"Can I get one of everybody? For the—I want to remember this."
She stood and backed up a few steps and held the phone up, and we all leaned together. Then she lowered it and looked at the screen, and frowned a little, and said, "Dad, could you lean in? No, the other way. Toward Peter. Little more. The light's weird on that side."
I leaned. She took several. She looked at them, and her thumb moved on the screen, and she smiled and sat down and put the phone face down beside her bread plate.
The chicken was very good. I'd expected that. I looked up while I ate, the way I do in any building, at the ductwork and the ceiling and the corners. You can learn a lot about a place by where it hides its machines. They'd done it well here. The returns were tucked into the old brick, painted the same color. And through the arched doorway to the kitchen, past the pass where the plates went out, I could see the stainless steel door of the main walk-in, and the little digital readout beside it, glowing green.
Thirty-six degrees. Right where it ought to be.
I knew that walk-in. I'd specced the condensing unit myself in the spring of 2009, and I'd stood on the roof of this building in a sleet storm and helped the crane operator set it on the curb. I knew the serial number of the compressor, or I used to. I knew it the way you know the birthdays of people you love.
I didn't say any of that. Margot had asked me not to get into compressors.
IV
It was during dessert that the kitchen doors swung open and the room changed.
I've been in enough restaurants to know the feeling. It's a kind of pressure drop. The servers straighten. The bartender stops polishing. Conversations at nearby tables don't stop, exactly, but they get a little thinner, because people want to listen without looking like they're listening.
"Oh my God," Margot whispered, leaning toward Peter. "That's her. That's Pauline Ostrowski. She almost never comes out."
"Who?" said Graham.
"She owns it," Philippa said, in the tone of someone correcting a child who has forgotten the name of the president. "She's the one who was on the cover of Cleveland Magazine. The James Beard nominee." She touched her pearls. "I tried for three months to get a table for the Foundation dinner."
Pauline was moving through the room the way she always has, slow and sideways, a hand on a shoulder here, a word there. She's shorter than people expect from her pictures. She was wearing chef's whites with the sleeves pushed up past the elbow and a pair of reading glasses hanging from a cord around her neck, and her gray hair was pulled back under a black bandana, and she had flour on her forearms, because Pauline has had flour on her forearms every single time I've seen her for twenty-eight years.
She stopped at the table beside ours, a couple celebrating an anniversary, and told them something that made the woman laugh. Then she straightened, and turned, and her eyes moved across our table the way they move across a room, quickly, taking inventory.