She sat across from him and folded her hands on the table and arranged herself to listen, and that was when Drew understood that all his rehearsing had been built on a mistake. He had imagined he would deliver something. She received people the way she had received children in a lunch line and bad news in a principal's office and, in time, a man from the parish with a folded flag: seated, facing it, all the way to the end.
"Now," she said. "You didn't cross the whole city to drink my tea. Say it where I can see it, baby. Slow is fine. I've got the whole afternoon and most of my hearing is in my eyes anyway."
He set his cup down so he would not have anything in his hands to hide behind.
"Miss Bea," he said, and made himself look at her face and not at the table, and made the words come out at the pace of a man setting down glass, one at a time. "Yesterday I shouted at you. I want to say the words back, because I think I should have to. You came in a little after noon and you stood by the stand, the way you always stand, and I was behind on my station and the room was loud and I looked at you standing there and I didn't see you. I saw something in my way. And I raised my voice at you, in your restaurant, at your table's door, and I said, *You need to move aside, please.* Loud enough that the people at the bar heard it. Loud enough that you heard it, which — " He stopped. His throat had arranged a treason against him and he had to wait it out, standing, though he was sitting, exactly where she could see him. "You face the person who's shouting, Miss Bea. That's what you do. You've been reading faces since before I was born. You read mine, and what was on it was: *Move.* Not a person doing a job badly. A person telling you that you were in the way of the day."
She did not move. The kettle ticked as it cooled. Somewhere in the front of the house a clock went on being right.
"I turned you away from your own table," Drew said. "November first. Your day since nineteen seventy-one. You were dressed for it. You'd come across the city for it, the way you've come every year I've ever — every year since before there were people like me working there. And I sent you back out the door with a sentence I use for delivery boys blocking the pass. That's the whole of it. I'm not going to tell you the rush did it, because the rush didn't raise my voice. I did. The list didn't either. It was me, at the stand, with your name in a book I had never opened and your coat over your arm. I didn't know who was supposed to be at Table Four on the first of November — nobody had ever told me, and I never asked. I knew the list, and I thought the list was the whole of it. I just didn't look up long enough to let it be a person."
He had run out of the plain account at last, and he sat in the silence after it with his hands flat on her table, and discovered that the silence was not the punishment he had feared. She was looking at him the way the photograph's sun must have looked, level and without blinking, and in her face there was something moving that he could not yet read — which frightened him more than anger would have, because anger he had a speech for, somewhere back in the torn-up pieces of the prep list. This he did not.
"Oh, baby," she said, and reached across the table and patted his hand twice, briskly, the way you dismiss a spill. "You were busy. I saw how busy. Old people are slow. We get underfoot. It's the way of it now."
It was over so fast he nearly missed what had happened. The forgiveness was already dispensed, warm and total and sealed with a pat, and it should have been the end of the visit — the very thing he had crossed the city for, handed to him in under a minute by a woman too gracious to withhold it. He had expected to climb toward it. Instead it had been set in front of him like a cup of tea, and all he had to do was drink and go, and he understood, sitting there with her kindness settling over the whole kitchen like steam, that if he let it stand he would be accepting something that was not his to take.