Then six of Grant’s friends and a cousin of his.
People whose names I got and lost.
And me at the end with my back to the service door.
Grant tapped his glass with a knife.
“All right, everybody. Order whatever you want. The good stuff. Tonight’s on me.”
Celeste put her hand over her heart.
“So generous.”
I thought about the card in Teao’s pocket.
And for a second, the whole thing was so absurd that I almost laughed.
Not bitterly.
It was just funny.
He was going to buy us all dinner in my restaurant with my money and take a bow.
Celeste turned to me during the first course with the politeness of someone doing a job.
“And what do you do, Marin?”
“Marin’s here all the time,” Brooke said before I could open my mouth.
And laughed.
A few of Grant’s friends laughed because Brooke had said it like it was a punchline.
“She’s in hospitality,” my mother said.
“I am,” I said.
It was true.
It just wasn’t enough.
And everyone at the table heard it as exactly as much as it was.
The conversation moved down the table and away from me like water finding a slope.
Grant ordered the wine.
He ran his finger down the list and picked the bottle from the bottom of the page.
The one we keep for the people who order from the bottom of the page.
Our server for the room was a kid named Devon.
Four months in.
Good hands.
Nervous.
He presented the bottle and stumbled on the name of the producer.
It’s a hard name.
Grant grinned and looked down the table at me.
“You could probably do that better, huh?”
Teasing.
Not cruel yet.
Just the first pass of a man finding the edges of the room.
“Probably,” I said.
Celeste told her story then.
It was clearly a story she’d told before.
One she liked.
“Brooke has been so open with us about losing her father, about having to grow up so fast. She basically raised herself, didn’t she, Diane? You must be so proud.”
“Brooke was always the strong one,” my mother said.
I looked down the table at my sister.
She was looking at Celeste.
She was smiling the way you smile at your own reflection when it’s doing well.
Devon came around with the bottle and poured my glass last.
He came in from the wrong side and poured a finger too much.
I put my hand flat on my thigh under the table so I wouldn’t reach out and fix it.
I understood then that there wasn’t going to be an after.
I’d been imagining a conversation with Brooke on Sunday.
On Monday.
Somewhere quiet.
But the story was being written right here at this table in front of these people, with me sitting in the last chair as its only silent witness.
Whatever I said on Monday would be said to a room that had already decided.
Teao came in to check the room.
He does it once a course.
A slow circuit.
Eyes on the water glasses.
His eyes came to me.
He opened his mouth to do what he does in that room with every owner in it.
“Good evening, ma—”
I shook my head.
A very small movement.
The kind only a person who’s worked beside you for six years can see.
He didn’t miss a beat.
“Good evening, everyone. I’m Teao. I’ll be looking after the room tonight. Anything at all, you let me know.”
“Great, Teao,” Grant said. “Another bottle of this. The good one.”
The second Barolo.
Twelve hundred dollars of wine now on the table.
On his tab.
On mine.
Celeste picked the story back up.
“Brooke told us you left school, Marin, to help out at home. That must have been hard, watching your sister go on and finish.”
“I was glad she finished,” I said.
And then, because it was sitting right there in my mouth:
“I paid for—”
My mother’s hand closed on my wrist under the table.
Not hard.
Just there.
The way you steady a glass that’s about to go over.
I stopped.
Grant was telling a story to his end of the table.
Something about a place in Napa.
About servers who thought they were sommeliers.
About a guy who’d tried to correct him on a vintage.
At my table.
That I was paying for.
His friends laughed.
Hollis didn’t.
Hollis looked at Teao, who was refilling water at the sideboard.
Then he looked at me.
Then he looked at his plate.
I noticed it the way I’d notice a guest who stopped eating.
Brooke had had two glasses by then.
Maybe three.
She leaned toward Celeste.
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