The last table

Marguerite had run the restaurant for nineteen years and on the last night, after the last customer, she cooked for the staff. It wasn't a tradition. There'd never been a last night before. But she'd known for a while what she'd do, the way you know which coat you'll wear to a funeral, and so when the final couple had paid and hugged her at the door and gone off down the street, still looking back, she locked up, turned the sign, and went into the kitchen with her apron still on. "Sit," she said. "All of you. Front of house too. Sit." Nine of them. Léo, who'd been her head chef for twelve years and had already got a job somewhere with a Michelin star and was pretending that didn't matter. Fatima on pastry. The two young ones on the line, Hugo and Sam. Nadia, who ran the floor and could remember the wine preferences of people she'd served once in 2017. Three waiters. And Bernard, the kitchen porter, who'd been there longer than Marguerite and who had, in nineteen years, never once sat at a table in the dining room. He sat now. He looked uncomfortable. Nadia poured him a glass of the good stuff and he looked at it like it might be a trick. Marguerite cooked. Nothing from the menu. She made the things she'd made when she opened, when it was her and Bernard and a menu written on a blackboard: a soup, a roast chicken, potatoes done in the fat, a salad with too much garlic in the dressing, a tart that Fatima watched her make with the expression of a professional resisting the urge to intervene. "You're overworking the pastry," Fatima said finally. "I know." "I could..." "I know you could. Sit down." Léo came into the kitchen at one point and stood at his old station, which he'd handed over to nobody, because there was nobody to hand it to, and Marguerite let him stand there, and after a while he went back out. The soup went out. Then the chicken, on one big platter, in the middle of the table, and she carved it herself, badly, because she'd always been a better cook than a carver, and Hugo laughed, and she pointed the knife at him, and he stopped, and then she laughed too.

They ate. They talked about the customers. The regular who'd proposed at table six and been turned down and come back the next week alone and been given the same table and a free dessert and had come back every Thursday since. The critic who'd given them a bad review in year two and a good one in year nine and had never once, either time, finished his main course. The night the power went and they'd done the whole service by candlelight and got the best tips of the year. Bernard, three glasses in, told a story about the first month, about Marguerite dropping a full tray of glasses on the stairs and standing in the wreckage saying, in a voice of total calm, "well, that's the budget," and everyone at the table looked at her, and she said, "It was," and that was the funniest thing anyone had ever heard. Tart. The pastry was overworked. It was fine. Around one in the morning she went to the pass and got the thing she'd put there earlier, which was the blackboard, the original one, the one with the first menu on it in her handwriting, which she'd kept in the office for nineteen years behind a filing cabinet. She put it on the table. "Someone should have this." Nobody said anything. Then Bernard reached out, and took it, and put it face down on his lap, and held it there with both hands, and looked at his glass. "All right," Marguerite said. "All right. Somebody help me with the plates." They did the plates. They did them properly, because that was how it was done. When it was finished Léo turned the lights off in the kitchen and stood for a moment in the dark, and then came out, and she locked the door behind them, and nobody looked back down the street, which she was grateful for, because she couldn't have taken it.