Chapter 4 #3
Despina let it sit. She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table. And then she said, quiet, not unkind:
“You say that to me, too.”
“What?”
“Every week I come to your shop with food and you don’t eat it.
Every week I say let me help, let me send my niece, let me sit with the books, I’m good with numbers, you know I am—and every week you take my hand, warm, so warm, and you put it back on my side of the counter.
” She wasn’t angry. That was the awful part.
Anger I could have hit back at. “I’m not a man who likes you, koritsi.
I’m not buying anything. I knew your baba before you were born.
I held you the day you were christened in the room over our heads.
And you push me away exactly the same as the dog man. Same hand. Same warmth. Same no.”
“That’s different—”
“It’s not different. It’s the same fence, only you built this one.
You stand inside it and you call it the dream and you starve in there and you call it honoring him.
” She leaned in. The smooth worn fondness gone hard for a second, the way only the people who love you longest can go hard.
“You’re drowning. Don’t make the face. You think I can’t see it?
Stavros’s girl, too thin, on her feet since three, the whole parish watching her feed everyone and eat nothing and go home to an empty street with a broken frame she won’t even let a friend mend.
You’re drowning, and you keep telling everyone you’ve got it, and that—” she put her finger on the table, “—is not honoring your father. That is breaking his heart. Wherever he is. If he could see you this alone—”
“He’d be proud,” I said, too fast. “The widow said it. You said it. Look what she made. He’d be proud I kept the doors open.”
“He’d be proud of the bread,” Despina said.
“He’d be heartbroken about the girl.” She let that land.
“He spent thirty years in other men’s shops, Katerina, working other men’s dough, and you know what he talked about?
Not the shop. The shop was the excuse. He talked about a table full of people.
He talked about feeding his own. He wanted the bakery so he could fill it.
With family. With friends. With noise. Not so his daughter could stand alone in the dark in his apron and call it loyalty. ”
“You don’t know what he wanted.”
“I knew him before you did.”
“It’s mine,” I said, and I heard it come out smaller than I meant it, defended like a child defends a thing she’s already half lost. “It’s the last thing of his that’s mine.”
And then she did it. She set down the thing she’d been carrying the whole conversation, the true thing, gentle, like setting a hot tray on a cloth so it doesn’t crack the marble.
“You’re not protecting the shop,” Despina said.
I looked at her.
“You think you’re protecting the shop. From the men, from me, from all of us with our hands out trying to help carry the flour.
” She reached across and put her hand over mine, on the table, warm, the way I do to everyone, the move I use to push people away made into the move that pinned me.
“You’re protecting yourself. From one more person walking in and mattering.
Because the last one mattered, and then he left, and it nearly killed you.
So you don’t let anyone carry anything, because if they carry it, they’re in, and if they’re in, they can leave, and you cannot survive one more person leaving.
That’s not the dream, koritsi. That’s a girl who lost her father and decided never to risk it again. ”
The kitchen was very quiet. The coffee had gone cold in my hands.
Somewhere up through the floor the priest’s voice rose and fell over someone else’s grief, aionia i mnimi, may the memory be eternal, and I had no answer for her.
That was the thing. I’m never short of an answer.
I had nothing. She’d reached past the wall and the fence and the speech and put her finger right on the one beam holding the whole structure up, and I couldn’t say it wasn’t true, and I couldn’t say it was, so I did the only thing left.
I took my hand back.
“I have to go,” I said. I stood. Knee popped. “The trays. The van. I’ve got an order for tomorrow I haven’t started.”
“Katerina.”
“Thank you for the coffee.” I was already moving, already gathering my coat, already turning my back, retreating the way I always retreat, into the work, into the weight, away from the warm hand that had got too close. “It was good to see you. I mean it.”
“Sit down. Finish your coffee.”
“I’ve got it,” I said, from the door, reflexive as a heartbeat, the verbal tic, the whole creed of me in three words. “I’m fine. I’ve got it.”
And I went out into the cold before she could land another true thing.
