Booked Through Sunday

Jubal had his father's hands, which was a problem, because Fabienne had told his father goodbye in a hotel room in Chicago five years ago and had never written to say there would be a smaller set to match.

He was four. He set his jaw over his letters the same way that man set his jaw over a keyboard he was about to make forty people stop talking for, and most afternoons at half past three he came through the swing door and did it again in front of her, and every time she looked at it and then looked at something else, the way she had been looking at something else for four years.

It had worked every day so far.

The fish came at ten, the way the fish came every Thursday, and Fabienne Arceneaux met it at the alley door with her sleeves already pushed up past the burn marks.

The door stuck. It had stuck since before she got here and it would stick after she was gone, and she put the heel of her hand up under the frame side and lifted, up and toward her, then out, without looking at it, the way you put your hand on a stair rail in your own house in the dark. Cold came in off the alley with a smell of wet brick and the grease trap and somebody's jasmine two courtyards over, blooming in February because this city had never been told what month it was.

"Morning, Miss Fab." The fish man had the drum on his shoulder in a wax box and the redfish under his arm. "Y'all survive it?"

"We surviving it." Carnival had come and gone on the ninth and the whole quarter had the look of a house the day after a funeral reception — everybody's money spent, everybody's feet hurting, ashes on half the foreheads that came through the door yesterday. The flat week. The broke week. March the first coming, she thought, and they still going to be broke, and then she put that down because it was ten in the morning and she had fifty covers to get out of a kitchen that had been under four inches of water three weeks ago.

She took the box off his shoulder, all forty-some pounds of it, and went up the step with it against her hip, five foot two of her, and did not break stride.

Ronell had the burners going by the time she came through, and a roux going that he had no business starting until one, and he did not look up from it, because you do not walk away from a pan and Ronell had not walked away from a pan since 2009.

"Early," she said.

"Lent," Ronell said, like that was a sentence.

It was, actually. Friday was tomorrow and tomorrow the room would be forty seats of people who had given something up on Wednesday and intended to take it out on a fish. She set the box on the prep table, split the tape with her thumb, and began breaking down the drum where she stood, the collar going into the staff pan and never onto a plate for money, because that was not a rule anybody had written down either.

The kitchen was warm and it was hers, and she never let herself think the second half of that sentence for longer than it took to have it.

Thirteen years. Odile Verrett had hired her at eighteen off Gert Town with no knives of her own and a bus transfer in her pocket, because she had come back the second day, which was the entire interview and Odile had told her so at the five-year mark and never before. Now Odile was a photograph over the register in a green dress with her arms folded, not smiling, thirty-one years old in that picture, which was Fabienne's own age now and a thing she had noticed in November and had not told a living soul.

A year Saturday. No — a year last Friday. Six days back, and the day had gone past with fifty-some covers on it and nobody had said anything at all, which she had decided beforehand was what Odile would have wanted and had spent the whole night being furious about anyway.

By eleven she had the fish down, the bisque on, and the board written. She wrote the specials in block capitals because the board had never been written any other way in that building, standing up on the milk crate she kept by the walk-in because the top line of the chalkboard was set for a taller woman and had been since Odile set it. DRUM, LEMON, BROWN BUTTER. BISQUE. CABBAGE. BREAD PUDDING. She stepped down off the crate, looked at it, went back up and put CRAB under BISQUE, because people wanted to be told what they already knew.

"Fabienne." Elouise, through the swing door, in her coat still, her reading glasses up in her Sunday head. "The ice make that noise all night?"

"It makes that noise every night, Auntie."

"It's making it worse."

"It's been making it worse since 2011."

Elouise made a sound that was not agreement and was not disagreement and went out to the room to do the brass, which she polished with the pink cream she bought in bulk and which put a faint sweet chemical smell down the length of the bar under the lamps by noon. Through the swing door Fabienne could hear her moving chairs she did not need to move, and she knew without looking which two she would leave — the two at eleven, which nobody had sat at since the fifth of February last year, and which Elouise had started seating again in November and then quietly stopped seating again in January without one word to anybody about why.

Fabienne squared the morning's tickets to the edge of the pass with two fingers and did not go out there.

At half past twelve the compressor came.

She heard the truck on Dauphine before she saw the man, and she was out the alley door with the clipboard already in her head. Two of them, a hand truck, and a crate strapped to it with a shipping label big enough to read from six feet and a part number on it she could have recited in her sleep by now, having said it into three phones in three weeks.

"Walk-in's through here. Mind the step, it's shorter than it looks."

They took the old unit off the roof pad and set the new one in, and she stood in the walk-in in a sweatshirt with her breath in front of her face and watched the needle on the wall thermometer come off forty-three and start going the right way, and she felt something in the middle of her chest let go about a quarter of an inch. Thirty-nine. It had been at forty-three for eleven days and she had been running the fish on ice in the bottom half and butchering twice a day to keep it honest and nobody upstairs had known there was anything to know.

"Sign here for me."

She signed. Her signature was small and fast, four letters and a line, nothing like Elouise's, which went across the bottom of a page like a river.

"And this one's your copy." He tore the yellow sheet off. "Y'all had it bad in January?"

"Four inches on the low side and a foot in the back hall."

"Insurance?"

