The revival had come to Chez Odette two years ago, in the winter the roof gave up. Rain had come through the dining-room ceiling during a Saturday service, falling with great dignity into a sauce boat, and the photograph had traveled, and a reviewer had written the sentence that owners read at three in the morning: a museum with a menu. Gus had done what proud men do when the numbers stop forgiving them. He had taken a partner — a quiet man from Houston who loved the restaurant the way some men love a racehorse, which is to say completely and from a distance — and the partner's money had fixed the roof, and the partner's condition had been Sanderson. Sanderson had arrived with the platform under his arm like a new roof of his own. The old host, Alphonse, who had run the stand for forty years and known every regular's dead, had been eased out with a farewell dinner and a watch that kept perfect time in a drawer. The maroon reservation book, in which Alphonse had written the room's history in pencil for four decades, had gone into a box. The waiters had been retrained. The word seating had entered the building and set up housekeeping.
Drew had been hired six months into the new order, and he had flourished in it, and the flourishing was a fact he carried carefully around the older staff, the way you carry a full glass past people who are thirsty. Mireille still called the tablet "the machine," in the tone one uses for weather — impersonal, unavoidable, faintly resented. Sanderson called that attitude the past. Drew, who was twenty-four and owed money, called it nothing at all. He needed the future to be the kind of thing that arrived on a screen, in a column, already decided.
He was proud. That was the honest word for it, and he did not flinch from it. The stand was the room's throat. Everything that entered Chez Odette entered through the person on the stand, and Sanderson had given it to him, on the biggest lunch of the autumn, in front of everybody. Drew had a private way of seeing the dining room that no one had ever asked him about: to him it was a ledger. Forty-one tables, each with a number, each number with a rate, each rate with a story he kept in his head the way his mother, in Baton Rouge, kept the office buildings she cleaned at night — this one pays, this one complains, this one leaves the lights on for her because somebody there has a mother too. Table 9 was a forty-dollar tip on a good day and a handshake. Table 22 was businessmen who ordered like they were voting. Table 17, in the corner, was where proposals happened, and a proposal cost eleven extra minutes no matter what anybody did, so the platform priced it in like a tax on happiness. Table 30 stood close enough to the kitchen door to hear Gus swear softly in French, which the food writers believed was a secret and paid extra for the privilege of overhearing. Table 4, the little two-top by the window, was the fastest turn in the house.
He kept a second ledger too, the one nobody trained him in. Six hundred and twelve dollars: his half of the rent on the shotgun, due the fifth. Ninety dollars to Baton Rouge on the fifteenth, an amount his mother protested every month and deposited every month, in that order, like a liturgy. The streetcar, when he took it. The shirts, which the restaurant required to be a white that had to be defended with bleach money. On the phone last Sunday she had asked him if he was eating, and he had lied the way sons lie, fluently and with detail, describing a pork chop that had never existed. She had said, "They treating you like somebody over there?" and he had said, "I'm the first face of the house now, Mama," and had heard her decide to believe him, which was its own kind of payment, and its own kind of debt.
The arithmetic underneath the pride was simpler and uglier. Drew split a shotgun double in Mid-City with a cousin who worked nights at a warehouse and slept with earplugs in, and the rent was due on the fifth, and he was short. Not catastrophically short — he was never catastrophically anything, catastrophe required a kind of freedom he couldn't afford — just short the way a man is short a stair in the dark. Tips were rent. Turnover was tips. Sanderson's doctrine, which the older staff repeated in the corridor with their faces arranged in a certain way Drew had never quite learned to read, had slid into him over two years like a key into a lock: the platform is the room, the seating is the product, sentiment is a leak. He believed it the way frightened people believe anything that promises the numbers will hold still — completely, and with both hands.