the makeup samples. The salon is busy with hair-stylists and manicurists, and a bevy of women wait for Lisa to wax them. Meanwhile, I blink back tears as Lisa whisks the wax from my face.
“Look.” Lisa offers me a hand mirror. In the harsh but natural light pouring in through The Make-Up Bar’s windows, I see only the wrinkles around my eyes. Then I raise the mirror and see two well-arched brows. My eyes look bigger and my nose looks smaller. What a difference a wax makes.
“It’s all about balance,” Lisa says.
Bette’s Counter
“I heard it, but I didn’t believe it,” says Bette when I walk into Café Louis that afternoon.
“For better or for worse.” I approach the counter. “I’m here.”
“For the better, hon. Come here and give me a hug.”
Bette is one of Café Louis’s original waitresses. Now Bette is near sixty. She’s still rail thin. What dates Bette is her Reagan-era makeup. Bette’s eyelids are weighted with blue shadow and her lashes struggle against black mascara. She wears pink, frosted lipstick. “Bette,” I say. “I’ve missed you terribly.”
I have. When I was a child, Bette was the most glamorous woman in my world. She’d breeze into the restaurant on a cloud of Jean Naté and cigarette smoke, her lipstick smeared from kissing goodbye her latest boyfriend, whose Firebird or TransAm squealed and roared as it left the parking lot.
“I work the counter now,” she tells me with pride. “Since your dad got sick, I’ve been keeping my eye on things.” Bette smiles. “But now you’re here. Things are going to get better. I just know it.”
Bette’s counter is filled with regulars by five o’clock. I watch Bette with admiration as she kibitzes with her mostly male audience. “It’s Friday, Hugh. You think I don’t know that you want the meatloaf?”
That night, after the other servers have left, Bette and I sit at the counter drinking coffee, sharing a piece of chocolate cake and talking. I tell her my plans for Café Louis. “That all sounds great,” Bette says. “Now tell me about the jerk boyfriend.”
I give her the Nick synopsis. She says, “Men never know what they want, do they?”
Menu Madness
Madeline is late to the meeting I have called to discuss the changes I want to make to Café Louis. I can’t be mad at Madeline because she is coming straight from Tiers, and because she has volunteered to come for moral support.
Grammy Jeff slowly walks to the tables I have pushed together for our meeting. She is tired. I can see it in her eyes, and her shoulders. “How y’all doin’?” Grammy says when she sits in the chair next to her grandson.
“How are you feeling, Grammy?” Bette asks. I realize that Bette and Grammy are within five years of each other. As is my mom.
“I’m doing just fine,” Grammy answers. She reaches for the white container that holds packets of sweetener. Grammy pulls five white packets of sugar.
Nelson grabs the sugar out of Grammy’s hand. He replaces the white packets with pink packets. Grammy frowns at her grandson. “Nellie, I want some sugar in my tea.”
“You had sugar in your tea an hour ago,” Nelson says. “I saw you.”
“Nellie…”
Nelson interrupts her. “Don’t make me come at you with the insulin.”
“Here I am,” Madeline says as she bounds through the door.
Introducing Madeline, I go around the table and realize that the staff has divided themselves into two teams. Representing the kitchen are Grammy Jeff and Nelson. The front of the house representatives are Christopher and Bette.
“Pleased to meet you all,” Madeline says cheerfully. She puts two bakery boxes on the table.
“What’s that?” Nelson asks, peering inside the first box.
“Cream puffs,” Madeline answers. “We were making a croquembouche. It’s a traditional French wedding cake made out of cream puffs. You stack them to make a four-foot tower, then caramelize sugar over the whole thing to enclose it. The bride and groom take a champagne bottle and swing at the tower, cracking the sugar. It’s pretty cool. Anyway, I brought these because we made too many cream puffs.”
“No such thing as too many cream puffs,” Christopher says.
Madeline smiles at him, then opens the second box. “These are chocolate samples from different suppliers. Tell me what you think.”
“What happened to Franco at Le Chocolat?” I ask.
“He cheated on me,” Madeline says. “He said that he was importing his unsweetened chocolate just for me. Yesterday I found out that he’s been selling to Aux Petit Delices behind my back. I had to