He understood then — the whole geography of her yesterday, laid out without one word of complaint in it. She had dressed, and crossed the city, and stood at the stand in her good coat with her fifty-fifth year in her hand, and she had been shouted at and turned, and she had walked back out into the November sun and gone to the bus stop and sat among strangers with her lunch money entire and her thank-you folded separately inside it, and ridden home unfed to this immaculate house, and put the envelope back in the bag, and told no one. Not her daughter in Houston. Not the neighbor through the wall. She had put it away in the bag the way she had put away the afghan over a dead man's chair, with terrible, tidy care, and gone about her evening.
"Nobody's going to ask me to be a nuisance again," she said, and she was not looking at him now; she was looking at the envelope, which is to say she was looking at the whole long corridor of Novembers laid end to end. "That's what I decided, sitting there at the bus stop. I decided it quiet, the way you decide things that are true. The tradition — Emile and me, our day, our table — it was a married people's thing, Drew. It was ours. It had two chairs in it. I've been keeping it going by myself three years now like a woman winding a clock in an empty house, and yesterday the house told me the truth about it. A woman alone is a nuisance in a fine room. She takes up a table for four and orders one lunch and sits slow, and everybody's too polite to say it, but the room knows. The room said it yesterday. Clear as a bell, and I heard it, baby — I face the room, too. It died with Emile. It just took me till yesterday to stop knocking on the door of it. I won't trouble y'all again. That's not anger. That's just the accounts, settled."
He wanted to argue with the accounts. He could feel the arguments crowding up in him — about the room, about Gus, about the regulars at the bar who had asked after her for years, about the plain fact that Chez Odette had been holding Table Four on the first of November since before Drew's mother was born — and he made himself let them all go unspoken, because he had learned one thing since the gate, which was that this woman could tell a performance from an account at twenty paces, and that arguing would only be him asking her to carry his feelings too. She had carried enough. What he had was smaller and heavier than an argument, and he set it on the table between them as plainly as she had set down the envelope.
"I'm not going to ask you to forgive me again," he said. "You already did that your way, and I'll leave it where you put it. I'm going to ask you for one practical thing, and you can say no to it and I'll go home and it'll be finished. This Sunday. November eighth. Let me bring you back to your table. Not the first — I know the first is gone, and I know whose fault that is, and I'm not going to dress it up like we can have it back. But Table Four is there, and Gus wants the restaurant to make its apology properly, out loud, in the room, the way it should have been — not through me standing in your kitchen. I'll come and get you myself. I'll walk you in myself. You sit at your table, and you have your lunch, and nobody in that room will ever again not know whose it is."
"No," she said.
It came out of her without a pause, smooth as a drawer closing. "No, baby. That's kind of you, and it's too much. You can't un-ring a Sunday. The day was the day. A make-up lunch on the eighth is just a lunch with everybody feeling sorry in the good silver. I won't be the reason a whole room has to be sorry at me. I had my last one last year and I didn't know it, and there's worse ways for a thing to end than not knowing."
"You said yesterday—" he began, and stopped, because he had almost reached for her own words to use on her, and Gus's voice in his head said *the part that's yours*, and the part that was his did not include that.
She watched him stop. Something in her face registered the stopping, and filed it.
He tried once more, lower, with less furniture on it. "The table's yours, Miss Bea. That's not me being kind. That's just — you're in the book. In ink. Before the book was even the book."
"And I am telling you the accounts are settled." She said it without hardness, which made it harder. "Emile's chair is empty. My envelope is full. Both of those things are just true, and a body has to live according to what's true, Drew Callahan, or she starts lying to herself in a house this quiet, and I won't do that. I won't do that."