a man saving coin by coin out of a longshoreman's pay was not going to be hurried by his wife's curiosity. On the morning of the day itself he was up before she was, which happened perhaps six times in fifty-three years of marriage. He had laid the suit out the night before and brushed it until the nap stood up. He emptied the tin onto the oilcloth and counted the coins in stacks of four, the way he counted everything, and the sum of a spring and summer of skipped cigarettes and fished-out pockets came to eleven dollars and forty cents — a fortune, in their economy, and he handled it like one. At the bank on the corner he had the teller change it into bills, and the teller, who knew a dock man's wages when he saw them coming across his counter in dimes, did the changing slowly and with a certain respect, and wished Mr. Thibodeaux a happy anniversary, which he had not been told about and did not need to be. Emile kept back two quarters, one for the streetcar and one, he said, for luck, though Bea suspected the luck was also for the streetcar. Their first anniversary was coming — November first, 1971, one year to the day from a wedding so small the priest had outnumbered the flowers — and Emile Thibodeaux had decided that his wife would be taken to lunch like a lady in a story, at a restaurant, with cloth on the table.
The restaurant was Chez Odette, on Prytania Street, and in those days it was new — three years old, modest, the paint not yet sure of itself, a place working people had begun to hear about from other working people, which was the only advertising Emile trusted. He wore his one suit, the wedding suit, and he was so nervous that Bea, walking beside him in her best dress with her hair still behaving, had to put her hand through his arm to steady them both. "It's just a room where they feed you," she told him. "You've been in rooms." But her heart was going too, because neither of them had ever eaten anywhere that a woman came to the table and asked what you would like, as if your liking were a serious matter.
They were shown to a small table by the window. Table four. The window gave onto Prytania, and the light came in the way light did before everything was sealed against it, moving and green with the trees. Emile studied the menu the way he studied a cargo manifest, thoroughly and in silence, and then ordered for them both with the gravity of a man signing for freight: gumbo to start — "If a place can't do gumbo, we can still walk out before the real money," he whispered, and the girl taking their order had the grace not to smile — and after, whatever the kitchen was proudest of, which turned out to be a chicken dish Bea would try, and fail, to reproduce for thirty years.
What she remembered most clearly, across fifty-five years, was not the food, though the food was good. It was how the room treated them. Two young people off the docks' edge of the city, in their one good set of clothes, with tin-money in his pocket counted out to the dime — and nobody in that room hurried them, or pitied them, or made a small face at Emile's careful French when he thanked the girl. The gumbo came in deep bowls. The bread was warm. When they had finished, and Emile was gathering his courage to ask what the desserts were, the kitchen door opened and the owner herself came out.
Odette Boudreaux was thirty years old and magnificent — that was the word Bea had used to Monique forty years later, and she stood by it. Tall, with her hair pinned up and an apron over a good dress, carrying their bread pudding on a plate in her own two hands as if it were a christening. She set it down between them. She looked at Emile's suit and Bea's dress and the way they were sitting, close, like people still surprised to be allowed, and she said — Bea remembered it word for word; some sentences a woman carries the way she carries her own name —
"I was told there are anniversaries at my table four. The pudding is mine to give. A restaurant is just a house that feeds whoever knocks. You've knocked." She put her hand, briefly, on Bea's shoulder. "Come back every year and knock again."
Then she took up the big reservation book that lived on its stand by the door — leather, heavy, the size of a family Bible — and wrote in it in her upright hand, while they watched, not even trying not to watch:
Thibodeaux, E. + wife — Table 4 — anniversary.
Emile paid for the lunch to the last cent and would not hear of the pudding being struck from the bill twice over; the bill, when it came, had already forgotten the pudding entirely. On the walk home he was quiet for three blocks, and then he said, "Every year, then," in the tone of a man who has signed something. "Rain or shine, woman. Every year, we're expected."