The three female banquet waiters were working. Bill had seen them and said hello as he’d encountered them. Beverly kept her distance again. It was almost as if they’d never shared that time in the faraway staircase. She said hello, did her business and went to hang out with her colleagues.
Nora was her name, the little French one. She said hello to Bill, in French, and then asked him, in French, if he spoke the language. Bill said “Un peu,” which meant “a little,” and then he told her he’d studied it in school but had forgotten most of it.
French was his mother’s choice. As it turned out, Spanish would have been more practical, but of course now that it was a fait accompli there was no use stewing over it. Meanwhile, as he spoke to her in her native language he saw a little smile, just a faint touch of a smile, pass over her red lips.
“Nora,” she said. She stopped what she was doing and put a hand out to shake Bill’s hand.
“Bill,” he said.
“Yes, I know,” she said.
Nora had a deep voice. Bill immediately thought that if she could sing she’d probably be a big asset in a choir. Why he thought this he couldn’t say. Maybe, and it didn’t really matter, it was that Robert, so far from a saint that he was, led his church’s choir and sang like an angel himself.
“Where you from?” he asked, this in English.
“Bretagne,” she said. “Ever been there?”
“Never been anywhere,” Bill said. Been in the workhouse, he thought.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Perhaps you’ll see it sometime.”
“How’d you get here?” Bill asked
“We make choices, don’t we?” Nora looked up at Bill so that her eyes met his. He saw she had deep, dark eyes. “Yes,” she said in a most droll and sultry way, “we make choices and things happen.”
Bill immediately decided he liked her. He thought, and just from this conversation, that she was someone he would like to talk to, someone he’d like to know. It was the writer in him, maybe. It was her sultriness maybe. It was that she was small, just his mother’s size, give or take, a tight little package.
“Maybe we can talk later,” he said.
“Why?” Nora asked.
Bill watched her walk away, watched her head on over to her friends. He wondered if she’d eaten, what she’d eaten. Then he wondered what had happened to her in her life that caused her to answer him the way she did. He could understand she was not “interested” in him. He hadn’t expected her to be and when he asked her about talking later he hadn’t meant it in any way other than talking in the sense of sharing experience. But her response reeked of some sort of bitterness and if not bitterness unhappiness, maybe even resentment or regret.
The last banquet was easy, simple: roast tenderloin for a touch more than three hundred. Substitution was rolled fillet of sole that was already ready and just needed to be baked off. Vegetables and potatoes were the same from the afternoon, mostly pommes Duchesse and green beans with almonds which made a very nice dish with the roast tenderloin. Of course they would be made fresh.
Because it was only three hundred and because most everything was prepared, they worked this one slowly. Kalista and Adonia already had the salad. All they had to do was mix it. This would be done right before the dish-up. The tenderloins went in on time. Jimmy Banquet Chef had already made the sauce and it was sitting on the stove simmering. Jimmy G, or more precisely his stewards, had set up all the vegetables and potatoes for going into the oven to get hot.
All was right with God.
