"You washed the car," she said, when he was close enough not to raise her voice.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Twice, by the shine on that side. A man washes a car once for the dirt. Twice, he's washing it for a person." She rose holding the porch rail, refusing with a small shake of her head the hand he had half offered — not refusing help, he understood, but refusing the order of operations: she would stand first, then decide about hands. She came down the steps one at a time and walked around the car slowly — tires, windshield, seat, floor — the way she must once have walked a cafeteria kitchen at five in the morning, missing nothing.
"Clean enough for church," she pronounced, and got in.
He closed her door like the door of a room where somebody is sleeping, got in, and pulled away signaling at the corner though there was nobody to signal to.
The drive across New Orleans on a late Sunday morning is a treaty, if both parties let it be. She named things as they passed, the way a person reads aloud in a room where someone else is listening. That corner had been a bakery when she was a girl; the woman who ran it gave day-old rolls to any child who asked at the back door in a complete sentence — she said hunger was no excuse for dropping your verbs. That yellow house: the lady in it had cleaned the hospital nights for thirty-one years and sent four children to college on it, and if Drew heard anyone call such a woman unskilled, he was to correct them, since she could not be everywhere.
He listened the way he had learned this week: turning his face toward her at the red lights when he spoke, because her hearing had narrowed to a small bright room in a large dim house, and she read lips the way other women read the newspaper — completely, and with commentary. Kindness, with Miss Bea, was a face turned toward her.
"You're doing it," she said at the third light. "Turning your face. Somebody taught you this week."
"You did, ma'am. Monday. On the porch. You said I talked to the top of your head at the stand. Last Sunday. You said I shouted at your hat."
The car went quiet except for the road, and he did not rush to fill it, which was the second thing he had learned and the harder one.
"I did say that," she said at last. "It was true, so I said it. You hold a door with your hands, Drew Callahan. You hold a person with your face. Last Sunday you did neither one. Today you're doing both. That's the whole report. Don't make me write it twice."
Gus had given her his own parking space at the side of the restaurant — "She is not walking from the street. Not today, not any Sunday" — and Drew opened her door and offered his arm in the correct order, after she was standing, and she took it, which he understood to be a decision and not a weakness, and they crossed the small lot at her pace: not slow so much as deliberate, the pace of a woman who had arrived on time at every obligation of her life.
The door opened before she reached it.
It did not swing wide with a flourish; it simply opened, fully and early, the way a door opens when somebody has been watching through the glass for it to be needed. Tee Baptiste stood holding it — Tee, the busser, seventeen and all elbows, who the Sunday before, in the worst ten minutes of Drew's life, had done the only decent thing anybody did: as Miss Bea turned away from the stand, he had crossed the dining room and held the street door open for her, both leaves, standing straight to do it, so that she left like a person and not a problem being escorted out of it. Drew had registered nothing at the time except noise — his own, mostly. He knew now only because the dining room keeps its own ledger, and somebody always writes in it.
"Morning, Miss Bea," Tee said, facing her, loud enough, with his whole face in it. "We saved you the good door."
"So I see." The inspection again, gentler at the edges. "You're the door boy from last week."
"Yes, ma'am."
"You hold a door like you were raised. Mind you keep it up. A door is the first thing a house says."