They passed over me. Then they came back.
I watched her face go still. Then I watched it break open, like an egg into a hot pan.
"No," she said. "No. Wesley Szabo. You son of a gun."
She came around the table so fast that the waiter had to step back with a tray of coffee. I barely had time to get my napkin off my lap and stand up before she had both arms around me, and she was squeezing hard, the way she does, like she's checking whether you're structurally sound, and she was laughing and saying into my shoulder, "Five years. Five years, you don't call, you don't come in, I have to hear from Rudy that you're still alive."
"I've been busy," I said.
"Busy." She pulled back and held me by both arms and looked at me. There was a handprint of flour on my lapel now, white on the brown corduroy. "Busy, he says. Look at you. You look exactly the same. You're even wearing the same jacket."
"Different jacket."
"Same kind of jacket." She turned her head and hollered toward the kitchen in the voice that used to cut through a dinner rush on Fulton Road. "Rudy! Rudy, get out here! Wes is here!"
And out of the kitchen came Rudy Paz, who is now the chef de cuisine of a restaurant that's been written up in the New York Times, and who was, when I first met him, a skinny fifteen-year-old washing dishes for Pauline under the table with headphones around his neck. He wiped his hands on his apron and came over and shook my hand and then pulled me into a hug and thumped my back twice, hard.
"Mr. Wes," he said. "Man. You see the walk-in? Still holding thirty-six."
"I saw."
"Twenty-eight years," said Pauline, "and he still checks my temps before he says hello."
By now the whole room was watching. I could feel it on the back of my neck. I turned around, and I saw the Lindqvists, and I saw Margot.
Philippa had her coffee cup halfway to her mouth and had apparently forgotten it was there. Graham had taken his reading glasses off his head and was holding them in his hand as if he might need them to understand what was happening. Peter was grinning, a big, uncomplicated, delighted grin.
And Margot was white. Not pale. White, the color of the tablecloth, with two spots of red high on her cheeks. She was looking at me as if I'd taken off a mask, and she wasn't sure whether she liked the face underneath.