Chapter 7 #2
And the bossing went on, and I drank it like water.
Hands. That tray. Behind you. Hot. Move.
No please, no softening. But even so, I though about what was under the boss.
I watched for it. I couldn’t help watching for it.
The Little. The tired thing that had melted.
The thing that wanted to be looked after, protected.
I collected it the way I collect everything, every scrap of evidence about who she really was: the way she fed everyone but herself, the way her hands shook at the end of a long day, the way she talked to herself, low and Greek and gentle, the gentlest thing in the building.
I fell a little harder every day and I held my rule like a man holding a hot pan—won’t use it, won’t test it, won’t reach—and the hope and the guilt twisted tighter together until I couldn’t tell which was which.
Olimpo installed himself like he’d signed a lease. The worst doorway, every morning, dreaming of birds. He let her feed him the good koulourakia off her flat palm and called her his favorite by leaning his whole bear’s weight on her shins.
And the shop got loud.
Day by day, person by person, it filled.
The bus driver said his six words. The nurses laughed in the doorway.
The old woman held court. People stayed because there was a thing to stay for, warmth pointed back at them, and the bell kept going, and the cases emptied, and one gray morning I looked up from the trays and the shop was full and roaring and gold and alive, more alive than it had been in a year, her father’s word made true on the new glass in his own green, and Katerina stood behind her counter in the middle of it not knowing what to do with her hands.
I knew exactly how she felt. I didn’t know what to do with mine either.
It was a Thursday when my cover came home to roost, and it came home wearing two good suits and a leather jacket.
The bell went mid-morning, in the lull after the rush, and I had a tray of koulourakia in one hand and flour to both elbows and I looked up the way you look up when the bell goes—half a smile already loaded, the morning-man face—and there in my doorway, stepping over Olimpo, who lifted his head and thumped his tail at the sight of them, stood my brother, my cousin, and the easy Caruso, all three, taking in the warm gold of the shop with the mild expressions of men out for bread.
And then they saw me.
I watched it land on each of them in turn, which was its own small comedy.
Pietro first—his eyes went to the apron, to the flour, to the tray, and the whole thing arrived in his face at once and lit it up like Christmas.
Sal second—Sal didn’t light up, Sal went still, the geological stillness, the listening-to-the-ground stillness, his eyes moving slow from the apron to the tray to my flour-dusted forearms and back to my face, processing, recalculating, a man watching the laws of physics fail in front of him.
And Marco last, easy Marco, who took it all in with that disarming smile already half-built and then let the smile go wider and wider as he understood exactly what he was looking at, because Marco understands things fastest of all.
“Toe,” Sal said, finally, very quietly. “What is on you?”
“It’s an apron.”
“I can see it is an apron.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
Pietro made a sound. A strangled, joyful sound, a man trying to hold a laugh and losing the whole war. “He’s working,” he said, to Sal, wondering, like he was reporting a miracle. “Sal. He has a job. He took a job. Look at him. He’s covered in—is that flour, Tonio, is that flour on you—”
“It’s a bakery,” I said, with all the dignity I had left, which by then was not a great deal. “Things get floury. It’s the nature of the work.”
“The nature of the work,” Marco repeated, delighted, drifting up to the counter, leaning on it the exact lazy way I lean on it, the family resemblance suddenly very loud.
“He says ‘the work.’ Like a man who has work. Like a tradesman. Pietro, our Tonio has a trade.” He looked at the cases, at the cases I’d helped fill, at the loaves I’d hauled the flour for.
“And he’s good at it, look, the place is full.
The bakery girl finally let you behind the counter, eh?
Took you, what—twelve mornings? Fourteen? ”
“It’s not relevant how many mornings.”
“It’s deeply relevant,” said Sal, who had recovered enough to be devastating, lining his disbelief up parallel to the edge of his disapproval the way he lines up his pen.
“You said you were surveilling. You sat at the table—our table—and you said: I am keeping eyes on the block. You did not say: I have become the help. You did not say: I am being paid in stale bread to take orders from a Greek girl with a broom. That part you left out, Tonio. I would remember that part.”
“I’m paying her, actually.”
The silence that followed that was one of the great silences of my life. Pietro had to put a hand on the counter.
“You are paying her?” Sal asked.
“To work for her?” Pietro breathed.
