The room filled around them the way it filled every day now, which was different from the way it had filled a year ago, and the difference was her doing and not her doing, which is the way most true changes happen. Odette's Table — Sundays, the long table by the kitchen wall, full menu, and the prices of 1971 for those who needed them, no forms, no questions, no announcement louder than a word passed hand to hand through three parishes — had run for fifty-two Sundays. Bea had hosted every one she was able, in the chair at the head that Gus had had made with a cushion and a small brass plate she pretended not to have read. The elders came in their good clothes, the proud old people who had fed this city for seventy years, who would rather have gone hungry in their own houses than be anybody's charity — and found, at that table, that they were not charity. They were the seating of honor. The staff served in rotation, Gus's rule, so that everyone in the building took a turn carrying plates to the old people at the pace the old people set.
Octave Bergeron was at the window table with his newspaper folded to the racing page. A year ago Octave had been a man eating alone at a counter, defending his solitude like a border. Now he brought the paper for the table on Sundays and read the obituaries aloud with commentary Bea privately considered worth the price of the gumbo — he's not dead, he's just late, that one, he's been late since 1974.
"Miss Bea," Octave called, tipping the paper. "You're late. I was about to send out a search party of one."
"Octave, it is eleven o'clock on a Monday and my table is held until noon by law older than you look." She raised her voice just enough — Octave's hearing and hers had reached an understanding years ago, an alliance of the partially deaf against a mumbling world. "And you left a paper on my porch this morning with the crossword half done. Half. A man who leaves a lady a half-done crossword is making a proposal or a challenge, and at my age I accept both but I finish neither."
The gumbo came — chicken and andouille, dark as a roux should be when the cook isn't in a hurry or a mood, served by Drew himself, because on November first Drew worked her table and the rest of the room could have the captain's attention in every other particular but not that one. He set it down and stepped back and did the thing that had taken him a year to learn to do: nothing. Now he presented the bowl the way you present a person you've already introduced: this is gumbo; gumbo, this is Miss Bea; you know each other.
"You taste it and tell me," he said.
She tasted it. "Your roux's got patience in it, Gus Boudreaux," she said, loud enough for the kitchen door. "Tell him the lady at Table Four says the roux has patience in it and he shouldn't let it go to his head, because patience curdles."
From behind the pass came Gus's voice, unamplified and entire: "Tell the lady at Table Four her table manners are showing and her taste is why we're all employed." And Drew carried nothing back but a grin, because some messages deliver themselves.
She ate the way she had eaten every November first: all of it, unhurried, with the bread for the last of the bowl and the rose in her sightline and the street going by outside the window.
Mireille Fabre came out herself with the bread pudding, because Mireille, at sixty-four, did not send her pudding out with emissaries on November first. She had made it that morning — Bea never had to ask whether the sauce had the rum measured or judged. It was judged. Mireille set the dish down and stood a moment with her hand resting, light as flour dust, on the back of Emile's chair, in the place where a person's shoulder would be if the chair were occupied by the man it kept a place for.
"He'd have had two," Mireille said.
"He'd have had two and denied the second while eating it," Bea said. "Set a spoon for him anyway, Mireille. In the kitchen. Where he can't be seen denying it."
"It is already set," Mireille said, and went back to her ovens.