“I’m told I’m performing tonight,” he said.
“Celeste wants a monument,” I replied. “Not a maestro.”
“Yes. Understood.”
He adjusted one cuff and then studied me briefly. “You’re going somewhere.”
“Dinner.”
“With Mr. Reyes?” He lifted his hat from the sideboard and settled it.
I nodded.
“Good.”
The restaurant in the Marigny had six tables, a chalkboard menu that had been partially erased and rewritten twice that day, and forty years of cooking aromas that seeped into the walls. Odette, the chef-owner, seated us herself.
She was a small woman in her early seventies, with close-cropped silver hair. She had known my mother since before I was born, and she had seen me through the Tulane years with a combination of free meals and unsolicited advice.
“You’ve got gray,” she said.
“It’s not gray. It’s the light in here.”
“The light in here is what it’s always been.” She reached up and touched the hair at my right temple with two fingers. “It’s distinguished.”
“I’m thirty-two. Too early for gray,” I said.
“Yes, I know how old you are.” She looked at Thiago. “You’re with him?”
“I’m with him.”
“You’ll eat then. Both of you.”
She poured wine before we had ordered or asked for it, set bread on the table, and returned to the kitchen.
“Distinguished,” Thiago said.
“She’s been saying what she thinks since I met her. I learned not to take it personally.”
“I didn’t say it was a problem.”
Odette returned twenty minutes later with the first course and a brief story about the evening I had arrived at her door during my second year at Tulane carrying a terrible bottle of wine. I had failed a midterm in Arts Administration Theory, and I needed to discuss it with someone sympathetic before sharing the news with my parents.
“He sat in that chair,” she said, gesturing toward the next table, “and he told me he was reconsidering his entire academic program. I told him to eat something first.”
“That’s sound advice,” Thiago said.
“He ate two plates of red beans and then stayed in school.” She set down a bowl of chilled shrimp with rémoulade, a crudo dressed with citrus and a thin oil, and a small board with country pâté, house-pickled okra, and a dark mustard. “The discipline saved him, and the cooking helped.”
“What cooking?” I asked.
“You came here and watched me cook for two years. You didn’t think I noticed?”
She disappeared.
The shrimp were cold and cleanly sweet against the bites of rémoulade. Thiago tried one, then another, and he reached across the table for the crudo.
“She’s not wrong,” he said.
