She sat there boasting to thirty-eight women about her son’s girlfriend while the girlfriend topped up their water.
At about half past four I took the bill in myself.
Twenty-three thousand two hundred and eighty-nine dollars.
And a folder, which I put down beside it.
In the folder: the bill. Then three years of comp slips, reprinted at menu price, with a total at the bottom. Then fourteen months of that supplier card, highlighted. Then one page on my own letterhead closing the Rook family account with immediate effect.
Constance opened it and read the top sheet and stopped smiling.
She turned to the second page and went a colour I have never seen on a person.
And then she looked up, because she had finally heard the silence behind her, and turned round, and saw the hostess.
Aurelie had put the water jug down. She was taking her apron off.
PART 5 — ALL STAYS IN THE FAMILY
Constance did not pay the twenty-three thousand. I did not expect her to and I did not chase it, and I have been told by three people that I am a fool about that.
What I wanted was for thirty-eight women to watch her not pay it.
They did. Most of them had left by five. Two came to the pass on the way out and put their cards down for their own share and did not look at me while they did it.
Tobias and I separated in the October.
The supplier card money came back through the divorce. The comps did not, and I never tried, because I signed every one of those slips and that was my choice.
Aurelie left that afternoon. She wrote to me in the November and I am not going to repeat the letter, except that she said she had been told I was about to leave him and that the restaurant was going to be his.
Constance has not been through my door since. I have heard from Declan that she tells people I threw her out.
I did not throw her out. I gave her a folder.
She’s good at working — that’s what you keep her for.
She said that in my own private dining room, holding a bottle of my wine against her chest, in front of thirty-eight women who laughed.
