Chapter 2
Katerina
There is a thing your hands learn that your head never can. My hands knew the dough before my head was awake enough to.
Three in the morning, the kitchen black except for the under-counter light, and my hands were already in it, turning, folding, feeling for the give.
I felt like a zombie—still asleep, still dreaming—but it didn’t matter.
My hands knew. They’d done this ten thousand times. They could do it without me.
That’s the trade. You give it your hands and it gives you back a kind of quiet.
I had the ovens up. Heat coming off the brick in waves, pushing the cold of the street back toward the door where it belonged.
The radio was on low, a Greek station that played at this hour.
Some old rebetiko thing, a bouzouki and a man with gravel in his throat singing about a woman who left.
They were always singing about a woman who left. I let it run under everything.
Flour hung in the air. You could see it in the light, a fine gold haze drifting where the heat moved it.
I had it on my forearms past the elbow, in the creases of my knuckles, dusted into the old burn scars that the oven gave me my first year, when I was still learning the difference between heat I could touch and heat that would teach me.
I licked sugar off my thumb without thinking. Tasted the cardamom. Right. Good.
I braided the tsoureki next, three ropes of dough I’d let rise overnight, and this part I could do blind.
Over, under, over, pull it taut, tuck the ends.
My grandmother did it this way. My father did it this way.
The braid came up glossy and even under my hands and I egg-washed it and laid the whole tray in the deck oven and shut the door on it, and for a second I just stood there with my palm flat on the warm steel, the way you’d put a hand on a sleeping animal to feel it breathe.
Above the register hung the icon. Saint Spyridon, dark with age, his little gold halo catching the under-light.
My father’s. He’d carried it from Kalamata in a shoebox wrapped in a sweater and he’d hung it over every register he ever stood behind in this country, in other men’s shops, working other men’s dough, for thirty years.
And taped beside the coffee machine, curling at the corners, was the photograph — him in this apron, the one I had on now, grinning at whoever held the camera, younger than I’d ever known him, with his whole life still in front of him and none of it gone wrong yet.
“Kalimera, Baba,” I said. Quiet. The way you’d say it to someone asleep in the next room.
The apron was his. I wore it every day. It was too big and I’d never taken it in. There were stains on it I hadn’t made and didn’t want to wash out. It still smelled like him, underneath the flour, if I let myself believe it did.
I had a thing I did, every morning, after the bread that paid the rent was in the ovens. I made his.
His mother’s recipe. A honey loaf with mastic in it—that resin you chewed, that tasted like pine and something extra, that you grated in fine so it perfumed the whole crumb.
He’d tried to teach me. Forty times he tried, standing at my shoulder in this kitchen the last year of his life when the cancer had already made his hands shake too bad to do it himself.
He’d talk me through it. The mastic goes in cold, Katya.
Patience. You feel for it. And I never once got it right while he was alive to taste it, and I’d promised myself—stupidly—that I’d get it before I forgot the sound of his voice saying.
I’d been at it a year. A year of mornings.
I measured the mastic. I worked it cold into the dough the way he showed me.
I shaped the loaf and scored the cross in the top with my thumbnail and slid it in and waited, and the kitchen filled with that smell, pine and honey and warm bread, and for the length of the bake I always let myself believe today.
I pulled it out twenty minutes later and I knew before I broke it.
The crumb was wrong. Too tight, too dry. When I tried it, the mastic was bitter where it should have been sweet, sitting on the loaf. His melted in.
I stood there with it warm in my hands and I let the disappointment go through me. One breath. Then I wrapped the failed loaf in a cloth to give away later, because you don’t throw out good bread, even bread that isn’t the bread, and I went back to the work that actually kept the lights on.
That was the thing nobody tells you about doing it alone.
There’s nobody to fail in front of, which sounds like mercy and isn’t.
There’s nobody to say it’s all right, do it again tomorrow.
