He Proposed at the Restaurant Where I Waitressed in College, and Then His Mother Walked In

Part 4: The Booth**

Marco brought out a cake with a sparkler in it. He had somehow, in the fifteen minutes between the ring and the dessert, understood exactly what had happened at our table.

“On the house,” he said.

“Marco,” I said. “Thank you.”

“You worked here, didn’t you.”

I looked up at him.

“How did you know that?”

“Danny told me. He said a girl who used to work here made a reservation for tonight. He said, keep an eye on that booth.”

“Danny still works here?”

“Danny owns the place now. He bought it from Mr. Marconi in 2019.”

Danny. Danny with the bad mustache and the good heart and the way he pretended not to see when I sat down with a customer who was crying.

“Is he here?”

“He’s in the back. He said he didn’t want to bother you. He said, if she wants to see me, she’ll ask.”

“I want to see him.”

Marco nodded and disappeared.

Katherine was eating her cake in small careful bites and pretending she was not still crying. David had his arm along the back of the booth behind me. His hand was on my shoulder, and every few seconds he squeezed it, like he was checking that I was still there.

Danny came out of the kitchen in a chef’s coat. He had lost some hair. He had gained some weight. He walked up to our table and he put his hands on his hips and he looked down at me and he said, “Emma. You got old.”

“You got old first.”

He laughed. He laughed the way I remembered, big and from the belly, and he leaned down and he hugged me across the table, and he smelled like the kitchen, garlic and oil and something baking.

“Congratulations,” he said. “I saw the ring from the pass.”

“You were watching.”

“I was watching. I’m not sorry.”

He straightened up. He looked at David and stuck out his hand.

“Danny.”

“David.”

“You take care of her. She was the best waitress I ever had. She left me for architecture school and I have never really forgiven her.”

“I will.”

Danny looked at Katherine.

“Ma’am. Have we met?”

Katherine looked up at him. Her eyes were red.

“I don’t think so.”

“You look familiar.”

“I’ve eaten here before.”

“Recently?”

“Twelve years ago.”

Danny narrowed his eyes at her. He tilted his head. And then something shifted in his face, some small thing, but he was too much of a professional to say whatever he was thinking.

“Well,” he said. “Welcome back.”

“Thank you.”

He looked at me one more time.

“Emma. Booth’s yours anytime. On the house. For the rest of your life.”

“Danny.”

“I mean it. You call ahead. You get this booth. I don’t care what night it is.”

He went back to the kitchen.

Katherine set down her fork.

“He remembered me,” she said quietly.

“Maybe.”

“He remembered me, Emma.”

“Maybe he did.”

She looked at the candle. She looked at the wallpaper. She looked at David.

“I want to sit here again,” she said. “With both of you. Next year. On my birthday. If you’ll come.”

David was quiet for a moment.

“I’ll think about it, Mom.”

He did not say yes. He did not say no. And Katherine, to her enormous credit, nodded once and did not push.

“Okay,” she said.

We paid the check. Katherine tried to pay it and David would not let her. Marco brought our coats. Katherine hugged me at the door, which I had not expected, and she held on for a second longer than she meant to, and then she stepped back and she smoothed her scarf and she said, “I’m at the Hilton on Broad. Call me tomorrow. Or don’t. Whichever.”

“I’ll call you,” I said.

She walked to her car alone. She did not look back. I watched her go through the front window.

David and I stood on the sidewalk outside Marconi’s. It was cold. Actually cold, the first real cold of the year, and my breath was making little clouds.

“Are you okay,” he said.

“I’m getting there.”

“I’m sorry she came.”

“Don’t be.”

“I am, though.”

I turned to face him. I put both my hands on his jacket, at the lapels.

“David. Listen to me. I’m not sorry she came.”

“Emma.”

“I would rather have met her tonight than at some brunch in six months where she’d be trying to figure out what I was and I’d be trying to figure out what she was.”

“That’s very generous.”

“It’s not generous. It’s practical.”

He almost smiled.

“You’ve always been practical.”

“Somebody has to be.”

He kissed me. On the sidewalk. Right where I used to stand on my break and eat a granola bar out of the pocket of my apron.

We drove home in his car. He put his hand on my knee at every red light. I looked at the ring in the glow from the dashboard, and it was small and it was elegant and it was exactly what I would have picked, and I thought about the twenty-year-old girl I had been in the black apron, and I thought about all the things I had not known about my own life then.

I did not tell David, that night, what I remembered on the drive home.

I remembered a woman crying over soup.

Not clearly. Not enough to swear to. But there was a shape in my head, a woman in a nice coat, sitting alone in the corner booth, and Danny watching from the bar, and me sitting down across from her because she looked like she was about to shatter. I could not see her face. I could not tell you the color of her hair. But there was a woman.

I did not tell David because I was not sure, and because I did not want to give Katherine something she wanted so badly that I had to invent it. If it was real, it was real without my confirming it. If it wasn’t, then it was still real for her, and that was hers to keep.

Six months later, at our engagement party at David’s house, Katherine cornered me in the kitchen.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” she said.

“Okay.”

“The night at Marconi’s. When I told you about the soup. I’ve thought about it a lot. And I want to say, I don’t need it to have been you. I want you to know that. It doesn’t matter to me anymore whether it was.”

“Katherine.”

“I just wanted you to know.”

I looked at her. She was holding a glass of white wine that she had not sipped. Her lipstick was very careful. She was, I had come to understand over six months of stilted lunches and one long weekend in Cleveland, a woman who was trying very hard, in her sixties, to become somebody she had not been for most of her life.

“It was me,” I said.

She did not move.

“I remembered on the drive home that night. I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to give it to you if I wasn’t sure. But I’ve thought about it. I’m sure. I remembered your coat.”

She set the wine down on the counter. Very carefully. Like it was expensive, which it was.

“Emma.”

“You had a cream coat. I remember the coat. And I remember Danny watching. And I remember telling you to call him.”

She put her hand over her mouth.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you at the restaurant.”

“No.”

“I wasn’t sure yet. And I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to.”

“No, Emma. No. You were right not to.”

She was crying again. She cried the same way she had in the booth, silently, with her whole face going still.

“I would not have believed you at the restaurant,” she said. “If you’d said it then. I would have thought you were being kind.”

“I know.”

“But now.”

“I know.”

She stepped forward and she hugged me, in David’s kitchen, next to a plate of half-eaten crackers, and she did not say anything else, because there was nothing else to say.

We got married in April. Not at Marconi’s. At a farm outside Delaware, Ohio, where my sister lives, and it rained, and my mascara ran, and David laughed at me from the altar, and my new mother-in-law sat in the front row in a cream-colored coat.

Danny came to the wedding. He gave us a card with a gift certificate to Marconi’s for our anniversary, every year, for the rest of our lives.

We used it last month, for our first anniversary.

We sat in the corner booth. Katherine flew down for the weekend. She sat where she had sat the first time, at the head of the table, and she ordered the same wine, and this time she drank it.

Marco was still there. He brought us bread without being asked.

“The usual booth?” he said to me.

“The usual booth.”

He winked and went away.

Katherine reached across the tablecloth and took my hand. She did not say anything. She just held it, for a moment, and then she let it go.

David squeezed my shoulder.

The candle between us was steady.