moment and then drunk it herself, black, the way he took it, which she did not like and did anyway, because some things you do with the taste wrong on purpose. By the second year she had stopped ordering it, and told the rose the news of the family instead, quietly, under the room's noise — Monique's new roof, Monique's boy applying to colleges with his grandfather's hands — in the voice she used for the photograph over the sink. It was not foolishness. It was bookkeeping. A life like hers had always been kept in twos, and she was keeping the entries until the book was done.
Things had changed around the edges lately — she was not a fool; deaf was not blind. The restaurant had new paint, and then new everything, two years back; there had been talk at the corner store of investors and a revival, a word Bea mistrusted in proportion to how often it was used by people who had never met the thing being revived. The faces at Chez Odette had gotten younger. Last year the big book had not been on its stand by the door, and she had noticed the empty stand the way you notice a missing tooth — with your tongue, all through the meal — but Alphonse had brought the rose, and the gumbo had been the gumbo, and she had told herself that a book was only a book. Books were not only books. She knew that better than most. But the rose had been there, and she had chosen, that day, to be a woman who counted roses instead of absences.
This year she had heard Alphonse had retired. His niece told the girl at the corner store, who wrote it on the pad for Bea in her clear block letters: RETIRED — GONE TO HIS DAUGHTER IN BATON ROUGE. Bea had read it twice and put the pad down gently. Well. Men retired. Roses, presumably, were within the competence of other hands.
She took up the handbag and checked its order the way she checked a stove before leaving a kitchen: envelope in the inside pocket, handkerchief, the little tin of mints, her reading glasses in their soft case — for the menu; she would not need them for anything else — and the folded umbrella from the stand by the door, because the weatherman had pointed at his map and mouthed rain, and she believed faces that turned toward her. The good coat went on over the dark blue dress. In the hall mirror she arranged her collar and considered the woman there: eighty-four, upright, her white hair in its neat roll, the aid a small beige comma behind her ear. "Table four," she told the mirror, "is expecting us." The mirror, which had known Emile too, offered no argument.
Mrs. Landry's grandson Terrell was sitting on his grandmother's steps with his car keys turning in his fingers, home from the early shift, and when he saw Bea come out in the good coat he stood up the way young men stand for her in this neighborhood, all at once and with their whole bodies.
"Miss Bea, that's your lunch day, ain't it? Let me drive you up there. Car's right here, I can have you on Prytania in twenty minutes, and I'll come back and get you after. No sense you messing with the bus in your good clothes."
She could not hear the half of it with the street between them, but she could read the offer plain on his face, and she loved him for making it with his face turned full toward her, the way his grandmother had taught him without ever saying so.
"Terrell, you're a good boy and your grandmother can be proud at the top of her lungs," she said, "but the bus is part of it. It has always been part of it. You take the ride away, you take a piece off the day, and at my age I don't have pieces to spare." She let him take her hand down the two front steps, because some courtesies are for the giver. "You eat something green today. And tell your grandmother I'll bring her the news of the gumbo, same as always."
The bus was part of it. The walk to the stop with the envelope riding safe against her ribs; the driver swinging round in his seat to say Prytania to her face when the time came; the long ride across the city, through neighborhoods she had fed from cafeteria lines for forty years — half the grown people on this bus had eaten her cooking at one school or another, and two of them, this morning, caught her eye and nodded the nod you