Chapter 24: Sunday Table

On the eighth Sunday after the banquet I pushed four tables together in the closed diner and covered them with a cloth.

It was my table.

The owner had given me the key to the dining room on Sundays, and nobody else was allowed to cook.

I had been in the kitchen since ten.

Bianca stood at my elbow with an onion and a knife, and she cut it into pieces that were nearly the same size.

"Look," she said.

"That's good."

"It's not good. It's even."

"Even is a start."

At five the old capo arrived in his wheelchair, with his nurse and a tin of cookies she had baked and he had pretended he did.

The dock capo's wife came behind him with a pot of her own, and her husband carried the bread.

"His mother gave him that recipe," she said. "He ruined it. Taste yours against it."

I tasted the bread.

"Yours is better," I told the dock capo.

He looked so astonished that the old man laughed until the tank rattled.

Elio set the places.

He put out a fork on the left side of every plate, and then a knife, and then he stood back to check.

"May I film the table?" my mother asked from the door.

She had come at four, as she did every Sunday, and sat in the booth by the entrance until I called her.

She had a small camcorder in her hands that she had bought herself.

"Film it?" I said.

"Just the one angle. If you'd allow it."

"Whose idea was it?"

"Mine." She swallowed. "I've filmed Bianca at every party for twenty-five years. I never filmed you."

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