"They're not coming for me, Drew. They're coming because nobody else ever held a chair for them and meant it."
"They're coming for both," he said, and turned onto Prytania, and that was the end of that argument, as it was every time, in a draw.
Chez Odette stood where it had stood since before either of them, in the long white building with the green shutters that Gus Boudreaux repainted every third spring whether they needed it or not, on the principle, inherited from his grandmother Odette, that a building you love should be able to tell. The sign was small. The door was red.
Drew parked and came around and offered the arm, and they went up the two steps together at her pace, which was not a slow pace so much as a decided one. Inside, the room was doing its late-morning breathing — the tables set, the glasses catching the light off Prytania, the smell of the kitchen's first serious work rolling under the door: stock, and butter, and peppers. Paul Sanderson was at the back with the books, where he belonged and, after last year, contentedly stayed. Gus came out of the kitchen wiping his hands, fifty-three years old, and crossed the room to take her hand in both of his.
"Miss Bea."
"Gus. You look thin. Nobody believes a thin cook."
"I look the same as Sunday, Miss Bea."
"Then you looked thin Sunday too and I was too polite." She patted his hand and released it. "What's the gumbo?"
"Chicken and andouille, and Mireille's been at the pudding since seven." He walked her — not led, walked with, a half-step behind her shoulder, the way the whole staff had learned to do it this year — toward the front, toward the stand. "Drew did the book this morning. He wanted you to see it before you sat."
The reservation book lay open on the stand, to today's page, in the slanted November light. It was not the old paper book — that one lay wrapped in the office safe like a treaty. This was its successor, bound in green cloth, kept the way the old one had been kept in Odette's time: by hand, in ink. At the top of the page, in Odette Boudreaux's own hand — copied onto the inside cover of every book since — was the founder's rule, the one Drew had never read until the worst morning of his working life:
Table 4, November 1 — the Thibodeaux table. Held until noon whether booked or not. Some reservations are older than the book. — O.
And below the day's ruled lines, in a hand she knew — a hand she had watched learn itself over a year of Sundays, at first too neat, then too fast, now settled into something honest — Drew had entered this year's line:
Thibodeaux, B. — Table 4 — held. Always.
Bea looked at it a long moment. Her eyes were not what they had been, but this she could read, and the reading of it went through her like weather through a well-built house: felt everywhere, damaging nothing.
"Always is a long word, Drew," she said at last.
"Yes, ma'am."
"You spelled it right."
"I had a good teacher," he said, "and a whole year to practice the handwriting." And he closed the book — gently, the way you close a book somebody is still writing — and offered his arm, and walked her through her restaurant to Table 4.
Table 4 stood by the front windows, where it had stood since Odette moved it there in 1969 because, she said, a table by the window teaches a room how to behave — people eat better when the street can see them being happy. It was set today the way it was set every November first: two places, the good linen, and on the second chair — Emile's chair, the one with its back to the kitchen, because Emile had liked to watch her face instead of the room — a single rose in a bud vase, laid across the seat cushion the way you lay a hand on a shoulder.
Tee Baptiste must have done it already. Tee was twenty now, a waiter in training — he'd been a busser last November, who had watched the worst ten minutes of the restaurant's year happen six feet from his shoulder and had never once made himself the hero of the retelling. A year ago, on the Sunday Drew fetched her back, she had pressed her folded tip into Tee's hand at the door with the message he had carried to the kitchen like a dispatch: Miss Bea keeps her accounts. He had understood it exactly, and somewhere in the year since, without being asked, the rose on Emile's chair had become Tee's duty. Today it was already laid, fresh, the stem trimmed at an angle the way Mireille had taught him.