Chapter 8 #2
“I have a lot of these,” she said. “From a lot of storefronts on this block. The dry cleaner. The Manolises. Six others who sold. You’re the only one I’m looking at across a counter, because you’re the only one who didn’t sell, which makes you the only one worth my time.
” She tapped the company name with one finger.
“This isn’t a real estate company. It’s three real estate companies, and they hold each other, and behind them is a vehicle in the islands that used to belong to somebody dead, and now belongs to somebody who isn’t.
I’m trying to draw a line from your window—your broken window, your scorched wall, the man in the car you saw last night, don’t make a face, I know about all of it—up to the hand that’s holding the pen.
Your bakery is the holdout. The holdout is the loose thread.
I pull the thread, the block comes apart, and the people doing this to you go to prison or worse.
” She ate the rest of the cannolo. “That’s what I’m working. That’s as much as I can say.”
I stood there a long minute. The radio played low. Tonio laughed at something the old woman said, a real laugh, miles away.
“You said it cost you your life once,” I said. “The money thing.”
She looked at me, and something in her went still and very honest. “I worked for people like the ones doing this to you,” she said.
“I found out what they were doing. I told the law. I testified. And then the law that was supposed to protect me failed, catastrophically, and I ran, and I’ve spent the last two years with another name in another city sleeping wherever I could sleep, alone, unseen, hunted, refusing every hand anyone put out because I’d decided a hand was just a way to get a leash on you.
” She said it flat, the way you say a thing you’ve made yourself able to say.
“I’ve been you, Katerina. Under siege. Too stubborn to call anyone.
Telling everyone I had it handled while I starved.
I know the speech. I’ve given the speech.
” A faint dry tilt of her mouth. “I see the speech all over you.”
I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t have been a smaller version of her speech. I felt the wall I keep up against strangers do something it almost never does.
It thinned.
“Have another,” I said, and boxed her two more before she could pay, and slid them across, and when she opened her mouth to argue I said, “I want the contract. I really want it.”
“I wont’ say no.” Her smile was beautiful.
A wicked thought popped into my head.
“How long have you known him,” I asked. I jerked my chin at him. “Tonio.”
Angela followed the chin. Watched him a second. “Not long, but long enough. He’s going to be my brother in law. So . . . I’m getting to know him better.” She looked back at me, and her eyes had gone careful, a woman who’d noticed she was standing near a thing that could go off. “Why?”
And here’s where I should have shrugged and lied.
I’m a good liar. I’d lied to Despina in a church basement, lied to the boy with the thin coat, lied to myself every morning for a year.
But it came out before I’d decided to let it, the way the true things only ever come out when I’m too tired to keep the door shut.
“He told me to sit down,” I said.
“. . . Okay.”
“No—listen.” I put my own hands flat on the counter because they wanted to do something.
“I’d been on my feet since two. I was—my hands were shaking, I was about to go down, and I wouldn’t stop, because I never stop, stopping is for people who have someone to stop for.
And he came across the kitchen and he turned a chair and he said sit down, eat something, I’ve got the counter.
” My throat did a funny thing and I felt my heart flutter.
I made it stop. “And I sat. Before I’d decided to.
My whole body just—folded into it. And he took the counter and the weight came off me, the weight I’ve carried alone since they put my father in the ground, every part of it with my own two hands—and I just put it down. Because he told me to.”
Angela didn’t say anything, she just listened.
“And it felt good,” I said, my voice cracking a little.
“That’s the part I can’t—it felt so good it scared me.
It felt like falling and being caught at the same time.
Like someone reached in and lifted off a thing I’d forgotten wasn’t part of me.
And then I kissed him, because I’m an idiot, and I tried to stuff the feelings down but I didn’t so obviously, again, because I’m an idiot, I tried to kiss him again, but the second time—” I breathed in deep, trying to keep myself going through this confession, “—the second time he didn’t even let me, he pulled back—and I don’t understand it.
Any of it. I run everything. This is my kitchen, my flour, my books, my life, I decide every single thing in it down to the koulouraki count, and I was undone—completely undone—by a man telling me to sit in a chair. What is wrong with me?”
