sidewalk, in November. And she looked at Emile — at his face, Drew, the way I'm telling you to look — and she saw the suit terror whole, the way you see a child has a fever, and she said, 'Monsieur, that is a beautiful suit.' And then she said the sentence I have carried for fifty-five years, and I am giving it to you now because you are the one who needs to be carrying it: 'A restaurant is just a house that feeds whoever knocks.'"
Drew had gone very still. Somewhere in the room a glass rang against a bottle.
"She fed us like we'd knocked and she'd been waiting all day to hear it. Table Four, by the window — this table — because she said the window seat was for people who had come the farthest, and we had come from the Ninth Ward and from the far side of ever believing we'd sit in such a room, so by her arithmetic we had come farthest of anybody in it. We had the gumbo. The bread pudding was Mireille's mother's recipe then, one generation up the line. And when we left, Odette stood at the door herself and took Emile's hand in both of hers and said, 'You come back. This table knows you now.' That is why, for fifty-six November firsts, I have come back — through a husband dying and streets flooding and my own knees going — because a woman once read a man's fear correctly through a pane of glass and answered it with supper. And that is why last Sunday—"
She stopped, drank her water, and set it down with care.
"Last Sunday you shouted at my hat, and I stood there eighty-four years old in the same doorway, in the same fear as Emile in his suit, and I thought: the house has forgotten what it is. Not that I'd been insulted — insults I've had by the bushel, baby; I worked in a school. I thought the house had forgotten. And if a house forgets what it is, somebody has to remind it. It turned out to be my job one more year. So I came back. Not for your apology — your apology was fine, and I have accepted it, and we are done with it. I came back to remind the house."
The minute was long over. Drew did not get up. Miss Bea looked at the clock over the bar, then at him, and folded her hands.
"You may get up now," she said, with immense dignity. "You've sat your minute. A man who can sit a whole story can be trusted with a door."
The bread pudding came — the large one; Mireille had sent back word through three relays that insults to forty-year friendships would be answered in kind, with bourbon sauce — and after it, coffee, after and not with. Then Miss Bea rose from Table Four and took her place at Odette's Table.
It stood along the wall by the kitchen door, where the pass's warmth reached and the room's noise softened: a long table set plainly and completely — full places, full menu, no asterisk, no separate anything. For those who needed it, the prices were the prices of 1971, and the needing was asked after by nobody. No proof, no form. A face turned toward you and a chair pulled out — that was the entire admissions procedure, and Miss Bea had telephoned, personally, all week from her porch, in a voice that permitted no refusals.
The first guest was the one she had been watching for.
Octave Bergeron, eighty-seven, came through the door on his granddaughter's arm like a man being led into deep water — four houses down Bea's own street, the blue house with the shutters he still painted himself; a retired longshoreman with hands like rope and a necktie knotted like a man dressing for a tribunal. His wife Cécile had been dead two years. He had not eaten in a restaurant since — not from grief alone, Bea had explained in the car, but from arithmetic: a man alone in a restaurant is a problem to be solved, a table wasted, a check too small. He had done that arithmetic at a dozen doors in two years and gone home to his stove every time. His granddaughter Renée had gotten him this far by promising to stay — and then, in the doorway, her telephone rang with the sitter's emergency, and Octave watched her face do the terrible arithmetic of the young, who have to be everywhere.
"Go," Octave said, too loudly, the way frightened men apologize in advance. "Go on, bébé. I was foolish. I can walk home. It's a nice day for it. Tell your mama I got dressed for nothing — she'll enjoy that." He said it smiling, coat already turning on his shoulders, a man retreating in good order with his dignity packed.
Miss Bea was already standing. She did not hurry; hurry would have been another kind of insult. She crossed the room at her deliberate pace and stood square in front of him, face to face, close enough that he didn't have to strain to see her mouth, and took his hand in both of hers the way Odette had once taken Emile's.