“My name’s Minas. Minas Nolan. And this is Miss Beerman.”
“You two are in love,” the sad-eyed giant informed them.
“Oh, no,” they both said at the same time.
“You might not know it yet,” Fontanot announced, “but 6
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you are in love. There’s no helpin’ that. All I need to know is if you’re hungry or not.”
“Starving,” Minas Nolan said with a deep feeling in his tone that struck Branwyn.
“Then come on back to my special table and I will serve you some barbecue.”
To be seated at the special table was the desire of every powerful customer at the Rib Joint. That table was there for Ira’s mother and for his new girlfriend.
Minda, Ira’s sainted mom, said that her son’s girlfriends were always new.
“The lady he’s seein’ might be with him for one birthday, but she’ll never see two,” Minda would say through her coarse smoker’s rasp.
Other than that, the special table, set in the corner of Ira’s kitchen, usually went empty. When a famous director like Heurick Roberts would ask Ivy, the hostess, to give him that table, she’d grin, showing her gold tooth, and say, “If I was to sit you in there with Fontanot he’d skin ya and clean ya and slather yo’ ribs wit’ sauce.”
But Minas and Branwyn didn’t know anything about the kitchen table and its special status. As a matter of fact, Branwyn thought that it was probably the worst seat in the house, being in the noisy kitchen and all, but she was willing to sit there because of that note of deep need in Minas’s voice when he declared his hunger.
Minas asked for ribs, but Fontanot told him that if he was hungry he wanted the restaurant’s special smoked sausages.
“Sausages stick to your ribs, boy,” the big chef declared.
“An’ what will you have, Miss Beerman?”
“I don’t eat much meat,” she admitted with a slight bow of her head.
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Minas thought that she was such a kind woman that she was afraid that her appetite would somehow bruise Fontanot’s feelings.
“I got catfish come up ev’ry day from Lake Charles, Louisiana,” Fontanot said. “They’s a farm down there where they introduce wild fish every six weeks. You know, the big catfish farms got they fish so inbred that you might as well call’em sole.”
This made Branwyn laugh.
Minas looked at the young, beautiful woman and wondered where she could have possibly come from. He was about to ask her, when Fontanot put a big oval plate of steaming sausages in front of him. One bite and Minas couldn’t stop eating. The sauce was extremely spicy-hot, and so the doctor ate plenty of bread and downed glass after glass of ice water through the meal. But he didn’t turn away the second plate when Fontanot placed it in front of him. Something about Branwyn’s company and the kitchen and loud, loud Ira Fontanot made the doctor ravenous.
Branwyn picked at her catfish, which was very good, and watched the heart surgeon eat. She imagined that he probably hadn’t had a good meal since the day his wife died.
“I’m not usually such a pig, Miss Beerman,” Minas said when he noticed her smiling at him.
“Appetite ain’t nuthin’ to be shamed of, Doctor,” she said.
“I wish that I could see my son eat like you.”
“You should see my boy, Miss Beerman,” Minas replied.
“He sucks down formula by the quart. When he cries it’s almost as loud as Mr. Fontanot here.”
“Maybe he’ll be a singer,” Ira Fontanot said. “That’s what I 8
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always wanted to be. But my voice was too strong, and they made me lip-synch in the church choir.”
“That’s awful,” Branwyn said. “A boy or a girl should always be let to sing. When you gonna sing but when you’re a child?”
“And who has more reason?” Minas added.
The three were silent a moment, appreciating how much in line their thinking was.
“More sausages, Minas?” Fontanot asked.
“I wouldn’t be able to get in behind the wheel if I had them, Ira.”
“How’s your fish?” the big cook asked Branwyn.
“The best I’ve ever eaten,” she said. “But don’t tell my mama I said that.”
Bac k i n th e car, Minas related a long and convoluted joke about a poor woman who fooled a banker into being the shill for a hoax she was pulling on a fancy-pants lawyer.
The story took so long to tell that he had driven to her apartment building and parked in front of the door again before it was through.
