind their fences, houses with gallery posts and milk crates and gardens still holding on to the last of the fall peppers, and he practiced nothing. That was the hardest part of the whole ride, harder than the gate when he got to it: practicing nothing. Every few blocks a sentence would rise up in him, polished and merciful to himself, and he had to let it sink back down unspoken, the way you let a fish off a hook you never meant to cast.
The house was narrow and exact, a shotgun the pale yellow of good butter, with a porch no wider than a church pew and a yard so tidy that the tidiness read as a form of speech. Everything in it had been decided. There were no weeds making arguments along the fence line. The gate was painted. The step was swept. A curtain hung in the front window, lace, the pattern of it old-fashioned and perfectly still, and Drew stood at the gate with his hand raised to the latch and did not lift it, because he had arrived at the one part of the morning no bus ride could prepare him for, which was the door itself, and what a man looks like standing in front of it with empty hands.