26. Andrei
ANDREI
The man across my desk had brought me three excuses and no money, and I was deciding, in the unhurried way I do my best deciding, exactly how his afternoon would end when my phone buzzed face up between us and her name took over the screen.
I answered on the first ring. He watched me do it, and whatever crossed my face frightened him more than the previous twenty minutes had.
“My love.”
“Okay, listen. No questions, and be very fast.” Zoe’s voice was a small, urgent storm. “Egg tarts. The bakery with the blue awning, near the flower stalls. They come out of the oven at three. It is ten to three. Andrei. Do you understand what I am telling you? They will be warm.”
“And to drink?”
“The peach tea. The cloudy one with the real fruit in it, not the clear imposter from the cooler. Cold enough to hurt.”
“Anything else?”
“Your presence. Eventually. Tarts first, presence second. I love you. Hurry.”
She hung up on me. The man across the desk had begun, unwisely, to relax.
“We are finished for today,” I said, taking my coat off the hook. “You have until the end of the week. Go home and thank whatever you pray to that someone in this city craves egg tarts.”
He did not understand. He did not need to.
The bakery’s line ran out the door and I stood at the end of it, one man among grandmothers, all of us summoned by the same oven.
At three exactly the trays came out, and the line moved with a discipline my own men could study.
I bought six tarts, the tea with the real fruit, and a second tea, because experience has made me humble.
The woman at the register glanced at my watch, then my face, and asked nothing. Smart people rarely do.
The flower stalls sat between me and the car, and a bucket of white peonies made an argument I did not contest. The old woman wrapped them in brown paper and looked me over with a merchant’s eye. “Apology?” she asked.
“Habit.”
She approved. I could tell by how much less she charged me than she could have.
Her studio sits above the river and drinks the whole afternoon through its glass, and I crossed the bridge in light traffic with the box riding the passenger seat like a dignitary under escort. Twenty minutes from the oven to her door. I took the stairs two at a time anyway.
Priya met me at the top of them. She did not say hello. She raised both hands the way you slow oncoming traffic.
“Beware,” she said. “She is not in the mood. She has been not in the mood since lunch, which she refused, which is why she is not in the mood. It is a circle, sir. We are all living inside it.”
“Casualties?”
“One intern. He is in the back alphabetizing the thread drawer, which no one asked him to do. We may not see him again.”
The studio told the same story. Pinned muslin everywhere, the steamer hissing to itself in its corner, three racks of the new collection standing at attention, and at the center of it all Zoe, bent over the cutting table with a pencil in her fist and the expression of a queen reviewing a disappointing army.
Her head came up when the door opened. Her eyes went straight to the box.
“Why are you so slow? I am hungry already. The oven was at three. It is three twenty.”
“There was a line. Grandmothers. I could not fight them.”
“You fight governments.”
“Governments surrender. A grandmother defending her place in line does not.”
She tried to hold the scowl and lost it the moment I opened the lid. The tarts had survived the bridge in formation, still warm, the custard barely set, and she lifted the first one with both hands, the way relics are handled, and bit into it, and her eyes fell shut.
I have closed deals worth more than this street and everything on it, and not one of them satisfied me like watching the day’s anger leave her body one bite at a time.
By the second tart her foot had started swinging under the table.
By the third she had pushed a stool out for me with that same foot, which in her language is a formal apology.
“Well?” I asked, sitting.
“The grandmothers are forgiven. You are forgiven. The intern is forgiven, whatever he did.” She licked custard from her thumb and pointed at the second tea. “Is that one also mine?”
“Everything I have is yours. That includes the tea.”
“Correct answer.”
“And these,” I said, laying the peonies on the table, well away from the silk.
She looked at them longer than she had looked at the tarts. “You are dangerous,” she said quietly, and went to put them in the water jug she keeps for exactly this, the one she claims is for brushes. There is not a single brush in that studio. We both let the lie stand.
She held the last bite of the third tart up to my mouth, and I ate it from her fingers, because refusing her anything stopped occurring to me a long time ago. “Verdict?” she asked.
“Good.”
“Good? That bakery has an eighty-year history and a line of armed grandmothers, and the best you can produce is good?”
