two tables downstairs are waiting for their checks.
‘Let her get back to work, Jasper.’
Jasper. He looks just like a Jasper should. Little mushed face with thick lips and long lashes and his father’s green eyes.
‘Blue or red?’
‘Blue.’
‘Ms. Murphy or Mr. Perez?’
‘Ms. Murphy.’
They laugh, Jasper the hardest.
‘Tennis or golf?’
‘Tennis. But I don’t play either.’
‘Then how do you know you like it better?’
‘Because I hate golf.’
This seems to upset him. ‘Even miniature golf?’
‘Mini golf is okay.’
‘Our dad is really, really good. No one can beat him.’
‘I could.’ I don’t know why I say that. Apart from it being true.
Both boys protest. They make so much noise the tables around them turn. ‘You could not!’
They look at their father to defend himself. He shrugs. He isn’t grinning exactly, but he’s pushed his plate away, and his fingers are laced in front of him. I smile, thinking about telling Muriel. I clear their table and leave.
I return with dessert menus. ‘I know there was a no-chocolate rule earlier, so dessert might not fly.’
The boys watch their father.
‘Dessert will fly.’
They cheer. I pass out the menus. Behind Oscar’s chair, I mime sticking a candle into something and blowing it out. His brother nods discreetly, but Jasper squeals. Oscar turns around and I look away. When he turns back I wink at the boys.
Jasper orders the basil-lavender crème brûlée, his brother chooses the Tahitian coppa, and Oscar goes with the cookie medallions. Cookies are not conducive to candles so I go to the pastry chef, Helene, in her far alcove of the kitchen. It’s a different land back here. She plays classical music. Her team wears white caps, not bandanas, and their white aprons are clean save small artistic smears of chocolate and raspberry.
Mary Hand’s back there loading herself with desserts. ‘Johnny-on-the-spot,’ she says and vanishes.
Helene bends over a row of pear compotes, placing a blackberry in the center of each one.
I point to the small machine that’s printing out my order. ‘Could I somehow get a candle or two on that cookie plate?’
She nods. I wait.
Igor tears the ticket off slowly and places it beside the others. He always looks like a drawing to me, with his tiny upturned nose and long fingers. He moves like a dancer. He must be twenty years younger than Helene, but they’ve been together since the restaurant opened in the early eighties.
Their small walk-in has a glass door and inside it looks like a jewelry shop with its meringues and feuilletines, caramel tuiles and white chocolate butterflies. Igor pulls out a crème brûlée, places it on a doilied plate, and torches the top with a blue flame until the sugar glows and liquefies. Next he pulls a plate off the shelf and with a big pastry bag squeezes out a thick spiraled cone of mocha cream in the center. He slides this plate to Helene at the same time that she slides John’s coppa to him. She arranges three cookies around the mocha cream and sticks a tall sparkler in the cream while he drops glazed raspberries on both the sundae and the crème brûlée. She leans to her right so he can light the tip of the sparkler with the torch, and they both wipe down the steel counter as soon as I lift the plates. I leave their Chopin nocturnes, pass through Zeppelin—‘I’m gonna give you my love,’ Clark is screaming at the steaks on the grill—and emerge into Craig’s Sinatra mix in the dining room.
I approach Oscar from behind, so the boys can watch. John keeps his smile trimmed, but when Jasper sees the sparks flying in all directions he starts giggling and pounding his feet.
‘Oh no,’ Oscar says, turning. ‘No singing. Please no singing,’ he says, but his boys and I start and the people beside them and then the two Kroks at table 4 who were eating with their parents and Tony and Craig and Gory and pretty much everyone else joins in. Oscar glowers at me, and I can’t tell if his kids are singing or laughing too hard. Afterward everyone claps and Oscar tries to blow out the sparkler but has to wait till it blazes down the stick.
‘That was a dirty trick,’ he says.
‘Are you mad, Papa?’
‘I’m not mad at either of you.’
‘Don’t be mad, Papa, not at anyone.’
Oscar reaches over and touches John’s sleeve. ‘Oh sweetie, I’m not mad. I was kidding. This is the best birthday ever.’
Jasper is whacking at the shellac of burnt sugar with a spoon.
‘I love