Chapter 10
Katerina
It felt, all of a sudden, like my life had exploded.
The threats. Tonio. The wedding contract. DDlg. Everything.
For so long, life had been stable.
A struggle—sure—but stable.
But now it was still a struggle, but it felt about as stable as a card tower in an earthquake.
Two hundred and forty covers. The whole dessert table—the Italian things they wanted and the Greek alongside, my grandmother’s cannoli and the loaves and the koulourakia and the syrup things, every one of them made by these two hands, because I wasn’t going to hand these people a thing I’d farmed out. And the cake. And the loaf.
The loaf I couldn’t make.
Plus the daily shop. The bus driver and his seeds. The nurses. The old woman.
In two weeks.
With two hands. Well, there was Tonio, too, but his hands were hot and bless him, he was new to all this.
Through the thin wall I could hear him.
Low. That rumble of him, the warm engine of it, working one of the regular customers about something I couldn’t make out, and then her cackle came up through the plaster, delighted, scandalised, the laugh of a woman being told she’s a heartbreaker by a handsome man who means it.
He did that. He’d been doing it for weeks.
The difference was that yesterday I’d thought it was charm—the same charm I’d thrown back at him forty times and watched bounce—and today I knew what it was.
Today I had the word for it. He runs toward the thing that needs feeding.
The old woman with the son who never calls. He fed her too. He fed everybody.
I caught myself touching my mouth.
My own fingers, two of them, pressed to my bottom lip, where his had been, where his teeth had been, and I yanked them down into my lap like I’d touched the oven.
My face went hot. Last night was still on my skin—I could feel it, the flour and the cold marble and the place on my throat where the pulse went, good girl, the shudder that went down me when he said it.
I was a grown woman doing the books with the door shut and I was sitting there blushing like the boy in the thin coat counting his coins, and I made myself look back at the page.
Under the desk, Olimpo sighed.
He had jammed himself into the one place in the building he wasn’t allowed, the footwell, his enormous wire-haired head resting on my boot. The office is a closet. There is no room in it for a small bear. Yet here he was.
“Out,” I told him.
He did not listen. He breathed, slow and judgmental, and his eyebrow twitched.
“You’re not supposed to be in here.” I nudged him with the boot. He let the boot move him a quarter inch and then put all his weight back, heavier, deliberate, a verdict. I gave up. I left my foot where it was, under the warm weight of a dog who’d decided, and went back to the impossible page.
Could I do it?
The deposit cleared the loan. The work would break my hands—possibly my spirit.
I didn’t know what I was going to do.
The door opened.
Tonio leaned in, filling it, and he didn’t say anything about the books or the numbers or the dog who wasn’t supposed to be here. He just set a koulouraki down on the corner of the desk, on a square of waxed paper.
“Can’t wait for later,” he said. Low. Just for me.
And I felt the heat go straight down through me, and I blushed fiercely.
Later. We had important business later.
The day was done and the bakery was empty. Tonio had made me promise that morning that I would take time away from everything—just half an hour—to go through a few . . . details.
He’d asked me to think of questions about our dynamic to raise, so I’d done it, writing them on the back of a flour-order docket.
So after we locked the door and killed the front lights and the ovens started their long tick down into quiet, I set two coffees on the marble and I took the docket out of my apron and I unfolded it and I read.
“Tell me what the dynamic is to you,” I said. “So I have it clear in my head.”
He’d settled across the bench from me with his coffee, sleeves still up. He didn’t grin.
“It’s me holding the things you carry,” he said.
“When you let me. The big ones and the small ones. What you eat. When you stop. Sometimes what you wear. Your sleep. Making sure you’re kind to yourself.
And helping you find the Little person inside you.
She wants to play. To feel safe. To express herself.
I want to nurture her. That’s the whole of it. Everything else is detail.”
My face was hot. I kept my eyes on the docket. “So . . . what it isn’t.”
“It isn’t me deciding I own you.” He said it flat, no heat, like he was reading off a docket of his own.
“It isn’t a thing you can’t stop. It isn’t me making you small because I want you small—it’s me holding the line so you can put down the part of you that’s been holding it alone, and only because you asked.
