Gus looked at the boy for a while, and what he did next was the part Drew would remember longer than the yes. He did not simply grant it. He shaped it, the way he would shape a sauce — tasting, correcting, refusing the easy version.
"Then hear how it runs," Gus said. "It will not be charity theater. I won't have elders seated like an exhibit of the restaurant's conscience, and I won't have it photographed, and if I ever see it in a press release I will shut it down myself and take the blame in public. They are guests. The table is set like the best table in the house, because it is one — by the window, where the light is. The menu they get is the menu. Full stop. The 1971 prices are never mentioned by the server — the check comes made out that way, and if a guest asks, the answer is, 'That's the house price for this table on Sundays,' and the subject is closed with a smile. A guest who wants to pay full price pays full price and is thanked like anyone else; pride is not a billing error and we don't correct it."
"Yes, Chef."
"The staff serves it in rotation, as an honor — it goes on the board as an honor, not a burden, and any server who treats it as either one loses it. You work it every Sunday because you asked for it, and because this table exists on account of you nearly destroying what it stands for, and those two facts are going to have to learn to live in the same apron. Last thing." Gus picked up his pen again. "It has a name, and the name is not yours and not mine."
"Odette's Table," Drew said at once, because it had only ever been that, from the first moment it formed in his head at a red light on Claiborne Avenue. "For the woman who started the practice. Odette's Table."
"Odette's Table," Gus agreed. "My grandmother's name on a table she never got to name herself. She'd have hated the fuss and fed the whole street. Get Mireille the details for the board. Four seats — no. Six. Old people have friends; that was rather the point of her."
The decision, when it came, did not come through the house or the platform or any channel the new Chez Odette had built. It came the old way — over a telephone line, between two women who had been feeding the same city for fifty years and had a shorthand for it the way sisters have a shorthand for a childhood.
Mireille called Bea on Friday evening, after her ovens were off, sitting in the pastry corner with her tea going cold the way it always did when Bea was on the line. They did not begin with Sunday. They began, as they had begun for decades, with other people's business — who was in the hospital on St. Claude, whose grandson had finally married, whether the price of pecans had any basis in God's law — and Gus, passing the pastry corner twice on invented errands, heard only Mireille's half and needed no more than that. He heard her laugh once, shortly. He heard a long silence in which Mireille listened with her eyes closed. He heard her say, "I told him you'd ask about that," and then, softer, "Yes. The morning of. I still make it the morning of, Bea. Some things a revival doesn't get to touch."
Then Mireille came and found him in the office, and stood in the doorway with her hands folded in her apron, and delivered the message the way Bea had delivered it to her — whole, and in order, and without one word of embroidery, because embroidery was not a thing either woman had ever permitted the other.
"She'll come this Sunday," Mireille said. "Those are her words: she'll come, and she'll sit at her table. Table 4, by the window, at noon, the way she has sat at it since before that boy was a rumor. That's the first part, and it isn't a favor she's granting us, Auguste, so don't go writing it up as one. She says a woman does not abandon her own table over one bad afternoon, and she does not intend to start at eighty-four."
"The second part," Gus said, because he could hear in Mireille's face that there was one.
"She will not be exhibited as this restaurant's apology. No flowers with a card from the management. No chef coming out to the table for the room to see. No photograph. If anybody from the newspaper has somehow learned the way to that table, she will get up and leave and she will not come back a second time at anyone's asking, and she says you may take that as scripture." Mireille paused. "She says she lived through being turned away from enough doors in her life, in years when it wasn't a mistake, and she knows the difference between an apology and an advertisement, and she will be party to exactly one of those."