The End of the Bar

For thirty-two years Peach Delahoussaye had come through the back door at ten of four on a Wednesday, and Elouise Verrett had told time by it and nothing else.

The first Wednesday in March was the kind of Wednesday a room has to be talked into.

Lent had the city by the collar. Mardi Gras was three weeks gone and everybody who had spent money on it was sorry, and everybody who hadn't was saving it for Easter, and the reservation book on the podium had eleven names in it for a forty-seat room, three of them in Elouise's own hand and one of those a man who had not shown up on a Wednesday since Thanksgiving. Monday's red beans were gone down to the scrapings by Tuesday noon. The container Miss Ora took home had been the last one. The kitchen had moved on to the shrimp, because Wednesday was shrimp, and the smell of butter going brown came through the swing door every time Ronell's elbow hit it.

Elouise stood at the podium at ten past four with a pencil and did the arithmetic on the room that she did every night and had stopped writing down years ago. Two-tops along the wall for the couples. Miss Ora's five. Mr. Alcide's nine if he came, and he would, because he said Lent was for other people. Walk-ins off Dauphine to fill the middle, if the sign brought anybody, which it would, VERRETT with its one R out, glowing pink at the end of the block since she threw the switch at four. She put the pencil down square to the edge of the book and looked at herself once in the back-bar mirror, across the length of the room.

Plum, today. The wrap dress with the self-tie belt, which she wore knotted at the side because her waist was the one thing about her body she had never had a single complaint about, at any age, and she did not see the point of hiding the one thing. Knee hem. The low black heel she could stand in until eleven. The Sunday head set right, curled under at the shoulder, her reading glasses pushed up into it where she could find them. Berry on her mouth, put on in the car and checked in the visor. Odile, in the photograph over the register, arms crossed in her green dress, had nothing to say about any of it, and Elouise took that the way she had always taken it from her sister.

"Auntie, you want this table or not?"

That was Tobias, with the four-top already halfway across the floor, his forearms flexed under the weight and the edge of it about to take a chair off table seven. Somebody always pushed the tables together at twenty past four and nobody ever thanked him for it.

"I want it where it goes," she said. "Not in Miss Ora's lap."

He set it down against the two-top at the end of the bar, under the photograph, and squared it, which he had not used to do. Fabienne came out of the kitchen with a hotel pan of chicken and sausage over rice and a stack of plates on her forearm, scarf on, the old burn shine showing where her sleeve was pushed back, and put both down on a folded towel without a word. Chantelle followed with the bread. Marielle came down the back stairs with her phone in her hand and her numbers on her face, and Dez behind her, ducking under the frame of the kitchen hall door the way a tall man does in a building that was built before tall men. Junie was already seated. Junie was always already seated. Curtis came in from the alley with his collar up and Cleve after him, young enough to apologise to the door for letting it shut.

Peach was already in the building.

Elouise had not had to see him come in to know it. She had been in that building at ten of four on more Wednesdays than she had been married, and the back door made a sound when it was lifted right that was different from the sound it made when somebody pushed it like a fool. He lifted it right. Then a little while of nothing, which was him hanging his coat, and setting the case down where the case went, and saying something low to Ronell at the range that made Ronell laugh without turning around.

Now he came out of the kitchen hall in the good grey suit with his hat in his hand, and he set the hat on the bar, brim up, and pulled out the chair at the far end of the pushed-together tables, where he always sat, and sat in it.

He was a long man. Sitting did not take that away from him. The suit had been cut for a funeral and cut again since by somebody who knew what they were doing, and it lay across his shoulders the way a good suit lays on a man who has stood up straight for fifty years so he can breathe. White shirt. A tie on a Wednesday, dark red. His hair was white and close, edged clean at the temples, and the moustache was white and trimmed to the lip, and under all that white his skin was so dark and so warm that the amber lamps over the bar found copper in it along the cheekbone. She had looked at that face across the room for thirty-two years. She had never once let it register as anything other than the band.

Jubal came through the swing door at a trot with a dupe slip in his fist, climbed onto the chair beside his mother, and announced that he had done his J's.

"Let's see your J's," said Chantelle.

He held them up. They went the wrong direction, every one of them, a row of fishhooks.

"Mm," said Peach, from the end of the table.

Jubal looked at him to see what kind of mm that was, decided it was the good kind, and put the slip under his plate for safekeeping.

They ate. Marielle had the Wednesday book open beside her plate and was quick with it, the way she was quick with everything, and said the number for a soft Wednesday in Lent and then looked sorry she'd said it. Dez said it would fill by eight. Junie said Dez said that about everything, including his own wedding, and Marielle threw a piece of bread at him without looking up. Curtis's phone went twice and he turned it face down twice, and everybody at the table knew who it was and what it was about and nobody said car note. Fabienne cut Jubal's sausage into coins and the boy ate around the outside of his plate, rice last.

Elouise ate the way she ate at that table, which was standing up half the time. She went to the podium when the phone rang and came back with a two-top for seven. She went to the bar for a lemon. She sat down. Halfway through her plate, she reached for the pepper sauce and found that Peach had it.

He was not using it. He was holding it. He had taken it out of the middle of the table and turned it in his long fingers so the label faced the right way, and then set it down again square to the edge of the towel, and then, because the neck had a drip of red on it, wiped the neck with the side of his thumb, slow, the way he did everything on a table, as if it was going to have to go back into a case at the end of the night.

"Since I got my Sundays," he said.

