Chapter 7: Second Table

"You're carrying it wrong," Bianca said. "Thumb on the rim and you'll drop the veal."

"I carried plates for six years."

"At a diner. This is Hanover Street."

She took my hand and moved my thumb two inches.

The family restaurant filled up by noon.

It had white tablecloths and red wine in short glasses, and every table had a photograph of a Vannozzi ancestor above it, watching the veal go by.

Bianca ran the floor from a stool by the register with a pencil behind each ear.

She had put me in an apron on Wednesday morning without asking.

"If you're going to be a Vannozzi," she said, "you'll learn the room before the room learns you."

I liked her more every hour.

She called the waiters by their mothers' names and the cooks by their worst jokes.

She told me which captain had a bad knee, and whose wife kept a gambling debt, and which table was never to be given the window.

"And that one," she said, nodding at the long table by the kitchen door. "That's the second table."

Six women sat there in good coats, over espresso.

"The wives," Bianca said. "They sit with their backs to the wall and watch everyone come in. Sandro calls it intelligence."

"What do you call it?"

"Brunch with knives."

I carried a tray of coffee over to the second table.

The talking stopped.

A woman in a camel coat looked me up and down over the rim of her cup.

She was perhaps fifty, with gold at her ears and the manner of someone who had been the room's judge for twenty years.

"The new bride," she said. "Lupo's old girl."

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