And then there was a lull — the room at its fullest and quietest, the coffee arriving — and Bea folded her napkin once, precisely, in her lap, and looked across the table at the young man who had sat down opposite her for this part, as he did now on November first, in the chair that was not Emile's, with his captain's apron off and his hands empty and his face turned to hers, fully, the way she had taught him without ever teaching him.
"Drew," she said. "I'm going to tell you a thing I've never told. Not Gus — Gus would keep it fine, but it isn't his shape of story. Not my daughter — she'd have wanted to fix it, and it was never broken. It's yours. You've earned the whole of it, and the whole of it is this: it's about nineteen seventy-one, and it's about the watch."
"You have to picture the money," she said, "because in nineteen seventy-one the money is the whole geography. I was a cafeteria cook making cafeteria money. Emile drove a delivery route for the bakery on Dauphine — the one that's a parking lot now; everything I loved is a parking lot now, except this room — and we had been married eleven months, and a baby coming we didn't know about yet, and a landlord who did. And I had told him, in the way a young wife tells a young husband things she thinks are just talk, that on our first anniversary I wanted to have lunch one time — one time — at Chez Odette. Not the counter. A table. The white tablecloth, the whole ceremony. I had walked past this room for six years and I wanted to sit in it like a lady whose lunch was the event. I said it in May. I said it like you'd say you wanted to go to Paris. It was talk.
"Emile never treated anything I said as talk. That was his religion, Drew, and my ruling, after fifty-six years, is: it was the whole man, and you don't get to unpick a man. A week before our anniversary he came home with his sleeves smelling of the bakery and his father's watch gone off his wrist."
"His father had given him that watch the year he died — a good watch, a railroad watch, heavy as a secret. Emile wore it the way other men wear their names. And that whole anniversary day — the green dress, this table, Odette herself still in the kitchen and coming out to look at us like we were a painting she wasn't sure she'd hung straight — that whole day he kept his left cuff buttoned down long, and I thought it was the new shirt being new. And at lunch he was like a man at his own wedding all over again. Proud. Lit up. It was the best hour of our first year, Drew. I want that understood before the rest. It was the best hour, and it stayed the best hour, and that's not the sad part of the story. That's the load-bearing part."
"When did you find out?" Drew asked, in the quiet voice she'd heard him use only at Odette's Table.
"Oh, years later. Years. I found the pawn ticket in his good coat, in the inside pocket, when I was taking it to be cleaned after his brother's funeral — nineteen seventy-eight, the year of the brooch. A little pink ticket, folded small as a secret's supposed to be. The shop on Rampart. The date on it was a week before our anniversary, and the description — I can still read it; a woman who reads lips learns to read everything twice — 'one man's watch, railroad grade, father's inscription.' He had sold his father's good watch to a pawnbroker to pay for that lunch. Nineteen dollars. That's what the whole ceremony cost in nineteen seventy-one, and that's what it cost him. Both numbers are the price, Drew. You have to hold them both or you don't have the story."
She looked up then, directly, the way she always looked when the important part was coming and she wanted it received at the right address.
"And I never told him I knew. Not that year, not any year. Fifty years I kept his secret for him, and people who hear that — the few I've almost told — they think it's because it would have shamed him. It would not have shamed him; Emile Thibodeaux was not a man who could be shamed by love, he was armored in it. I kept it because the lunch was sweet, and the lunch was sweet because he believed he'd carried it off — that he'd given me the thing clean, with no price tag showing. If I'd told him, I'd have been trading his pride for my honesty, and my honesty was not worth that much. It still isn't. A marriage, Drew, is mostly the administration of each other's dignities. The rest is laundry."
"Miss Bea—" He stopped. Whatever he'd been about to arrange into a sentence had declined to be arranged, and she watched him, with something like pride, choose not to force it.