She looked at me like I was crazy.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You don’t even know me. This has been a very stressfu—”
“Nothing is wrong with you,” Angela said. Her expression had changed—no scorn, just deep thought.
She said it fast and flat and certain, and it stopped me.
“Nothing at all,” she said. She’d gone still in a particular way, leaning her hip against the counter.
“I want to be careful here, because it’s not my thing to explain to you, and there are pieces I won’t touch.
But I’ll tell you what I can.” She held my eyes.
“What you just described—the relief. The wanting to be told. Being run flat and folding into a chair the second someone steady tells you you don’t have to hold it anymore.
The feeling like falling and being caught.
That’s not weakness. It’s not you breaking. And it’s not what you think it is.”
“What do I think it is?”
“You think it’s a prison,” she said, and I went cold.
“You think being looked after means being owned. That care is just control wearing a nicer coat. I know you think that because I thought it for two years, and it nearly killed me.” She let that land.
“It’s not that. There’s a— here’s a whole shape of thing it can be, that’s the opposite of a prison.
Where someone holds the line so you don’t have to.
Where putting it down isn’t losing yourself, it’s getting to rest. Where being told to sit and eat is the most freedom you’ve had in years, because for once you’re not the one managing everything alone. ”
My heart was going. I don’t know why my heart was going. “And that has a—that’s a thing? It has a—”
“It has a name.” She didn’t say it. She watched me want her to say it, and she didn’t, and instead she took the pen from beside the register, the one I do the till with, and she pulled a fresh paper bag off the stack and she wrote something on it, small, four letters, and turned it so I could read it and didn’t read it out loud, like saying it out loud would be deciding it for me.
“Look into it. On your own. When he’s not here.
You’re a researcher — I can tell, the way you read that letter — so research it.
And don’t decide what it means before you’ve read what it actually is.
” She slid the bag toward me. “That’s all I’ll point at. The rest is yours to find.”
I looked at the four letters and didn’t understand them and felt my whole skin go hot anyway, some animal part of me reacting ahead of the thinking part, the way it had on the dark street the night I reached for him without meaning to.
“And the family,” I said, because I needed somewhere else to put my eyes. “Yours. His. Are they—”
“They’re good people,” Angela said. “Which sounds insane given what I’ve told you about what they touch.
But they are. The genuine kind. They look after their own with everything they have.
” Her gaze went across the room to Tonio again, and softened, the way a hard thing softens when it’s not braced.
“And that one’s the real thing, Katerina.
I don’t say that lightly. I don’t say warm things lightly about anyone anymore.
He looked after me when I needed it. Fed me.
I was in a bad place and he helped his brother look after me.
” She stopped. Reconsidered. Started again, quieter.
“I know what it looks like, a man like that, when he’s decided.
I’m—let’s say I’ve had occasion to learn the shape of it.
From the inside.” Something moved behind her eyes, some private thing with a man in it, and she let me see exactly as much of it as she meant to and no more.
“He’s not going to handle you. He’s going to do the opposite. The hard part is you have to let him.”
She straightened off the counter. Tucked her coat closed. Picked up her box of cannoli.
“Thank you for these,” she said. “I’ll be back about the dessert table. You’re getting the contract.” And she gave me one short nod, woman to woman, and went out into the cold, and the bell went, and the warm gold of the shop closed back over the gap she left.
I stood there holding a paper bag with four letters on it.
D. D. l. g.
I had no idea what they meant. But I was going to find out.
“I’ve got to check the books,” I told him, which was true, in a way. “Back office. Don’t burn anything, watch the second proof, and if the bus driver comes in he gets the seeded ones, not the plain, he’ll pretend he doesn’t care but he counts the seeds.”
“Seeded for the bus driver. On it, boss.”
The office is barely a closet—the desk that holds the books, the chair, the safe nobody’s ever broken into because there’s nothing in it, my father’s spare apron on a hook, my phone charging on the corner because I forget it out front. I shut the door. I sat in the chair. My heart was going.
I typed the letters.
And then I sat there and read.
Daddy Dom. Little Girl.