It was barely six when I came out of the church and the sky had already gone from steel to coal, the streetlights doing their orange best and mostly failing.
The cold had teeth in it now, the real kind, the kind that finds the gap at your collar.
I pulled my coat tight and put my head down and started the walk home the way I’d done it ten thousand times, the route I could do asleep, which most mornings I half was.
I heard the footsteps about two blocks in.
Not at first as a thing. At first just as sound, behind me, the ordinary scuff of someone else out in the cold, and I didn’t think anything because why would you.
But I slowed at the corner to let a car pass, and the footsteps slowed.
And I crossed, and they crossed. And when I picked it back up, brisk, head down, they picked it back up too, matched, the same distance behind, neither closing nor falling away, and the back of my neck knew before the rest of me did, the animal part, the part that’s older than the speech I’d just given Despina.
Someone was behind me.
Next time won’t be gentle. The thug’s voice, soft, conversational, picking up his patience like a coat.
My heart had gone up into my throat. My breath came short and white and too fast. I wouldn’t run. Running would tell him I knew. Running was danger. I would not flinch.
Three more blocks. The grocer’s was dark, closed hours ago, no still here, still here tonight.
The plywood block, the cowed block, every shuttered storefront with the same nothing signage, not a lit window in a quarter mile, not a soul to shout to.
My keys were in my pocket and I got them out without slowing and threaded them through my fingers the way my father never taught me but the world did, the cold metal points sticking out from my fist, and I felt how little they were against a grown man and hated how little, hated the whole arithmetic of being small and alone on a dark street that somebody was eating one mouthful at a time.
There was nobody to call. I stood in that fear.
And then, before I could stop it, my whole stupid body reached for someone. One person. Instinct, fast, ahead of thought, the way your hand goes to the railing on a stair that isn’t there. Not Despina. Not the law. Not my father.
The dog man.
The grinning idiot with the broken nose.
The eleven-dollars-of-bread, leans-on-the-counter-like-a-bar, having-a-wonderful-night nuisance.
I wanted him there. I wanted the car at the curb and the shape in it and the dog’s head in the glass.
I wanted the door coming open and the cold coming in and the way he’d had the thug against my window before I’d understood he was moving, no shouting, no show.
I wanted his hands. The steady scarred ones I’d looked at and hated myself for looking at.
I wanted, in the worst spiking middle of my fear, to turn around and have him be there, and the wanting was so total and so fast and so far ahead of anything I’d have allowed that it appalled me even as it happened, even with my heart in my throat, even with the keys in my fist—
No. Not him. Not him of all the—
The footsteps turned off.
A door. A scrape of a key, a real key in a real lock, and I made myself glance back, finally, fast, ready, and it was a man.
Just a man. In a parka, a phone lit up against his ear, talking low and laughing at something, fishing his keys out at the bottom of a stoop two doors back, a man going into his own building after his own long day, who’d been walking the same direction I was because people do, because it’s a street and that’s what streets are for.
He didn’t look at me. He didn’t know I existed.
He went up his steps still laughing into his phone and the door shut behind him and the lock turned and that was all.
That was the whole of it. A man going home.
Nothing.
The adrenaline went out of me all at once, the way it does, leaving the shakes behind.
My legs felt like someone else’s. I stood there in the orange dark with my keys still threaded through my fist and made myself breathe, in, out, white in the cold, until the slam in my chest came down to something I could live inside.
Nothing. It was nothing. A neighbor. A friend.
And then, in the wash of it, in the long ebb after the fear, came the worse thing.
I’d reached for him.
Out of everyone in the world, when my body thought it was going to die, it had reached for the grinning idiot with the broken nose.
Not because he was useful. Not because he was strong, though he was.
I’d wanted him there. Him. The man I’d thrown out.
The man I’d built a whole speech against just half an hour ago.
I stood very still on the sidewalk, keys loose in my hand, and let the thought arrive. There was no stopping it.
Oh no, I thought.
Oh no.
I like this man.