Chapter 9
Tonio
She came back on a Friday, which I’d half expected, because Angela doesn’t wait around. I looked up from the proofing rack, and there she was in the thrifted coat with a folder under her arm.
“We’re not really open for paperwork,” Katerina said from the bench. “A little grubby right now.”
“I think you might change your mind,” Angela said, “when you hear what I need.”
She put the folder on the counter and opened it and turned it so Katerina could read it.
“It’s all decided,” she said. “Filoxenia caters the wedding. All of it. Not just the cannoli, though the cannoli started the fight in your favor.” She tapped the page.
“The whole dessert table. Two hundred and forty covers. The Italian pastries, yes, but they want yours too—the Greek alongside, your grandmother’s cannoli that isn’t Sicilian and the loaves and the koulourakia and the syrup things, all of it.
And the cake. I want you on the cake, Katerina. ”
I watched Katerina’s hands stop in the dough.
I knew she was in trouble financially. I’d picked up the odd detail here and there. The loans, the struggles because of less footfall on the block. I knew she owed a substantial amount.
Angela said the number they could pay.
She said it plainly, the catering figure, the deposit and the balance and the line about expenses on top, and she said it the way she says everything, flat and exact, a woman who reads money the way I read a room.
And I watched the number land on Katerina, and I watched it do what I’d known it would do, which was take the floor out from under her.
That number cleared the loan—it had to.
Something dawned on Angela’s face. Something like hope. Just for a second, and then she shut it. I watched her shut it. The shutter coming down on the hope the way it comes down on everything, fast, hard, before it could cost her.
“That’s a lot of people,” she said. Flat. Like she was being asked to bake for a bus tour. “Two hundred and forty’s a lot of dessert.”
“It is,” Angela agreed, and her eyes flicked to me, one beat, then back.
What Katerina didn’t know—what she’d skin me for if she ever found out—was that I’d half-built this.
When the question came up at the table, when Marco said offhand that they needed a baker and somebody floated some catering house from the North Side, I’d kept my face still and said, easy, like it cost me nothing, there’s a place on the block.
Greek. The cannoli are better than anything we make.
And I’d let the bread do the rest, because the bread is genuinely that good, and because I’d already brought a box of it to the restaurant the week before and watched my brothers eat the whole thing.
The family chose her bakery on the merits.
I just made sure the merits walked into the room.
So this was a real thing I could give her. The first thing she might actually take, because it didn’t come with my name on it, didn’t come as a hand—it came as a contract, as commerce, the one shape of giving this woman could swallow. The relief of that went through me warm.
And right behind the warm came the cold, because I could already see the next three weeks.
I could see them with terrible clarity. Two hundred and forty covers on top of the daily shop, on top of the dawn load-in and the dusk load-out, on top of a woman who already didn’t sleep, who already didn’t eat, who already worked her hands to a shake by the end of a day with a tenth of this load on it.
She would not hire help. She would not take mine beyond the flour.
She would do all of it—the testing, the volume, the cake, her father’s impossible Greek things she’d want on that Italian table to plant his flag in front of two hundred and forty Sicilians—she would do every part of it with her own two stubborn hands, and she would break herself doing it, and I would have to stand in her kitchen and watch.
“I’ll do it,” Katerina said.
Then she took the pen and she signed. Her signature came out small and hard and certain, the same hand that letters nothing and commands everything, and she pushed it back across the marble, and it was done.
“You’ll get the deposit Monday,” Angela said.
She closed the folder. She looked at Katerina a long beat, woman to woman, and then she looked at me, and there was a thing in the look I couldn’t fully read except that it was kind.
“Don’t kill yourself over it,” she said to Katerina.
“It’s a wedding. It’s supposed to be a happy thing. ”
“It’s a job,” Katerina said. “Jobs you do right or you don’t take them.”
Angela smiled and went out into the cold, and the bell went, and the warm gold closed back over her.
That’s when it hit me. Something about it, about how sincere and strong she was, how deserving of happiness. I had no choice.
