Chapter 7
Tonio
Istood outside her door and braced myself.
I’d lain awake all night running the scenarios.
I had a speech ready for each eventuality.
I pushed the door. The bell went. The heat hit me, the smell of her hit me—sesame and honey and that resin underneath—and Olimpo ambled past my leg to claim his doorway, and I stepped into the warm gold of it ready for war.
“You’re late,” she said. She didn’t sound furious or embarrassed.
I checked the clock over the register. Four exactly.
“I’m on time.”
“It’s past four. You’re standing in my doorway letting the cold in. Hurry up. Coat. Apron. The flour’s not going to walk itself out.”
And that was it. That was the whole of it.
No ice, no embarrassment, no reason for any speech.
She was at the bench already, hands in the dough, hair scraped up, flour to the wrist, and she didn’t look at me.
The kiss—the kiss that had been burning in my mouth since I’d walked out into the dark with my dog and a promise—sat in the room between us, enormous, unmentioned, impossible to ignore.
I hung my coat. I washed to the elbow. I got the apron off the hook and I went and got the flour, two sacks to a shoulder, and I set them where she pointed without being told twice.
Because here’s the trouble—the thing I couldn’t put down, the thing I’d carried out into the cold and home to my empty apartment and back here again at four in the morning like a stone in my coat.
It wasn’t the kiss.
It was the chair. It was the way she’d sat down when I told her to. The way her whole body had folded into it before her face had finished arguing, the way the relief had gone through her like a wave breaking. I’d seen it—I always see things like that. It’s who I am.
But who am I?
I’m the one who sets people down. The one who sees them.
I’m the one who notices you haven’t eaten.
The one who tells you to sleep and means it and makes you.
I’ve had the word for it a long time. My brothers don’t say it out loud—Sicilians don’t—but Sal’s seen it in me, the way I run toward the thing that needs feeding, the way I’d have laid down in front of a train for any of them.
It’s in me the way the boxer’s in me. The same hands.
Daddy.
And she—
She might be a little.
The thought had kept me up most of the night and it kept coming now, between the flour and the trays, every time she barked an order and I took it and felt that thing ease in my chest. She might be exactly what I’m made to care for.
The woman who commands all day, who’d hand me my head for calling her Kat, who runs her own kitchen like a general—and underneath it, somewhere she’d never name in daylight, somebody so tired of being in charge that she’d melted into a chair the second a steady hand told her she didn’t have to be anymore.
And there it was, the hope, warm and stupid and dangerous, and right behind it, like the cold coming in behind the bell, the thing that killed it.
She didn’t know what I was—maybe she didn’t know what she was.
Could I tell her? Did I need to? We’d kissed, but clearly it wasn’t important to her, or if it was, she didn’t want me to know.
No. I shouldn’t tell her. Shouldn’t bring it up again. Shouldn’t make her obey me, shouldn’t tap into that hidden part of me that I was suddenly desperate to show her.
So I made myself a rule, somewhere around the third sack of flour, watching her shape rolls with delicate hands.
I wouldn’t use it. Not again. Not the chair, not the voice, not the set-down—not until she knew what it was and chose it with her eyes open.
Straight, or not at all. I’d watch for what she was, because I couldn’t help watching, but I wouldn’t test it, wouldn’t reach for it, wouldn’t take one more thing from her she hadn’t agreed to give.
“You’re staring,” she said, not looking up.
“Just admiring your technique.”
“Admire it from the storeroom. I need the butter.”
“Yes, boss.”
I got the butter. And I told myself: just work. Just be near her. Just haul the flour and take the orders and figure out, slow, in the light, who she actually was—and keep my hands off the only thing I had that could ruin her.
It was going to be the hardest job of my life.
The glass guy was coming Monday. That was what she’d said, the night of the scorch.
I was worried, though, so I found the guy, called him, asked him what he was going to charge.
When he’d given me the figure, I almost passed out.
There was no way Kat could afford it, and I knew there was no way that she would accept money from me.
So I told him not to bother, that I’d find someone else.
I did know a guy. Not exactly a glass guy, but someone who dabbled. Plus, I could help. How hard could it be?
