"Understood," Gus said quietly. "And honored. Is there a third part?"
"There's a third part." And here, for the first time in the whole recitation, Mireille Fabre smiled — the narrow, satisfied smile of a woman delivering the move in a chess game she has been watching for fifty years. "She's heard about the elders' table. Don't ask me how; the Ninth Ward knew by Thursday, Auguste, this is New Orleans. Her condition is this. If there is to be an elders' table, she will greet at it. Not sit at it like a centerpiece. Greet. Hostess, not mascot — those are her words and I am not to soften them. She says she knows every old person in three parishes who is too proud to knock on a door that's turned them away before, and every one who thinks a white-tablecloth room stopped being for them sometime around the second price increase, and she has their telephone numbers in a book of her own, which she keeps by her telephone, in her own handwriting." Mireille folded her arms. "She says Odette fed whoever knocked, and somebody has to do the knocking for the ones who won't. She says she'll be the knock."
Gus wrote Bea's conditions on an index card in his own hand and pinned it inside the kitchen door, where the specials used to go, so that every person working Sunday would pass it twice an hour. Not exhibited. No photograph. She greets at the elders' table; she is not seated at it like an apology with a face. And under the conditions, because a kitchen runs on preparation the way a church runs on belief, he wrote a second card with the practical translation: Table 4 at noon. Bread pudding made the morning of. Miss Bea's tea the way she takes it — Mireille knows; ask Mireille. And if a stranger with a camera so much as drifts toward the window tables, that stranger is Celeste's problem, Marcus from the bar's problem, anybody's problem except Beatrice Thibodeaux's.
Sunday morning came up gray and mild, the way November comes in New Orleans when it has decided to be kind.
The dining room did its slow transformation before service, chairs coming down off tables, silverware rolling out of linen in bright clattering bundles, the light through the front windows turning the white cloths the color of piano keys. Drew arrived at nine with his apron over his arm — washed, ironed by his own hands at his own kitchen table, which he had done badly and with great seriousness — and he helped Celeste set the room, and neither of them mentioned that he could not keep his eyes off the window table.
Table 4 stood where it had always stood, in the bow of the front window, close enough to Prytania that a person seated there could watch the streetcars' green shadows go past the far side of the neutral ground. It had been set for one: one plate, one glass, one linen napkin folded the old way, in the bishop's mitre Mireille had taught a generation of servers and the revival had replaced with a rectangle. One setting. One chair in use, out from the table at its angle.
And on the second chair — the chair on the window side, pulled in close, the chair that had been Emile Thibodeaux's for thirty-one years of November firsts and for every ordinary occasion the two of them had ever invented to sit in this room — there lay a single rose.
It was not the restaurant's rose. The house roses came from a wholesaler, long-stemmed and correct, and lived in bud vases with ferns. This one was a garden rose, deep red nearly to purple, a little blowsy, the kind that opens all the way and perfumes a room for one day and is gone by Tuesday — the kind that grew, and had grown for as long as anyone working could remember, on the thorny, unpruned bush behind the kitchen door that no regime had ever managed to get Mireille to cut back.
Gus saw it when he came through on his final pass. He stopped. He looked at the rose on Emile's chair for a long moment, and then he looked across the room to the pastry station, where Mireille Fabre was piping rosettes onto a tray with the concentration of a woman defusing something.
She did not look up. She did not ask anyone's permission. She had not asked on Sunday when she took the book home, either; there were custodianships in this world that did not run through the management, and everybody in Chez Odette above the age of thirty understood that a rose for Emile's chair was one of them.