The Corner Booth (Part 2)
By the middle of June the day had a shape to it: busy for one hour at breakfast, empty from ten until two, three or four tables at night. Rosalind cut the order from the food supplier. A week later she cut it further. She stopped buying the good sausage.
Camille was looking for napkins in the office when she found the folder.
It was sitting on the desk, not hidden, which somehow made it worse. Inside there were printed pages from a real estate company, a photograph of the building taken from the sidewalk, and a number circled in pen. A card was stapled to the front with a woman's name on it, and under the name, in her grandmother's handwriting: called back, Thursday, 2pm.
Camille stood there with the napkins under her arm and read it twice.
“You went in the office,” Rosalind said from the doorway.
“For napkins.”
“Mm.”
“Grandma.” Camille held up the folder. “What is this?”
Rosalind sat down on the arm of the chair, which she never did. She always stood. “That's information,” she said. “It isn't a decision.”
“It's got a price on it.”
“Everything's got a price on it.”
“You didn't tell me.”
“You're nineteen. You've got school in September.” Rosalind took the folder out of her hands, not unkindly, and set it back on the desk. “You want the real thing? It isn't the balloons across the road. The rent's two months behind. That's the factor. It was two months behind in March as well, and there was no restaurant over there in March.”
Camille didn't say anything.
“Go home,” her grandmother said. “I'll close up.”
Camille went home. She didn't sleep. At two in the morning she got out of bed, found a pen, and started a list of names on the back of an envelope — the man with the newspaper, the nurses, the two roofers, the woman who always asked for extra bread. Everybody who had stopped coming.