Di was watching her without appearing to, a manager's skill Jasmine had once studied the way other people studied languages.
"Anywhere in particular?" Di asked, with elaborate casualness that did not fool either of them.
Jasmine looked across the room, past the early couples and the business travelers and the two women sharing an appetizer with the concentration of old friendship, to the far side by the windows, where ten chairs stood around a table laid with the quiet ceremony reserved for a party that had not yet arrived.
She asked for Table Twelve — as a guest.
Chapter 29 — The Woman at Table Twelve
Di Foster did not hesitate, though she did allow herself one raised eyebrow, an economical gesture Jasmine remembered as her manager's equivalent of a paragraph.
"Table Twelve seats ten," Di said.
"Then I'll have room for my thoughts," Jasmine said. "They've gotten numerous."
Something in Di's face settled, as if a question she had carried for years had been answered in the right tone. She nodded to the host, who moved ahead with the menu, and led Jasmine herself across the dining room — not the fastest diagonal, Jasmine noticed, but the long way, past the bar and along the windows, the route a manager used when she wanted a room to have time to notice something without being told to.
People did notice. Not all at once, and not rudely. It began at the service station, where a server in his thirties — Jasmine knew him slightly, a hire from her final season, once frantic with wine keys and now unhurried — looked up from polishing a glass, looked again, and said her name aloud as a question. At the kitchen pass, a line cook leaned into the doorway and came out of it again quickly, the way people did when they were fetching someone. By the windows, an older couple who had been regulars since before her time were watching with the open interest of people who read the local pages; the woman touched her companion's wrist, and Jasmine saw her mouth shape the beginning of a story she was apparently known in.
The woman at Table Twelve. That was what the room was deciding to call her, she could feel it, and for once she did not mind being named by a room.
She sat where Chen Bo-Lin had sat that night — not by design at first. She had moved toward the harbor side of the table out of habit, wanting the water in view, and only when she was seated did she understand whose chair she had taken. From it, the whole table opened along her left, and the windows ran wide, and Boston Harbor darkened beyond the glass while the ferries crossed it in their lit, unhurried lines. She set her bag down. She placed Grace's hoops, mentally, beside her plate. She breathed.
Marco arrived before the water did.
He had come in on his night off — someone had clearly telephoned him, and he had clearly come anyway, still in a street coat over his evening clothes, his hair wind-ruffled from the waterfront. He stopped a correct distance from the table, maître d' even in his haste, and beamed at her with an indignation he made no effort to hide.
"A reservation," he said, "under your own name, at my restaurant, and I learn of it from a text message with three exclamation points. Three, Jasmine. From the bartender."
"You taught me to book properly," she said. "Side-door people don't get Thursdays off respected."
He laughed and bent, briefly and formally, over her hand, and told her the room looked better with her on this side of it, and went away again before the moment could turn into a ceremony — but not before she saw him speak, in passing, to two servers and the bartender, and understood that whatever she ordered that evening would arrive with more ceremony than the menu strictly described.
She ordered slowly, for pleasure, which was a discipline she had to practice at first. Years on the other side of the menu had trained her to calculate: what the kitchen could do without strain, what would not keep a table waiting, what a server would silently bless her for choosing. Tonight she set the training aside an item at a time. She chose the soup the kitchen was proudest of in cold weather. She chose the fish that came off the boats she could see, in daylight, from these very windows. She asked her server — a composed woman named Elena, new since Jasmine's time, who had recovered beautifully from an early flicker of recognition and now served her with extra, deliberate normality — she asked Elena what she would eat if she were sitting down, and ordered that for her final course on the strength of the answer, and saw the small, professional pleasure that answer being trusted always gave.
The room hummed around her. That was the word for it. Courses came and went at the pace of a place that understood evenings. At the bar, glasses sang. At the far tables, a birthday was being celebrated with restraint, then with less restraint. Two servers crossed at the station with the old, wordless choreography she had once performed without thinking, and her shoulders remembered it the way they remembered a dance learned young. She ate, and she watched, and she let the double vision of the night do its work: the room as it was, laid over the room as it had been, the girl with the apron ghosting politely behind the woman with the reservation, neither of them canceling the other out.
Between courses she thought about what she would tell Samuel, and what Di would report to the staff room tomorrow, and how she would describe to Maria — who had never eaten in a place like this and had once, laughing, called restaurants with cloth napkins "courtrooms with butter" — how entirely possible it was to sit at a ten-person table alone and feel neither lonely nor on display.
She was reaching for her water, content, when it happened at the station beside the kitchen door.
A young waitress — very young, Jasmine thought, twenty at most, with her hair pinned up in the style of someone still copying the older staff and a tray carried at the hopeful, overloaded angle of a second-week hire — came out of the kitchen at a pace the room did not forgive. The door swung wider than she expected. Someone called a warning she half-heard. The tray tipped, corrected, tipped past saving: glasses, a sauce boat, a folded stack of side plates, all of it going down at once on the hard floor by the station in a crash that stopped every conversation in the dining room for exactly one second.
The girl froze in the wreckage with her hands still shaped around the tray that was no longer there. Her face did the thing Jasmine remembered her own face doing, in dreams if never in service, years ago — the hot, public certainty that the whole room had seen, and judged, and would remember.
Jasmine stood to help her.
Chapter 30 — The Room Was Expecting Her
The glass had broken cleanly, which was a mercy.