The Corner Booth (Part 3)

She found the man with the newspaper at the gas station on Tuesday morning, filling his truck.

“I'm not angry,” Camille said. “I want to ask you one thing. What do you miss?”

He looked embarrassed. “The food over there is fine,” he said. “That's the honest answer. It's fine. It's the same as everywhere.”

“That's not what I asked.”

He thought about it while the numbers turned over on the pump. “Sunday gumbo,” he said at last. “Your grandmother's. She hasn't made it in years.”

She heard it again from one of the nurses outside the hospital, and again from the woman who wanted extra bread, and again from a roofer in the hardware store parking lot, who said it with his mouth full, so she had to ask him twice. Six people. Then nine. By Friday it was the only answer she was getting.

Rosalind had cooked gumbo — the thick dark soup with rice that took her the whole of Sunday morning — every week for thirty years, in a pot so big that Camille used to think it belonged to a school. She had stopped six years ago, in the winter Camille's grandfather died, and nobody had ever asked her to start again, because nobody wants to be the person who asks.

“No,” Rosalind said.

“One Sunday.”

“No.”

“They don't want a menu, Grandma. They can get a menu across the street. That place has forty things on it and a photograph of every single one.” Camille put the envelope down on the counter, name side up. “They want the pot.”

Rosalind wiped the same clean piece of counter twice.

“How many people?” she said.

“Forty-one,” Camille said. “I already asked them.”