"I can call them back," Teddy said quickly. "Right now. I'll tell them I made a mistake. I'll find someone else, or nobody, it doesn't matter, they'll survive." He took a breath. "It's only, Amara, I've watched you for two years. I've watched you carry plates for people who couldn't do a tenth of what you can do. I've heard you in the walk-in with Mei, going a hundred miles an hour, laughing. I watch these people come in here every day, these men with their deals, and I think, she could run circles around all of you. And this morning the phone rang and someone asked me the question and I just..." He spread his hands. "I'm tired of watching you get passed over. That's all. I got carried away. I'll call them back."
Amara looked past him down the path toward the Long Table, gray and bare in the fog light. She thought of the email. She thought of two lines from a man named Carl.
"Teddy," she said. "When you told them about me. Did you say my name?"
"No. Just that I had someone."
"Did the assistant ask what I looked like?"
Teddy did not answer right away. That was answer enough, but she waited, because she wanted to hear it.
"He asked," Teddy said finally, "if you were Chinese."
"And what did you say?"
"I said you were fluent." He met her eyes. "That's all I said. I said, she's fluent, she grew up there. I didn't say anything else."
Amara nodded slowly.
"That matters," she said.
"I know it matters. That's why I'm going to call them back."
"No," Amara said. "Don't."
Teddy blinked at her.
"I'll do it," she said. "I'll work the table. I'll help with the menu and the wine. If they want someone to sit at the end and keep the chairman comfortable, I'll keep him comfortable." She tied her apron, a double knot at the back, the way she always did. "It's lunch, Teddy. It's my job. I serve lunch."
"It's never just lunch," Teddy said quietly. "Not at that table. You know that. It's never just about the menu and the wine."
"I know," said Amara. "Let me set it anyway."
* * *
She set the Long Table herself, the way she liked to, without help.
Fourteen places. No tablecloth; the basalt was the point, and Teddy said covering it would be like putting a slipcover on a Rodin. Cream linen napkins folded in a simple rectangle. White porcelain plates, heavy and plain. Steel cutlery, laid with a ruler. Down the center of the stone she ran a low line of white ranunculus in shallow stone bowls, mixed with sprigs of lemon leaf cut from the trees along the path, so the table smelled faintly of citrus when you leaned over it.
Then she went to the back storeroom and found the box she was looking for on the top shelf, behind the extra candles.
The chopstick rests were porcelain fish, each one about two inches long, white glazed with a fine blue line around the eye and the curve of the tail. The restaurant used them once a year, for the Lunar New Year menu in February, and the rest of the time they lived in a box behind the candles. Nobody had told her to use them. Nobody had told her not to. She set one beside every place, to the right of the cutlery, small blue-eyed fish swimming in a line down both sides of the dark stone.
Then she went into the kitchen.
Mei was at the pass, wiping down the steel with a folded cloth. She was thirty-four, from Chengdu, small and compact, with her hair cropped short under her chef's cap and a burn scar across the back of her left hand that she said came from a wok and that Kenji was convinced came from something much more exciting. She had been the sous-chef at The Glasshouse for three years. She said very little in English. In Mandarin she was dry and funny and merciless, and she and Amara had fallen, within a week of meeting, into the habit of talking in the walk-in fridge, where it was cold and quiet and nobody else could follow.
"I need fourteen pairs of chopsticks," Amara said in Mandarin. "Good ones. Not the bamboo."
Mei looked at her. Then she put down the cloth and went into the back without a word, and came back two minutes later with a long flat box of dark wood, very old, the lacquer worn pale at the corners.
She opened it. Inside, on faded red silk, lay fourteen pairs of chopsticks. They were ebony, long and slender and nearly black, with tips of worn silver. They caught the kitchen light with a soft dull shine, the way old things do that have been handled for a long time.
"My grandmother's," Mei said. "She brought them from Sichuan. Sixteen pairs, originally. My uncle broke one pair. My cousin lost the other at a wedding in Chongqing and we don't talk about it." She closed the lid and held the box out. "I want them back. All fourteen."
Amara took the box carefully in both hands. "Mei. Are you sure?"
"I heard Teddy on the phone this morning," Mei said. "In his office. The door was open." She picked up her cloth again. "The person on the other end asked if you were Chinese."
"I know."
"Teddy said you were fluent."
"I know."
Mei wiped the steel in a slow circle. "My grandmother had a saying," she said. "You can't measure the sea with a bucket. You can't judge a person by their face." She did not look up. "She said it a lot. Mostly about my uncle."
Amara laughed, surprising herself.
"Chen Popo used to say that," she said. "Every single day. To everyone who came into the shop."
Mei looked up then. She had heard the name before, once or twice, in the walk-in.
"Chen Popo," she said. "The old lady with the noodle shop. On Hongli Road."
"The old lady with the cane," Amara said.
* * *
She laid the chopsticks on the porcelain fish, one pair at each place, the silver tips pointing toward the center of the table. Fourteen dark lines on fourteen small white fish.
When she was done she walked back to the far end of the lemon-tree path and turned and looked at it.