When I told Kat the change of planes, she looked alarmed and said, “It can wait. We have plywood. No need to get some random idiot to do it.”
“No way,” I replied. “I can’t have a plywood window,” I said.
“Plywood says something happened here. Plywood says somebody’s worth leaning on.
I need this block to look boring, and a boarded-up bakery is not boring, it’s a flag.
So we put the glass in. It’s for me.” She narrowed her eyes at me the way she did when she could see the trick of it but couldn’t find the seam, and then she said fine, your money, your back, and let me do it.
I’m good with my hands. People miss that, under the charm—they see the boxer’s nose and the easy face and they think that’s the whole inventory.
But I built things, as a boy, at my mother’s elbow and my uncle’s, and the glass went in clean and true, no rattle, the bead of sealant run smooth as icing, and when it was set I stood back and the morning came through it gold and unbroken and you couldn’t tell anymore.
You couldn’t tell anything had ever happened.
Except the name.
FILOXENIA had been painted on the old glass in green—worn, hand-lettered, her father’s green, the green of a man who’d painted it himself.
It had broken with the window. They’d salvaged what they could and given up, and there’d been a stretch of plywood with broken letters across it, half a word, half a welcome.
I bought the paint. I matched the green at the hardware place on Halsted, held a chip of the old letter up to a dozen swatches under the buzzing light until I found the one, and I came in early, earlier than four, before she’d be up, and I started in on it with a brush in the cold gray dawn.
I’m not a sign painter. But I am fucking determined.
And I now how to Google, and I know how to watch youtube videos.
The first F took me an hour and I painted it twice.
But I’d watched her father’s letters long enough—three months of standing across the street looking at that word—that I knew the shape of them, the way the I leaned just slightly, the curl on the tail of the A, the small imperfect human hand of it, and I gave it that, gave it the lean and the curl and the human, because a perfect machine-cut FILOXENIA would have been worse than no name at all.
She came out of the back while I was on the second N.
I felt her before I saw her—the kitchen changes when she’s in it—and I didn’t turn around, kept the brush moving, because I’d learned by now that turning around was crowding and crowding was poison. So I stayed on the N and let her stand there.
She didn’t say anything for a long time.
I finished the N. Started the second I. And in the new glass, faint, I could see her reflected behind me, standing dead still in her too-big apron with a tray forgotten in her hands, watching me put her father’s name back on her father’s shop in her father’s green, and her face was doing something I’d never seen it do—not the cold, not the fury, not the deadpan, none of her armor at all, just a raw open thing she didn’t know I could see in the glass, her mouth pressed tight and her eyes too bright, and I understood that if I turned around she’d put it all away in a half a second and tell me I’d missed a spot.
So I didn’t turn around.
“It’s not perfect,” I said to the glass, easy, light, giving her the out. “I’m not a sign man. You want it redone proper, I know a guy.”
“No,” she said. Her voice came out wrong, thick, and she fixed it fast. “No. Leave it. It’s—” and she stopped, and I waited, and she didn’t finish it, just set the tray down hard and said, “The ovens are at temperature. Stop dawdling,” and went back to the bench, and I let her, and I finished her father’s name and neither of us said another word about it.
That was how she let me see it. By telling me to stop dawdling. From her, that was everything.
The wall I did the same morning, the scorched one—primer and two coats while she had her back turned, so that the next time she looked at it there was nothing there to look at, no black fan, no blister, no sentence written in smoke.
She came around the corner with a sack of sugar and stopped, and looked at the clean wall, and looked at me, and didn’t say thank you, because she doesn’t, because a thank-you is a thing you owe and she doesn’t owe, and I didn’t want one.
I just wanted her to never have to scrub a thing she couldn’t unburn with her shaking hands again.
And the days went on, and they built.
You can’t be in a kitchen this small with someone day after day and not learn their music.
The choreography that had been all collisions the first morning smoothed out into something close to a dance.
I learned her reach for the bench scraper, her pivot from oven to proofing rack, the half-step she did at the corner, and I learned to be the not-there in the spaces she needed, to fold myself small when small was wanted and to be a wall at her back when a wall was wanted, and she stopped having to tell me to be smaller because I’d learned the shape of her movement well enough to leave it room.