Chapter 6 Luca
LUCA
It happened on a Wednesday.
We had stayed late at the facility, which was not unusual.
I stayed late most nights because equipment rooms don't organize themselves and because I genuinely liked being in the building when it was empty.
The sounds were different after hours. The hum of the ice plant.
The creak of the building settling. The distant echo of the Zamboni making its last pass.
A hockey arena at night is a cathedral with better lighting, and I was a man who found peace in cathedrals.
We walked out together. This had become part of the routine, the unspoken agreement that we would leave the building at the same time and walk to the parking garage in the same silence, and the silence had become its own kind of conversation.
Comfortable. Companionable. The silence of two people who had spent enough time together that the absence of words was no longer awkward but was instead a shared space they occupied without tension.
The parking garage was cold. Atlanta in late November was not Minnesota cold, but it was enough to make you zip your jacket and see your breath, and the concrete amplified the chill in a way that made the garage feel like a refrigerator.
I did not make the refrigerator joke that presented itself because I had heard about Cole Briggs's Russian language incident from Jonah, and the story had nearly killed me, and I was saving it for a moment when Wes might actually appreciate it.
We reached our cars. Mine was a Honda Civic that was old enough to vote. His was a black truck that was immaculately clean in a way that suggested he cleaned it the way he cleaned everything, thoroughly and in solitude.
This was normally the point where we said goodnight. A nod from Wes. A wave from me. The separation that bookended every day and sent us to our respective apartments to do our respective things alone.
Wes unlocked his truck. Then he stood there with his hand on the door and did not open it.
He stood there for long enough that I noticed, which was approximately three seconds, because I noticed everything about Wes Chen and the three-second delay between reaching for his door and opening it was a deviation from the pattern and deviations from Wes's pattern meant something.
"Moretti," he said.
"Chen."
"I made bread."
I blinked. "Right now?"
"Last night. Sourdough. It's..." He paused. The hand on the door flexed. His jaw did the thing it did when he was working through something internally, the slight tightening that meant his brain was running calculations his mouth hadn't cleared for release. "I have too much."
"You have too much bread."
"The recipe makes two loaves. I only need one."
"So you're offering me bread."
"I'm informing you that excess bread exists. What you do with that information is your business."
I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted copper.
Because what was happening, underneath the flat delivery and the studied casualness, was that Wes Chen was inviting me to his apartment.
He was doing it in the most Wes Chen way possible, which was to frame the invitation as a logistical notification about surplus baked goods, but the invitation was there.
Underneath the bread. Underneath the words.
A man who let no one into his space was cracking the door open and pretending it was about sourdough.
"I could take that bread off your hands," I said. "As a favor to you. Surplus bread is a serious issue."
"It is. Storage concerns."
"Exactly. I'd be doing you a service."
"A public service."
"Practically civic duty."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. The scaffolding of one. The architectural plans submitted for review but not yet approved.
"Follow me," he said, and got in his truck.
I followed him. Through the streets of Atlanta, which were doing their evening thing, all headlights and restaurant signs and the particular amber glow that the city takes on after dark.
He drove precisely. Speed limit. Full stops.
Turn signals deployed with military timing.
I drove behind him in my geriatric Civic and thought about the fact that I was going to Wes Chen's apartment and that my heart rate was elevated and that Sofia was going to have so many opinions about this.
His building was in a neighborhood called Reynoldstown, east of the city center.
A converted warehouse turned into lofts, the kind of development that Atlanta was producing at an alarming rate as the city grew.
His unit was on the third floor. Parking garage.
Elevator. No lobby, no doorman. A building designed for people who wanted to come and go without being witnessed.
He unlocked the door and I followed him inside and stopped.
The apartment was exactly what I expected in one sense and completely surprising in another.
The living area was spare to the point of austerity.
A leather couch, a television, a bookshelf with six books on it.
No art on the walls. No photographs. No decorative objects.
The space of a man who viewed his living room as a waypoint between the rink and the bedroom and had not invested emotional energy in either.
But the kitchen.
The kitchen was a revelation.
Professional-grade oven, the kind you'd find in a restaurant.
Marble countertop, pale and smooth and flawless.
A stand mixer that I recognized immediately as a KitchenAid Pro 600, which cost eight hundred dollars and was the mixer equivalent of a top-of-the-line hockey stick.
A rack of cooling racks on the counter. Jars of flour, sugar, salt, each one labeled in small, precise handwriting.
A proofing bowl with a cloth over it. And on a wooden cutting board in the center of the island, two perfect loaves of sourdough bread with golden-brown crusts and the particular sheen that indicated proper hydration and a steam-injected bake.
I stared.
"You weren't kidding," I said.
"I don't kid about bread."
"This is a professional kitchen."
"It's a kitchen."
"Wes. This is a professional kitchen. This oven costs more than my car."
"Most things cost more than your car."
"That's fair but also rude."
He moved to the counter with the ease of a man entering the one room where he felt completely at home.
His body language changed. The rigidity in his shoulders softened.
His hands, which were always either clenched or trembling or carefully controlled, relaxed at his sides.
In this kitchen, with the marble under his palms and the bread cooling on the board, Wes Chen was a different person.
A calmer person. A person who existed at a lower frequency than the one the rest of the world encountered.
He cut the bread. The knife moved through the crust with a sound that was deeply, almost obscenely satisfying, and the interior was revealed in cross-section: open crumb, irregular holes, the telltale signs of a long fermentation and a practiced hand.
He placed a slice on a small plate and reached into the refrigerator and produced a jar of homemade butter.
"You make your own butter," I said. This was not a question.
"It's not difficult."
"You make your own bread and your own butter. In a professional kitchen. In secret."
"It's not a secret. It's private."
"What's the difference?"
"A secret is something you hide because you're ashamed of it. Privacy is something you keep because it's yours and you're not obligated to share it."
He said this with his back to me, spreading butter on the bread with a knife that he handled with more care than I'd ever seen him handle a hockey stick.
The answer was articulate and precise and revealed a level of self-awareness that contradicted everything I thought I knew about Wes Chen.
This was not a man who lacked emotional intelligence.
This was a man who had it in abundance and had chosen to deploy it selectively, and the kitchen was where the deployment happened.
He set the plate in front of me. One slice of sourdough with homemade butter, the butter already melting into the warm bread, glistening.
I took a bite.
I am Italian. I grew up in a house where food was religion and the kitchen was the church and my grandmother was the pope.
I have strong opinions about bread. I have eaten bread in Rome and Florence and a tiny bakery in Puglia where the baker was ninety-three years old and had been making the same loaf for seventy years. I know bread.
This was exceptional bread.
The crust shattered and gave way to an interior that was soft and tangy and complex, the sourness balanced by a sweetness that came from the long fermentation, and the butter was rich and slightly salted and melted on my tongue, and the combination was so good that I closed my eyes and made a sound that I am not going to describe because it was involuntary and embarrassing and if Sofia ever found out about it she would bring it up at every family gathering for the rest of my life.
When I opened my eyes, Wes was watching me.
His expression was unguarded in a way I had never seen.
Not the controlled blankness. Not even the tentative softening that appeared when he almost smiled.
Something else. Something that looked like hope.
The specific, fragile hope of a man who had made something with his hands and was watching someone experience it and was waiting to find out if the thing he made was good enough to bridge the distance between himself and another person.
"This is incredible," I said.
"It's bread."
"This is not bread. This is a religious experience. This is the bread that God intended when He invented wheat. If you served this in a restaurant, people would weep."
"You're being dramatic."
"I'm being Italian. It's the same thing."