"Flood exclusion," Fabienne said pleasantly, and the man winced on her behalf and got in his truck, and that was the last conversation anybody at the Verrett was going to have about it.

She took the yellow sheet into the office.

Eight by ten. Laptop with the one corner staved in. Pencil jar carried in from the register because the office pencils all walked. Odile's cigarette burn in the veneer by the phone, which Fabienne had put her thumb on more times in a year than she would have owned to and not one of those times on purpose.

The linen company's calendar hung on its nail by the door, squared to the edge, February with the days ruled off in three different hands. Under it, flat against the wall where the nail held the card tight, was the invoice from the restoration people. Eleven thousand four hundred dollars. Subfloor, the back-hall wall to thirty inches, the two reach-ins, the electrical they had to open up and could not close again until the parish came out, and now the compressor.

Four thousand two hundred of it had gone out of the drawer already. She had taken it in three pieces across three weeks — a deposit, a second draw when they opened the wall, and the compressor this morning — and every one of those three times she had written it down, because the house rule was that the tally got written down and not remembered, and she had written it down on a legal pad in the office drawer in her own small hand and not in the book, and there was a difference between those two things that she was not going to pretend she did not understand.

Seven thousand two hundred still owed.

She lifted the calendar off the nail with one hand, slid the yellow sheet behind the invoice, and hung the calendar back, squared, face-down over both.

"Hey." Ronell, in the doorway, wiping down. "They get it?"

"Got it. She's at thirty-nine and holding."

"Bout time." He looked at her a second longer than the sentence needed. "That come out of the January money or the—"

"It's handled," Fabienne said.

"Alright." He went. That was it; that was the whole thing. Nobody in that kitchen was ever surprised by anything and they said so by declining to be, and Ronell would go home tonight and tell his wife the walk-in was fixed and would not once, not ever, wonder out loud in that building what it had been fixed with. It was the kindest room in the city about a person's business and it was the reason she could do this at all.

At half past three the front door shut on its closer, slow, and a small voice said, "Ma," from a great distance, meaning the front of the house, and then Jubal came through the swing door under Elouise's hand with his backpack on both shoulders and his jacket zipped to the chin because Elouise did not believe in February.

"Hands," Fabienne said.

He went up on the milk crate at the sink and did his hands, seriously, both sides, four years old and built like somebody she was not going to think about at three-thirty on a Thursday. Then he climbed onto the stool at the end of the prep table, and she put the dupe slips down in front of him and the good pencil, and he started on his letters on the back of a ticket for a nine-top that had come in on Mardi Gras and stiffed the bar.

"J," he said.

"That's you."

"J is for me and for jelly."

"J is for you and for jelly. Do six of em and then do your name."

He did four of them and then wanted to know how the fish was, and she held the drum collar up over the pass so he could look at it, and he looked at it with his whole face the way he looked at everything, and she went back to the bisque and stirred and did not stop moving, and that was the day. One-handed. It had been one-handed for four years and she had never found it heavy in the way people meant when they said that word.

Family meal went on the bar at four-thirty on a folded towel, the two-top and the four-top pushed together at the end under Odile's picture — smothered chicken, rice, the collar off the drum in a pan with lemon. Anthony ate standing with his hip against the ice well. Elouise sat. Ronell did not. Jubal got the piece with the skin on it because he asked for it by name.

"Dez called," Elouise said, to the room, seating herself with her plate. "From up there. Wanted to know did the ice machine get fixed."

"It's the compressor, and it's the walk-in, and it did."

"Mm." Elouise ate. "He say the cold up there is a different animal."

"He's from here. Everything's a different animal."

The board by the podium had THE HOUSE BAND — WED THRU SAT on it in Chantelle's capitals from Wednesday, because Dez was in Chicago for his fortnight and Cleve had gone up there with him, and the room would be fine, the room was always fine, the room had been fine through a funeral and a lawsuit and ten dark nights and a foot of water in the back hall.

At five past five, with the doors twenty-five minutes off, Fabienne counted what was left.

She did it in the office with the door shut, standing up, because you count standing up. The band was five envelopes tonight and Peach's went into his hand in the room before the first set, and the kitchen was the other Thursday and not this one, thank God. She counted it twice. It came to enough for tonight and tomorrow's fish and the linen, and it did not come to seven thousand two hundred dollars and it was never going to.

Out in the room somebody threw the switch and the pink sign came up at the end of the block with the second R still dead in it, the way it had been dead for three years now, because a letter cost four hundred dollars and there was a band to pay first.

She banded the money, put it back, and stood there a second with her hand flat on the desk.

She could walk out that swing door right now, cross to the register, and say the number out loud to Chantelle, who was upstairs in her own life with her own husband and her own great weight, and who had been handed the books in October and had not had a good night since. Say: the flood was eleven four and I put four two of yours in it without asking you. Watch her face do the arithmetic. Watch it land, at the end of a week where the whole quarter was broke and the room had turned sixty covers on a Wednesday in Lent.

She had been given one thing in her life by a woman who did not have to give it, and she had been paying it back every service since. You did not pay a thing like that back by walking into the front of the house and handing the house a bill.

Fabienne straightened the calendar on its nail so it sat square to the edge of the wall, went out, and got her hands under the night.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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