I had to tell her what I was. Before the wedding.
Before three weeks of close quarters and exhaustion and the thing between us pulling tighter every dawn—before I broke and reached for the chair and the voice with her not knowing what they were, I had to put it on the table and let her choose with her eyes open, the way I’d sworn she would.
And the three weeks were going to be the hardest of my life, because I was going to spend every one of them watching her come apart, allowed to lift the flour and nothing else, holding the one thing that could either ruin her or set her down, not knowing which.
“You’re staring again,” she said, not looking up.
“Just trying to work out how the hell we’re going to do this,” I said.
“How I’m going to do this.”
“Whatever you say, boss,” I said, and got the next sack, and started counting down the days.
Things changed, although not everything.
The shop ran the same as always—the ovens at three, the bell at four, the bus driver and the nurses and the old woman in the three-husband coat, the cases filled and emptied and filled.
But now there was a second shop running underneath it, a ghost shop, the wedding shop, and it had no hours and no end.
We tested at volume. We made forty cannoli to find the four that were right, made tsoureki in braids of six and eight until she had the proportions for two hundred and forty, made trays and trays of things that went into boxes for the day-old shelf or into me.
She didn’t sleep. I knew because I was there at three and gone at ten and the lights had been on past me both ways.
She’d nap on the office chair with her head on the desk for twenty minutes and call it rest. She ate when I put it in front of her and not otherwise, and I learned to put it in front of her sideways—a roll left at her elbow, a coffee set down without comment—because if I made it a thing she wouldn’t take it, and if I made it a job she would.
I held my rule like a man holding a hot pan.
The flour. The lifting. Nothing else. I would not reach for the chair, the voice, the set-down—not until she knew what they were.
So I lifted and I fed her sideways and I watched her run herself down to the wick.
And underneath all of it was the loaf.
The mastic loaf. Her father’s. I’d never seen anything take her the way that loaf took her.
The mastic came in little tears of resin she ground by hand, and the dough wanted a thing from her she couldn’t quite give it, and she’d told me once, flat, not looking up, that he made it every Sunday and she’d never once got it right, not once in a year of trying, and she said it the way you say a thing that costs you, and I’d kept my mouth shut and greased the trays.
She wanted it on the Caruso table. That was the whole of it. She said the table needs something with weight to it, a bread, not a sweet, and went back to the bench.
She could not make it work at scale.
One was hard. Twelve was impossible. The crumb went dense, or the mastic went bitter, or the crust came out wrong, and she’d pull a tray and look at it and not say anything, just set it on the day-old shelf and start again, and the days got short and the wedding got close and the loaf would not come, and she stopped sleeping at all.
It broke on a Tuesday, in the dark before the dark.
I came in earlier than four, and the ovens were already going, which meant probably she’d never gone home.
She was at the bench with mastic dust to the wrist working a dough that was already lost—I could see it was lost, the gluten gone, the thing slack and gray under her hands—and she was working it anyway, in tight hard circles, the way she’d scrubbed the scorch off the wall a lifetime ago, like enough pressure could unmake the failure.
Her hands were shaking.
Worse than I’d ever seen them. Not the end-of-day tremor.
A deep shake, the shake of a body that has spent everything and gone into the walls for more, and her face had a grayness on it under the flour that put a stone in my chest, and as I watched she reached for the next thing and the room tilted on her—I saw it tilt, saw her catch the bench edge with one fist, saw her sway and lock her knees and tell the room to hold still by force of will.
“Sit down,” I said.
She didn’t.
“Katerina.” I was across the kitchen before I’d decided to be. “I’m telling you to sit down. Now.”
“I have to—the loaf—I have to get the loaf, the wedding’s in—”
“The loaf can wait. You can’t.” I took the dough out of her hands.
Just took it. Set it aside. Took her by the shoulders, careful, the way you steady the dog, and the shoulders under my hands were shaking so hard it scared me, and I turned the chair with my foot the way I’d turned it that first time and I put her in it. “Sit. Eat. I’ve got the counter.”
And here is where it went different.