"Service in forty minutes," Gus said at last, to the room in general. "Table 4 is held. It has been held since 1971. Anybody new asks why, the answer is the book."
At eleven-fifteen, Drew hung the house apron on its hook, put on the clean one, and took his keys off the nail by the kitchen door.
His car was eleven years old and silver where it had not faded to a color with no name at all, and he had vacuumed it on Saturday night with a thoroughness that would have embarrassed him if anyone had seen. He had washed the windows inside and out. He had put the passenger seat back to its fullest reach, because he knew precisely what an eighty-four-year-old woman's knees require of the world, and he had rehearsed — not the words; he had given up on the words — but the order of operations. Ring once. Wait on the porch; do not knock twice. Offer the arm at the steps, not before, not after. Hold the car door all the way open and stand out of the swing of it.
He drove east across the city with the windows down, through the mild gray morning, past the cemeteries with their white cities of the dead all dressed for All Saints' week, over the canal, into the Ninth Ward where the houses sat bright-painted and porch-fronted and Sunday-quiet. He was twenty-four years old, in a clean apron, driving to fetch a lady to her lunch — a lady who had sat at the same table for fifty-five years, who had been shouted at by his voice and turned away by his hands, who had received his apology on her porch on Monday and sent him away unforgiven and uncondemned, with nothing but a question about bread pudding to tell him the door of her life was not quite closed.
He did not know if she would be on the porch. He did not know if she would come at all — conditions travel well through intermediaries and sometimes dissolve on porches. He knew what Mireille had said, and he knew that a rose was lying on a dead man's chair in a restaurant window across the city because an old woman had laid it there without asking, and he knew that Table 4 was set for one with a napkin folded the old way, held until noon whether booked or not.
Some reservations are older than the book. Drew turned onto her street, slowed the old car to a walk, and began, house by house, to look for a lady in her Sunday clothes, standing in a doorway, ready to be knocked for — and to do the knocking.
Drew Callahan got to the Ninth Ward at eleven o'clock with a car he had washed twice — once Saturday night at the coin wash for the dirt, and once Sunday morning for the person. He had vacuumed out fries of an age he declined to examine, cleaned the windshield's inside with newspaper the way his grandfather taught him, and put a towel over the passenger seat, then taken it off again, because a towel looked like an admission. Miss Bea Thibodeaux, who read everything else by watching faces, would certainly read his character through a smeared windshield.
Her house was narrow and painted a green so deep it was nearly blue, with a porch across its width and a garden standing in rows where the yard should have been — greens rising even in November like a congregation nobody had told about winter. There was a fig tree, and a porch chair with a much-mended cushion. It was the house of a woman who had fed other people's children for forty years and kept every habit the job taught her: nothing wasted, nothing shabby that could be helped.
Drew had stood on that porch on Monday and said the thing he had come to say, all of it, while she let him — which was its own kind of labor — and then she had fed him, which was hers. Now she was coming back to Chez Odette on terms she had dictated like a woman reading a grocery list. She would not be exhibited as the restaurant's apology. She would sit at her table and eat her lunch. And afterward she would take her place as hostess at the long table by the kitchen door — Odette's Table, the new Sunday elders' table: full menu, 1971 prices for those who needed it, no proof asked — because she knew every old person in three parishes too proud to knock, and pride, she said, is just hunger that has learned manners.
She was already on the porch, purse on her lap, in a dress the color of strong tea and shoes polished past his own. She watched him come up the walk with the attention of a woman who had long ago decided about men and was merely checking her arithmetic.