Take the line back and I let go. Every time. No argument.”
I wrote nothing. The pencil sat in my hand. I went to the next question and my voice came out fine, level, the boss voice, and underneath it everything was shaking.
“Does it make me weak?”
I asked it looking at the docket. Not at him. I couldn’t have asked it looking at him.
He was quiet a second, and when he answered, his voice had gone lower, the careful low that wasn’t a tactic, that I’d learned was the truth coming up out of him.
“It’s the opposite of weak,” he said. “Katerina. Look at what it costs you to hand a person the flour. I’ve watched you—you can’t take a roll without parsing it.
You carry this whole place on two hands.
” A breath. “Handing someone the weight on purpose, knowing exactly what you’re doing, choosing it with your eyes open and knowing you can rip it back any second—that’s not weakness.
That’s the bravest thing I’ve ever watched anybody do.
Soft is a thing you’re strong enough to be. Most people aren’t.”
I had to put the pencil down because my hand wasn’t steady.
“There needs to be a word,” I said, to get us off it. “I read that. A word that stops everything. A—”
“A safeword. Yeah.” He nodded. “You pick it. Something you’d never say in the middle of it by accident. Something that means stop, all of it, now, and I stop, no matter what’s happening, no matter how far in we are.”
I thought about it. And the thing my tired stupid head landed on, of course, the thing my whole life had brought me to, was the pastry.
“Kataifi,” I said.
He didn’t laugh. I’d half-said it to be funny, a small acid thing to take the weight off, because kataifi is frankly ridiculous.
The, fine shredded dough you coax for hours, that takes forever and falls apart into a thousand useless threads the second you rush it or grip it too hard.
It was a joke. It was also, I realised as I said it, not a joke at all.
He didn’t laugh. “Say it again.”
“Tonio—”
“Say it again. So it’s in your mouth. So it’s real and you don’t have to find it under panic.” He held my eyes across the cooling kitchen. “Kataifi.”
“Kataifi,” I said. Twice. Once for him and once for me, and somewhere in the second one it stopped being funny altogether.
Then I said the thing I’d written last and almost crossed out.
“Everyone who’s ever held my—” I stopped.
Started again. I made myself say it the ugly way, the true way.
“Everyone who ever took care of me did it by deciding things for me. My father loved me and worked himself dead doing it and never once asked what I wanted. The loans were help. Help with strings. I’ve never met the kind without strings.
” My voice was holding by a thread and I let it.
“So how is this not just—a leash in a nicer coat? How do I know being looked after isn’t just being owned, with you smiling while you do it? ”
He didn’t argue it away.
“You don’t know,” he said. “Not from me telling you. You can’t.
You’d be a fool to take my word for it. And you’re not a fool.
” He set his coffee down. “So here’s how you find out.
The power is in your hand the whole time.
Not mine. You hand it over when you want and you rip it back when you want. You wait and see. The power is yours.”
The ovens ticked. The radio played low, some old Greek thing my father would’ve hummed. My heart pounded as I considered what I was about to ask.
“And what happens . . . when I don’t do what I’m told?”
He answered it the same way at first. Plain.
“Discipline. But never in anger,” he said.
“That’s the first thing, and it’s the only thing that matters.
It’s not punishment because I’m mad. It’s a way of drawing the line so you can feel where it is.
So you know exactly where the edge is and you don’t have to spend your strength finding it yourself in the dark.
Some people need to hear it. Some people need to feel it.
It’s structure. It’s a hand on your back that says here, this far, no further, I’ve got it from here. ”
I wrote structure on the docket. My pencil was steady.
“Do you want me to show you?” he asked.
The pencil started to tremble.
I heard myself say “yes” before I could process what he’d asked.
“Stand up,” he said.
The voice. The soft-steel one. And I stood.
“Turn around. Hands flat on the marble.”
My body did it before I’d agreed to. It knew the shape already—the same shape as last night, the bench at my hips, my palms going flat to the cold stone, my weight tipping forward—and it went loose and ready and waiting a full second before my head caught up, like the body had been keeping a secret from me, like it had wanted this longer than I’d let myself know.
I felt him come up behind me. The heat of him, the furnace, close.