There’s just you and the next tray. The till has to come up right by Friday or it doesn’t matter how good your tsoureki is.
I was tired in a way sleep didn’t touch.
A year now. A year of this hour with no name, of being the only living thing on a street going dark store by store, of doing every part of it—the baking and the books and the buying and the hauling and the smiling—with one pair of hands.
My father had wanted this his whole life.
His own shop, his name on it, finally, after thirty years working other men’s.
He never got it. He got sick first. So I got it for him, after, with the little he left and the lease nobody else wanted, and I painted FILOXENIA on the window in green because that was the word he used for it—welcome, hospitality, the stranger made guest—and I’d kept the doors open one more day and one more day and one more day, for him.
Through the front glass the sky was going from black to the color of old steel.
Morning, such as it was. I wiped my hands down the apron, his apron, and I filled the cases—the koulourakia in their rows, the tsoureki glossy and braided, the baklava already weeping syrup into the tray.
Cannoli, too, for the Italians. I put the kettle on.
I straightened the photograph that didn’t need straightening.
Then I went to the door, and I turned the sign, and I braced.
The first person through the door was always the old woman from the apartments over the dry cleaner—eighty if she was a day, in a coat that had seen three husbands, who came for one koulouraki and a coffee and to tell me about her hip and her son who never called and the woman downstairs who stole her newspaper.
I knew it all. I could have recited it. I poured the coffee before she got her gloves off.
“You look tired,” she told me, which is what she told me every day, the way other people say good morning.
“I’m radiant,” I said. “It’s just the lighting.”
She took her koulouraki and her seat by the window, the same seat, and held court over an empty room, and I let her.
After her it was the rush, such as it was these days.
The man who drove the early bus, who took two loaves and a bag of the sesame rings and never said more than three words and tipped like he was ashamed of having money.
The two nurses coming off nights, gray-faced, who I loaded down with whatever was warm because nobody should go home off a night shift to cold bread.
A boy in a coat too thin for the weather who came in counting change out of his palm, coins, actual coins, going red as he did the math and came up short, and I rang him for a koulouraki and slid two loaves and the bag of yesterday’s bread across the counter before he could open his mouth.
“That’s—” he started.
“That’s the day-old,” I said. “I have to move it or the mice unionize. You’re doing me a favor.” I gave him the wrapped failed loaf too, the mastic one, the one that wasn’t my father’s. “And take that. Tell me if it’s any good. I’m experimenting and I trust nobody’s palate but a hungry man’s.”
He didn’t have words for it. They never do, the ones who need it most. He just nodded and ducked out fast.
That’s the part I was good at. The outward part. Warmth, I had to spare, as long as it was pointed at somebody else.
Mid-morning the grocer came in. The one from down the block, the one I’d watched all winter go a little flatter in the shoulders.
We were the only two left awake on this street some mornings.
There’s a thing between people in a slow disaster together, a kind of unspoken roll-call—you still here?
still here. We did it with our eyes every day.
He bought bread he didn’t need. I knew his wife baked. He bought it to put money on my counter, and I took it, because I’d have done the same for him.
But today he set the bread down and didn’t go. He stood there turning his hat in his hands.
“Katerina,” he said. “My nephew. He’s good with the heavy work. The flour, the deliveries, the early load-in. He could come mornings. You wouldn’t pay him—I’d—”
“No,” I said. Warm. I made it warm. I made it the warmest no I had, because I loved this man and he was offering me his own short money out of a pocket that had less in it than mine. “No, but God love you. I’ve got it.”
“You’re doing the work of three people.”
“I’m a very efficient person.”
“You’re going to fall down one of these days and nobody’ll find you till the bread burns.”
“Then at least I’ll go out smelling good.” I put my hand over his on the counter, just for a second. “I’ve got it. I have. Tell your sister I said her son’s a good boy for offering, and then tell him to go find a job that pays, because I can’t, and that’s the truth of it, and we both know it.”