She had grown up in Shenzhen. Not visited, not studied abroad, not spent a summer. Grown up. She had lived there from the age of six to the age of seventeen, in a tower block in Futian District, and had gone to two local schools where she was the only Black child in the building, and had been fluent in Mandarin by nine and in Cantonese by eleven. She still sometimes dreamed in Chinese. Her mother said she talked in her sleep in Chinese, which her mother found hilarious, since her mother's own Mandarin had never gotten much past ordering in restaurants and arguing with taxi drivers.
She was eleven months from finishing a master's degree in conference interpreting at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey. Her professors called her the most natural interpreter in her cohort. One of them, an exacting woman from Taipei who did not give compliments, had written on her midterm evaluation that she had the ear you cannot teach.
And on the Pacific Bridge oral assessment, which had been forty minutes of consecutive interpretation of a simulated negotiation about rare-earth mineral contracts, with two assessors firing questions at her in alternating languages and a third one taking notes, she had scored in the top two percent of every candidate they had ever tested.
None of it had mattered. A man named Carl had wanted someone who looked the part.
She drank the tea standing at the window. Outside, the fog was a solid gray wall pressed against the glass, and the streetlight on the corner was a soft orange smear inside it. She could not see the house across the street.
At six-thirty she showered. At six-forty she dressed: black trousers, white shirt buttoned to the collar, black apron folded over her arm, her hair pinned up and back the way Teddy liked it, so it would not fall forward when she leaned over a table. She looked at herself once in the mirror by the door. Tall, five foot ten, dark-skinned, tired around the eyes, a white shirt that needed ironing and was not going to get it.
Looks the part, she thought, and did not finish the thought.
At six-fifty-one she caught the bus.
* * *
The Glasshouse stood on a rise in the Presidio, above Crissy Field, where on a clear day you could look straight down the slope at the water and the bridge and the brown hills of Marin on the other side. There were not very many clear days.
It had been built in 1891 as a private conservatory for the daughter of a railroad baron, a woman who had grown orchids and lemon trees under glass and was said to have spoken to them in French. After she died, the army had taken over the Presidio and turned the conservatory into a greenhouse for growing vegetables for the officers' mess, and later into a storage shed, and later into nothing at all. For forty years it had stood empty. The glass had broken pane by pane. A eucalyptus seed had found its way in through a hole in the roof and taken root in the old orchid bed, and by the time anyone thought to do anything about it, the tree had grown up through the iron ribs and out into the open air and was sixty feet tall.
Eleven years ago a restaurant group had bought the lease and spent three years and an amount of money nobody would ever say out loud restoring it. They had replaced every pane by hand. They had scraped and repainted every rib of the white ironwork. They had left the eucalyptus where it was, and built the roof around it, and now it rose up through the center of the building and out through a collar of copper and glass into the sky. Food writers called it the most beautiful dining room in San Francisco. They called it that every year, in lists, and the lists were not wrong.
Amara had stopped seeing it after about a month. That was how it went with beautiful places when you worked in them. They became the place where the dishwasher broke and the walk-in fridge was too cold and the gravel got in your shoes. And then, sometime toward the end of her first year, without any warning, she had started to see it again. She did not know why. She had been carrying a tray of empty glasses down the long central path one evening in winter, and the rain had been sliding down the panes overhead, and the candles had been lit along the tables, and she had looked up and seen the whole glowing iron skeleton of the place rising over her into the dark like the inside of a lantern, and she had stopped walking. She had stood there with the tray of glasses until Kenji bumped into her from behind.
She had seen it ever since.
The main hall was a hundred and twenty feet long, all glass and white iron, nearly four thousand panes, so that the light inside changed every few minutes with the weather outside. On fog mornings it was the color of milk. On clear afternoons it was gold. The floor was pale river gravel that the bussers raked smooth every morning before opening, in long straight lines like a Zen garden, and which crunched pleasantly under your shoes and drove the servers mad. Ferns stood in terracotta planters taller than a man. Lemon trees and boxwood lined the paths. In the center, under the eucalyptus, a stone fountain murmured to itself, and a bronze heron stood in the basin on one leg, looking down at the water with an expression of permanent mild disappointment.
At the far end of the hall, at the end of a straight gravel path lined on both sides with lemon trees clipped into perfect round lollipops, stood the Long Table.