“In her shop?” Marco finished, and the three of them looked at each other, and then at me, and I felt my whole face go hot under the flour, and I would have given a year of my life for a single one of my deflections to work, and I reached for the grin, the wide easy one, the one that opens bartenders and bookies and bored wives—
“So what’s new with you guys?”
It bounced.
“He’s deflecting,” Pietro told Sal, gleeful.
“He’s deflecting so badly,” Sal agreed. “It’s almost sad. Tonio, it is almost sad.”
And that’s when Katerina came out of the back.
She came out with a sack of sugar on her shoulder and stopped at the sight of three large strange men in good clothes filling up her shop, and I watched her read them—fast, the way she reads everyone, the working sharp part of her clicking through the inventory.
Two suits, no ties, the watches, the way they held the room, the deference in how the easy one leaned and the iron in how the still one stood, and Olimpo thumping his tail at them like he knew them—and I saw her get to the bottom of the read and arrive exactly where I’d known she’d arrive, because she’s not a stupid woman, she’s the least stupid woman I’ve ever met.
Same flavor as the dog man. Some of them. Some kind of them.
She set the sugar down. She did not smile.
“We’re not hiring,” she said. “And the cannoli’s not Sicilian, before one of you tells me how my grandmother did it wrong.”
I have never in my life seen Sal blink the way he blinked then. Marco actually laughed out loud, a real one. And Pietro looked from her to me and back with an expression of such pure dawning understanding that I wanted to put my own face in the tray.
“Signora,” Marco started, deploying the smile, the strategic one, the one that has charmed politicians and journalists and bored wives across a dozen rooms. “We don’t want work. We’ve only come to admire the—”
“You’re his people,” she said, cutting through it clean, jerking her chin at me.
Not a question. “You’ve got his whole—” she waved a hand at all of them, at the whole thing, the way she’d once waved a hand at all of me, “—that. The watch. The leaning. He does the leaning too. Drives me up the wall.”
“She’s got us,” Marco said, charmed, hand to his chest. “Signora, you’ve got us cold.”
“Hands,” Katerina said.
It took the brothers a second to understand it wasn’t aimed at them.
It was aimed at me. The order, flat, no please, the boss in her full and certain in her own kitchen in front of three of the most dangerous men in Chicago, and I—God help me, in front of my own blood—I put the tray down and turned exactly where she aimed me, to the proofing rack, no argument, no please, because that’s the rhythm now, that’s the music, and behind me I heard the entire bottom drop out of my dignity forever.
Pietro had to leave the counter. He actually walked away to the window and stood there with his shoulders shaking.
Sal made a sound I’d never heard him make—a short dry exhale through the nose that, from Sal, is a standing ovation.
And Marco said, soft, wonderingly, to no one, “He moved when she said move. The whole man just—moved.”
“He’s adequate,” Katerina said, going back to the bench. “On a good day. He can’t laminate to save his life.”
“He can’t?” Pietro asked, recovering, hungry for it. “Lamination like . . . ?”
“His hands run hot. He breaks the butter every time. He’s a furnace, that one, useless with anything that needs to be cold.
” She said it without looking up, dismissive, devastating, and the brothers drank it down like wine, every word about me from the one person on earth my charm had never once worked on.
It was the easy Caruso who got us back on track.
He drifted close to me at the rack, under cover of admiring the bread, and dropped his voice to nothing, and I dropped a name into the small space between us—the operator’s name, the one three rungs up from the collector I’d put through her window, the name I’d pried loose watching the yard by the freight line all week.
Marco’s eyes flickered, took it, filed it, and his face never changed at all.
That’s the gift of him. He can do business in the middle of a joke and you’d never see the seam.
Then they bought an indecent amount of bread—out of loyalty, out of cover, out of pure delight at my expense—and they went to the door, and Sal stopped, and looked back at me, and looked at the warm gold shop and the full cases and the woman at the bench, and then at me again, and something passed across his geological face that wasn’t teasing at all.
He’d clocked it. They all had. The thing they’d never seen on me in twenty-nine years. I was home, here, in the flour, taking her orders, and it showed on me like flour shows on a dark coat.
“She should come to the wedding,” Sal said. Dry. Devastating. The corner of his mouth not moving at all.
“Out,” I told him.