Chapter 2 #3
“I’m just looking.” He didn’t put it down.
He held it a beat longer than he needed to, looking from the photo to me and back “Here’s where we are,” he said, and brushed the crumbs off his hands onto my clean floor.
“This is the third time I’ve come down here being a gentleman about it.
The people I work for, they own this block now.
Most of it. The whole street’s come around—sensible people, they took the offer, they’re out, they’re happy.
You’re the holdout.” He said it like it was a quaint thing, a charming flaw.
“And a holdout’s a problem. You sell, you get a fair number and you walk away clean and you go open a nice little place somewhere it’s wanted.
Or you don’t sell, and you stay, and there’s an arrangement.
A weekly thing. For the trouble of letting you stay where you’re not wanted. You follow me.”
“I follow you.”
“So which is it gonna be.”
“Neither,” I said. “I’m not selling and I’m not paying you a dime. This is my father’s. It’s not for sale at any number and I’m not renting back what’s already mine. Now you’ve had your koulouraki, so.”
Under the counter, my hands were shaking. My mouth had gone to paper. There was a cold sick thing turning over in my stomach and I could hear my own pulse in my ears. Somehow, I kept it from my face.
He looked at me for a long moment, and then he laughed, soft, and came around the counter toward me, and stopped—too close.
Far too close. Close enough that I could smell the koulouraki and the cologne and under it something rank, and I had to tilt my head back to keep my eyes on his, which is exactly what he wanted, and I did it anyway, because looking down was the flinch and I would not flinch.
“You’re a tough one,” he said, and his voice had dropped into something lower, something that had nothing to do with the money, and the something turned my stomach over harder than any of it.
His eyes went down me, slow, the way he’d looked at everything else in the shop, like inventory, like deciding whether the kitchen worked for him.
“All alone down here, every morning, every night. Pretty little thing, working herself to the bone.” He reached out and—I felt it before I saw it—took a piece of my hair, the loose flour-dusted piece that always came down, and tucked it back behind my ear, and his finger grazed my jaw doing it, and I went rigid as the floor under me.
“Doesn’t have to be so hard, you know. A girl like you, all by herself.
There’s friendlier arrangements than money.
I could look out for you. I could be very good to you.
” The smile again, the patient one, the open-house one, and now it was an open house and I was the kitchen.
“Think about how nice it could be, instead of how hard it is. You want my advice? You’re putting up a fight you can’t win, sweetheart, and there’s no one here to see you do it. So why.”
He let the hair go. He stepped back, finally, gave me the air again, and I took a breath I tried not to let him see me take.
“The next time I come down here,” he said, easy, conversational, picking up his patience again like a coat, “it won’t be me being a gentleman. You understand? This is the gentle one. So you think about it. You think real hard about it. You’ve got a nice place here. Be a shame.”
He didn’t leave.
“You should go,” I said. “We’re closed.”
“I gave you good advice.”
“I’m not paying you. I’m not selling. I’m not afraid of you, and you can come back as many times as you like, you can bring the not-gentle one, I’ll have a koulouraki for him too. This is my father’s. You don’t get it. There’s no number. There’s no arrangement. Now get out of my shop.”
It was the stupidest thing I’d ever said.
I knew it was stupid while it was coming out of me.
Brave is just stupid that worked out, and I had no reason to think this would work out, and I said it anyway, because the alternative was handing him the thing I’d refused to hand him all night, and I’d rather be stupid than hand it over.
The wound’s an engine like any other. It’ll run you straight off a cliff if you let it, and that night I let it, and I’d do it again.
His face changed. Just a flicker. The patience didn’t crack — men like that don’t crack, that’s the whole horror of them — but something cooled behind it, went flat, took my measure and filed it away. He’d been hoping I was smart. He’d settle for me being a lesson.
“Okay,” he said. Soft. “Okay.”
And on his way past the counter—slow, deliberate, looking right at me while he did it so I’d know it wasn’t an accident, so I’d know there are no accidents with a man like this—he put two fingers against the photograph beside the coffee machine, the one he’d turned an inch off true, and he pushed it.
It went off the edge. I heard it before I understood it—the frame catching the lip of the counter, the small flat slap of it hitting the tile, the glass going with a sound like ice. My father’s face under a web of cracks. The whole thing in pieces at his feet.
“Whoops,” he said.