The person behind me was my father. He had followed me from the house, because he had known this day would come, and he sat down in his same chair and asked me to sit across from him the way the women did. Then he told me the truth the waitress could not.
The woman with the scratched-out face was my mother’s twin sister, Coralie, who died in a car accident the night of that opening in 1990, driving home from the very restaurant, and whom my mother never spoke of again for the rest of her life. My father had loved my mother for forty years. What he had never told anyone, including me, was that before he ever met my mother, he had been engaged to Coralie first.