“Magnificent. Life changing. I will write to the city about a statue.”
“Thank you. That is called effort.”
Then the food finished its work, and the second Zoe arrived, the one that follows the storm as surely as quiet follows thunder.
She slid off her stool, walked me backward into the sagging armchair by the window, and folded herself on top of me, knees drawn up, face pressed into my neck, one hand closing around my shirt as though the building might try to reclaim me.
“Comfortable?” I asked.
“Quiet. You are a chair now. Chairs do not talk.”
Priya came in holding a swatch card and stopped as if she had walked into glass.
Her gaze traveled from the cutting table, where the tyrant of the early afternoon had lately reigned, to the window chair, where the same woman now lay curled against me with her eyes closed, humming faintly.
The look on Priya’s face was the look people give the sky when it snows in summer.
She stood there waiting for someone to explain the universe to her.
I laughed. Quietly, out of respect for the humming, but I laughed.
“Bear with her,” I said. “She will be like this for a long while yet. It goes easier once you stop trying to understand it.”
Zoe surfaced instantly. “What is the meaning of that?”
“It means I am telling your people to take good care of you, my goddess. Nothing else hides in it.”
“Hmm.” She examined my face for a hidden crime, found none she could prove, and settled back into my shoulder. “You are so sweet, oldie.”
“You say that as if I had any choice in the matter.”
“You did not,” she agreed peacefully. “I never gave you one.”
We worked like that into the late afternoon, a habit we built without ever once discussing it. She went back to the table and her sketches. I kept the chair and the phone, and ran what needed running with one ear and half my attention, the other half permanently assigned elsewhere.
“He is offering eighty,” said the voice on the line.
“He offered eighty last month and it was an insult then.” I watched Zoe frown at a sleeve, unpick a pin, and try again. “The number is one twenty. He has until noon tomorrow, after which it becomes one forty, and he can ask Viktor to explain the arithmetic.”
“And if he refuses?”
“Then I will be disappointed for an entire minute. Send the papers.” I ended the call.
Zoe spoke around the pins held in the corner of her mouth. “One forty. You should make it one fifty for interrupting my snack.”
“I will note it for next time.”
“See that you do. I am the brains of this operation.”
The calls kept coming, her pencil kept moving, my voice stayed flat and final, two trades practicing side by side in one sunlit room.
Between calls she held sketches over her shoulder without turning around, and I delivered verdicts, and she overruled every verdict I got wrong, which she informed me was most of them.
“The gold or the grey?” she asked once, holding both sketches over her head.
“The grey.”
“Wrong. It is the gold. You are fortunate you have other qualities.”
“Then why ask me at all?”
“Because you look so sure of yourself when you answer. I do not have the heart to take it from you.”
At some point the intern emerged from the back with the thread drawer restored to glory and froze at the sight of me, visibly recalculating every rumor he had ever been told. “The drawer looks excellent,” Zoe said, queen again for exactly one sentence, and the boy glowed and fled.
“He alphabetized the colors,” she whispered once he was gone. “He had to invent spellings to manage it. Nobody tells him. He is so proud.”
Then, halfway through pinning a hem, she stopped.
I know that stillness now. I knew it before she did, and I was already up and moving when she pushed back from the table with her hand pressed to her mouth.
Her stomach is a delicate, treacherous thing, and the child we made has only sharpened its opinions.
In the small washroom at the back I gathered her hair from her face and held it, my other hand steady on her spine, while her body took back the tarts it had been so happy about an hour before.
There is nothing useful to be done in those minutes except to be there.
So I was there. I am always there. It is the one appointment I have never missed.
When it passed I gave her water in small sips and pressed the cool cloth to her face, the one Priya has learned to leave folded by the sink.
She would not meet my eyes in the mirror.
Then she turned and came into my chest all at once, both arms cinching around my ribs, and I felt the crying begin before any sound of it arrived.
“Aren’t you getting tired of me?” she wept into my shirt. “Tell the truth. You ran across the city for tarts I could not even keep. I yell at everyone. I cry on you every other day. I am ruining all of your shirts. Any normal man would be so tired by now.”