He said it to the bottle. Not loud. The table was talking over itself and he did not raise his voice into it; he never did. He let it go under.

"I'm going to be at the counter on Rampart. Sunday. About one."

Then he sat back and picked up his fork.

Junie said, "Man got one day off in thirty-two years and he going to spend it on a coffee."

"It's a good coffee," said Peach.

"It's four dollars," said Marielle, and then, "I'm sorry. It's not my business what a coffee costs."

"It's four-fifty now," said Tobias.

Dez said, "Mm," and went on eating, and Chantelle asked Fabienne whether the shrimp would hold to the second seating if there was a second seating, and Fabienne said it would hold if nobody opened the reach-in to look at it, and the table went on.

Fabienne did not look at Elouise. That was how Elouise knew she had seen it. A woman who has run that range by herself for a year notices everything at a table and makes a point of being surprised by none of it, and the point was the not-looking. She reached past her son for the rice, served herself a second spoon she did not want, and said to her plate, "Counter's open Sundays," as if somebody had asked her the weather.

Elouise put her fork down.

Nobody at that table had a free afternoon on a Sunday. Ronell put the roux on at one. Chantelle was in the office with the book by noon. Fabienne had the stock going and Jubal on her hip, and Marielle had the phone, and the band did not exist on a Sunday because a Sunday was piano only and the piano was Emile's now. Tobias was hauling ice. The only person who sat down to that table on a Sunday at four-thirty with nothing behind her from one o'clock on was the woman who brought the boy back to the corner before one and did not have to be at the door again until five.

He knew that. He had known her Sundays for thirty years. He had played most of them.

A time and a direction. Nothing that could be refused because there was nothing that had been offered. That was how a Verrett asked for a thing, which was to say it was how a Verrett did not ask, and he had been in that building long enough to learn it off her sister. He had left it on the floor in front of everybody, where the only person who could pick it up was her, and the only way for her to pick it up was to walk to Rampart.

Or she could decide she had not heard it. That was available. Women her age were permitted not to hear things at a loud table. She looked at the end of the table and found him eating his chicken and sausage with his whole attention, his hat on the bar, his tie the colour of a good wine, his eyes on his plate and nowhere else, and she understood that he was going to give her exactly that much room and not one inch less.

"Auntie," said Chantelle. "Your phone."

It was the podium phone, ringing out across the room. She got up and went to answer it, and did not look back at the end of the table, and was not sure, crossing the floor, whether she was walking slower than usual or faster.

Doors were at five-thirty, and by six the room was not as bad as Marielle's number.

Elouise seated it the way she always had, with the part of her mind that had done it for thirty years and did not need the rest. Miss Ora at five, with her hand taken. Mr. Alcide at nine, saying Lent was for Protestants. A pair of nurses still in their scrubs under their coats who wanted to be seen and got the table under the lamp. A couple off a cruise ship who wanted the corner and did not know it yet, so she gave it to them, and watched the woman's shoulders come down.

At a quarter to seven a young man and his girl came in off Dauphine asking for the bar, and she walked them down the length of it past Cordell's stool, empty tonight, and the man stopped her before she could seat them at the middle and said, "Can we take the end? By the wall?"

The last stool. Against the wall, by the service station, where the waitresses came for their drinks and nobody ever wanted to sit.

"It's yours," Elouise said, and it was, because nobody had ever asked her to keep it, and she had never once asked anybody to.

Wendell had sat there every Wednesday Peach played, from the winter Odile gave Peach the night until the March Wendell's heart stopped in his sleep. Thirteen years. One Dixie and one bourbon and nothing after, and a tip for the band out of his own pocket on his birthday that he made a production of and Peach never once acknowledged and never once failed to play something for. Wendell had been a big wide laughing man with a bald head and a Post Office pension and a habit of dancing her round the kitchen while the rice burned. She had loved him without any trouble at all for twenty-six years, and she had missed him for nineteen in the way you miss a window in a room you still live in. Nineteen years this month. It did not hurt to walk somebody to his stool. It had not hurt for a long time. The boy put his girl's coat over the back of it and ordered two Abita and had no idea he was sitting on anything, and that was right. That was how it should be.

She went back to the door.

At twenty-eight minutes past seven Peach came through the back door off the kitchen hall with the horn in its case at the end of his arm, the same as he had every Wednesday. He crossed behind the bar and stepped up onto the stand and set his hat on the piano, brim up, beside Cleve's water. He took the horn out. Then he stood there with his weight even and his head on one side and listened to the room fill, for nobody's benefit but his own, while Dez said something to Curtis and Junie tapped a stick on his knee.

At half past, without a count and without a nod, he was in on the first note.

The tin ceiling took it up and laid it down flat across every table in the room at the same distance, and the nurses stopped talking, and the cruise-ship woman put her hand on her husband's wrist, and Elouise stood at the podium in her plum dress with a menu against her chest and let it reach her the same as it reached them. She did not have a table to seat for twenty minutes. She stood there for twenty minutes.

At eight she went into the kitchen for the boy.

He was at the dry end of the dish table with his coat already on, buttoned wrong, his dupe slips in his pocket. Anthony racked a load off the left and gave her the nod that meant he had been good. Ronell, at the range, said, "He ate," which was the whole report. She fixed the buttons and took him up on her hip, the good side, and her bag on the other shoulder, and went down the back hall past the ice machine to the alley door, and lifted it, heel of her hand up under the frame, up and toward her and out.

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

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