They had been expected for fifty-five years.
The kettle clicked off. Bea poured water she did not need over a tea bag that would keep for later and let the morning settle back into the present, where the coat was waiting on the bed and the rain was deciding itself over the city. Fifty-five lunches. She could have laid them out like plates along the whole length of her life, and mostly, in the privacy of this kitchen, she could still say what year each one was by what the world had been doing around the table.
The year Monique was five and came along in a party dress and was given her own small pudding in a teacup, and behaved, for one full hour, like a duchess. The years the children grew tall and then grew gone — Houston took Monique, the way Houston took so many people's children, kindly and for good reasons, and the table went back to two. The year Emile retired from the river, and wore the wedding suit one last time before allowing, with enormous ceremony, that a good jacket would do; he had ordered the gumbo before they were properly seated, out of pure seniority. The bad August of 2005, when the water came and the whole city was knocked sideways — and Chez Odette, when November came, stood half-repaired with its windows still boarded on one side, and Odette's family cooked anyway, out of a kitchen running on stubbornness, and there was gumbo for whoever knocked, and Bea and Emile had knocked, and eaten at table four in a room that smelled of fresh plaster, and it remained, of all fifty-five, the lunch Bea thought of when she needed to remember what people were.
There was the year her own mother died, three weeks before the first of November, and Bea had nearly not gone — grief makes hermits of the best people — and Emile had simply put her coat in her hands at eleven o'clock without a word of persuasion, and Odette, who by then had silver in her hair and a grandson appearing and disappearing in the kitchen doorway, had taken one look at Bea's face and moved them to table four a full half hour before the room filled, as if to say: grieve here, where the light is. There was the year Emile came off a ship with his right hand bandaged from a winch cable, and Odette herself had come out — she was past sixty by then and came out less often — and cut his chicken for him at the table with a mother's total lack of ceremony, and told him that a man who fed a city off the river could stand to be fed himself for one hour a year. And there were the long ordinary years, which were most of them, thank God: the book on its stand growing fat with other people's anniversaries, Odette's upright hand slowing, then appearing rarely, then not at all — the restaurant passing the way good restaurants do, hand to hand, down the family — and always, on the first of November, the small table by the window, held. Bea and Emile had never once, in fifty-two years of going together, been told that table four was taken. It would have seemed to them like being told their own pew was taken, their own porch, their own name.
And the years since 2023. Emile had gone in the spring of that year, quickly, after a winter of getting tired in a way sleep didn't fix — the doctor's face turned toward her, she would always be grateful for that; she had understood every word. In November she had put on the good coat and taken the bus uptown alone, and her hands had not shaken until she was seated, and then the old host — Alphonse, who had run the stand for forty years and served their corner of the dining room since his hair was black — had come out of the kitchen carrying a single rose in a bud vase, and had set it on the empty chair beside her without a word, and had stood a moment with his hand on the chair's back, the way you stand at a grave when the prayer is over and there's nothing else useful to do with your hands. He had not asked. Nobody had asked. The rose had simply been there, that year and the two years after, laid on Emile's chair by staff who remembered, and Bea had eaten her gumbo and her bread pudding next to it and had not felt, even once, like a woman eating alone. She had felt accompanied, which was an entirely different thing. The first of those three years she had ordered his coffee too, out of thirty years of habit, and when it came she had sat looking at it a