give a woman in her good coat on a Sunday, which said: we know where you're going, Miss Bea, even if we couldn't say how we know. The city passed its storefronts and its churches and its weather at the windows. By the time the bus let her off, the sky had darkened another shade, and the air had that held breath that comes before rain in New Orleans, but Bea, alighting carefully, umbrella in hand, handbag over her arm, was precisely on time.
Eleven twenty-five. Five minutes early, as she had been early for fifty-five years, because Emile — who was late to everything except ships and this — had teased her once in 1973 that she would be five minutes early to her own funeral, and she had decided on the spot to keep that as a standard.
Chez Odette stood where it had always stood on Prytania Street, and yet her first sight of it, this year, came to her the way a familiar face comes after a long absence — the same, and then, a beat later, not the same. The glass in the door was new, a single shining sheet of it where the old divided panes had been. The sign above had been re-lettered in a thin, elegant hand that seemed to be apologizing for taking up space. And by the door, at the height of a hand, there was a small placard, dark, with pale lettering too fine for her to read at a stranger's distance — she had her glasses, but they were for menus, for paper held close in good light, and some instinct she did not examine kept her from stopping in the street to fish for them over a sign. It would say something about hours, she supposed. Restaurants were always saying something about hours.
She reached for the handle, as she had reached for it fifty-five times before, in wedding clothes and in mourning clothes and in the plain good coat of an ordinary widow, with the envelope in her handbag and the date circled in red in a kitchen across the city.
"Well, Emile," she said, too softly for anyone to have made a lesson of it. "Let's see what they're proudest of this year."
And she pulled the door open, and went in to lunch.
The line-up at Chez Odette began at ten-forty in the morning, in the narrow corridor between the kitchen and the bar, because Paul Sanderson believed that a staff that aligned itself in a narrow place absorbed some of the narrowness, and a restaurant, on a day like today, needed to be narrow. It needed to be a blade.
"Today is not a lunch," he said. "Today is a logistics problem with sauces."
He stood with his tablet against his chest the way other men held a hymnal, and the staff of the fullest room in New Orleans stood in front of him in their whites and their black, fourteen people smelling of starch and coffee and the faint, sweet ghost of the pastry corner, and nobody contradicted him, because nobody ever did before noon.
"Sunday the first of November," Sanderson said. "Three seatings. Eleven-thirty, one o'clock, two-thirty. Four hundred and twelve covers on the platform, which is twenty-two more than last year, and last year we drowned. So. What do we not do?"
"We do not improvise," the floor said, in the ragged unison of people who had said it before.
"We do not improvise. The platform is the room. If it is not on the platform, it is not in the room. Walk-ins—" he let the word sit there a moment, the way a man holds a fish up by the tail "—walk-ins are leaks, and I do not run a boat with leaks. Table turns are fifty minutes at lunch. Fifty. Not a birthday, not an anniversary, not a proposal in the world buys minute fifty-one. Nobody eats history. They eat the seating." He looked down the line, and the line looked back, and his eyes stopped, as they always stopped, on the young man nearest the door end. "Callahan. You're on the stand today."
Drew Callahan, twenty-four, waiter, third year at Chez Odette and first on the door, felt the assignment land on him like a tray he had not expected to be handed.
"Denise called out," Sanderson said. "Her boy's fever. You'll work the stand and your section both until one, then pass the book—" he caught himself, and smiled the thin smile of a man annoyed at his own ghost "—the tablet, to Renée for the second seating. Doors at eleven-fifteen. The list is full and the list is final. Questions that are not questions?"
There were no questions. There never were, in the corridor, before noon.
Sanderson dismissed them with a nod, and the line broke into motion — ice, linen, silver, the bell-soft clatter of a great machine winding itself up — and Drew stood a moment longer than the others, looking at the tablet Sanderson had pressed into his hands as though it were a deed to something.