The gala had taken the lobby the way weather takes a valley. There were flowers in urns tall as children. There was a champagne tower being assembled with the concentration of a bomb disposal unit. There was a board on an easel near the ballroom doors with the foundation's name at the top in the same raised gold as the invitation in Arthur's pocket: THE ENCORE FOUNDATION — FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY GALA. Beneath it, smaller, the evening's program. Arthur read it with the calm of a man reading his own obituary and finding it mostly accurate.
And there, to the left of the ballroom doors, was the check-in table: a long skirted table with two tablets on stands, a small forest of printed place cards in alphabetical order, and two young women in black dresses with headsets resting around their necks like stethoscopes. A third young woman stood a little apart with a clipboard, watching the doors with the expression of air traffic control.
The nearer of the two women at the tablets smiled as they approached. She was perhaps twenty-five, with her hair drawn back and a smile that had been trained, Arthur could tell, the way scales are trained — correctly, and at some cost to naturalness.
"Good evening," she said. "Welcome to the Encore Foundation Gala. Names, please?"
"Delaney," Arthur said. "Arthur and Rose Delaney."
"Delaney," she repeated, and bent to her tablet. Her fingers moved. Her smile stayed where it was, but something beneath it went looking for something and did not immediately find it. "Delaney... Could you spell that for me?"
"D-E-L-A-N-E-Y," Arthur said. "It's been spelled that way all my life. I've checked."
She typed again. She scrolled. The smile thinned, not unkindly — professionally. "And you're with which party, sir?"
"We're not with a party," Rose said pleasantly. "We are the party's occasion. But go on looking, dear. The letters sometimes hide."
The young woman — her name tag said KELSEY — glanced sideways at her colleague, a look Arthur recognized from forty years of school concerts: the look of a student whose music has gone somewhere the page did not predict. The colleague slid down the table with her own tablet already raised, the way a senior nurse once would have come down a ward, and Arthur understood, with the mild interest of a man watching weather form, that they had been promoted to management.
"Good evening," the colleague said. "I'm Madison Pierce, I'm lead on check-in tonight. Let me help you." She was twenty-seven, perhaps, with the composed efficiency of a person who runs things and intends to be seen running them. "Delaney, was it?"
"Arthur Delaney," Arthur said. "And my wife, Rose."
Madison's fingers were faster than Kelsey's and surer. She searched. She searched by first name. She searched, Arthur could see, by something else — a code, a table number. The tablet lit her face from below. Somewhere behind them the doors sighed open and shut, open and shut, and other guests flowed past in silk and good shoes toward the ballroom, several of them glancing at the old couple at the table with the mild curiosity of people passing a minor delay at an airport.
"I'm not finding you," Madison said at last, in the tone of a person reporting a fact about the weather in another state. "Are you guests of a sponsor, perhaps? Sometimes the sponsor's guests are listed under the company name."
"No," Arthur said. "We're not under a company name."
"Are you perhaps with the musicians?" The question was gentle. "Family of one of the performers? Those seats are sometimes held separately—"
"We're not held separately," Rose said. Her voice was mild and it carried, the way it had carried down school corridors. "We are on the list, Madison. We have been on the list, in one form or another, for forty years. Do look again."
Madison did look again. Arthur watched her do it and did not doubt her thoroughness; her thoroughness was not the thing that was failing. She scrolled with the diligence of a person defusing something. "The system migrated in August," she said, half to them and half to excuse the tablet. "Some of the legacy records—" She stopped herself, the way professionals do when they hear themselves explaining. "Sir, ma'am, I have the full list here. Every confirmed guest. And I'm very sorry, but the Delaneys are not on it."
There was a small silence at the table. Kelsey had become extremely interested in her place cards.
"Then perhaps," Arthur said, "the list is not on us. May I show you something?"
He reached into his inside pocket and brought out the invitation. The cream paper had kept its weight. Forty years of school recitals had taught him that documents, like children, behave better when handled unhurriedly. He laid it on the table between them, not pushing it toward her, simply setting it where the light was good.