Chapter 11 #2
She bossed everyone. The vendors. The florist. Me.
She tried to boss Olimpo, who was in his usual ridiculous spread across the worst possible spot, and told him flatly to relocate, and Olimpo gave her the no-tail-wag that is a verdict and did not move one ounce, and Donatella looked at the dog, and the dog looked at Donatella, and she said “fine” and stepped over him like he was furniture, and I think that was the moment she earned him, honestly.
She took orders from no one.
And then Katerina, three things behind, sugar going into the big mixer, the day clawing at her the way it always did, said it without looking up.
“Hands.”
And I put the tray down and turned exactly where she aimed me—to the proofing rack, no please, no argument, because that’s the music, that’s the rhythm, my body moving on her word before my head got a vote—
And Donatella stopped typing.
I felt it more than saw it. The hurricane went still.
I had my back to her, hands on the rack where Kat had pointed me, and behind me the whole command post went quiet, both phones forgotten, and when I turned around she was looking at me with her chin propped on one ringed hand and an expression of such pure, dawning, delighted understanding that I wanted to climb into the deck oven and pull the door shut.
“She says ‘hands,’” Donatella said, to the room, soft, wondering, “and the whole man just moves.” She looked from me to Katerina and back.
The corner of her mouth went up under the red.
“I walked in on something last night. The door was unlocked—not my fault. And I’ve been sitting here all morning telling myself I imagined it.
” She picked the pen back up, twirled it once, devastating.
“I did not imagine it. You two—” she waved the pen between us, the same way Kat had once waved a hand at all of me, the family gesture, apparently we all have it, “—that.”
“Tella.”
“I’m not saying anything. I’m logistics.
I’m here to count cannoli.” She went back to the spreadsheet, but she was smiling now, fully, the warmth under the sharp, the whole loud clan of us in it.
“It’s just very nice,” she added, not looking up, putting the thing right back on the marble between us where it would sit all day, “to see my new cousin take an order so well.”
Katerina, at the mixer, went red to her hairline.
I went and got more flour, and stood in the doorway Donatella had finally vacated, and tried to pretend none of this was happening.
The rush went the way rushes go, all at once and then not at all, and then it was time for the two of them to square off over the cake.
It was a thing of beauty to watch, if you weren’t in the blast radius.
Donatella had a schematic. Of course she did. A real one, drawn to scale, four tiers and a structural diagram and a note in the margin about transport temperature, and she’d laid it on the marble like a treaty and put one ringed finger on it and said, “This is what they approved.”
Katerina looked at it the way she looks at a buyout offer.
“No way.”
“It’s approved.”
“It’ll collapse.” Flat. The boss, full and certain in her own kitchen.
“Look at the ratio—you’ve got four tiers and a dowel plan a child drew.
The bottom tier won’t hold that. You’ll have a cake on the floor in front of two hundred and forty Sicilians and a don off a plane, and they’ll blame me, because my name’s on the contract. ”
“The designer is the best in—”
“The designer’s never moved a cake across this city.
” Kat pulled a pencil out of her apron and started marking up the sacred schematic right there, fast, hard little strokes.
“You internal-support every tier, you separate them for transport, you assemble on site. You don’t build a four-tier and pray.
I don’t pray. Praying is for people who didn’t do the math. ”
Donatella’s eyes narrowed. The ring started to turn.
And then it stopped turning.
Donatella leaned in over Kat’s pencil marks, and her face changed, the sharp going thoughtful, and she said, slow, “You’re separating them for transport.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I told the designer. Three times.” She straightened up. “He said it would ‘compromise the line.’”
“The line’s already compromised. It’s on the floor.”
“That’s exactly what I said.” Donatella stabbed the schematic with the pen. “I told him we need to consider the practicalities and he looked at me like I’d asked him to bake it in a microwave.”
“That’s what they do,” Kat said, and there was something new in her voice, something I’d almost never heard pointed at another person—recognition. “All vision and no execution.”
“All vision and no execution,” Donatella agreed, grim, and the two of them looked down at the marked-up schematic together, shoulder to shoulder now instead of across the marble, two commanding women who’d discovered they commanded the same army, and something settled between them, grudging and real.
I stood by the rack and didn’t say a word, because you don’t get in the way of a thing like that. You just get to watch it.
“You two,” Donatella said to me later, “seem to be hitting it off, Toe.”
“We work together.”
“Mm.” She went back to the schematic, but she was smiling, the warmth coming up under the sharp.
“This family loves drama, you know. We feed on it. Marco will be insufferable. Santo will pretend he doesn’t care and then ask me forty questions.
Sera will be kind about it, which is worse.
” She glanced at Kat, then at me, and the needle went in soft and clean.
“I felt it the second I walked in last night. The whole room had a temperature. I’ve been to a lot of rooms with that temperature. I know what it means.”
Katerina, marking the schematic, said nothing, but her ears had gone pink.
And here’s the thing I didn’t expect: Donatella was kind to her.
Not soft—Donatella doesn’t do soft, same as Kat doesn’t—but kind in the way the sharp ones are kind, sideways, through the work.
She started asking Kat real questions, about the loaves, about the Greek things she wanted on the table, about her father, and she listened to the answers, and she made a note in her missal that wasn’t logistics, and once she said something dry enough that Katerina actually laughed—a real one, surprised out of her, the kind that changes her whole face—and the sound of it went straight through my chest, because I have spent weeks now learning to be glad of the small things in this woman, the cold feet, the half-smiles, the stop dawdling, and here was a stranger pulling a real laugh out of her over a cake schematic, and I had never been so grateful to anyone in my life.
She was happy. For a minute Katerina was just plainly happy, talking shop with a woman who got it, and I leaned on the rack and let it land on me and didn’t try to do anything with it.
When the bag was packed and the schematic settled and the linen vendor beaten into submission, Donatella stood, untied the borrowed apron, and went to the front of the shop to put herself back together, and she did it in the new glass.
“I like you, Katty,” she said. Flat. To the glass.
The highest thing she’d say. “You don’t take my crap but you’ve got a heart.
That’s rare. I’ll be back Tuesday with the seating, which is going to be a fucking war.
” She uncapped her lipstick, applied a lick, then tucked it away.
Pulled her coat closed. “Goodbye, cousin,” she said to me, and went out into the cold, and the bell went, and the warm gold closed back over the gap she left, and the shop was ours again, quiet, the two of us and the dog and the radio low.
Katerina let out a breath she’d been holding all day.
“I’m taking you somewhere,” I said.
She looked at me.
“Come on, honey. Let’s go.”
The place I took her was small and old and Greek, three blocks the wrong way and worth it, a dozen tables and a tin ceiling and an icon of some saint or other. I’d picked it on purpose. I wanted her somewhere that smelled like home, somewhere her shoulders might come down.
She’d worn a dark green dress. Something she’d picked, and she kept tugging at the hem of it like it might betray her. She was beautiful—unbelievably so.
She let me order for her, which was its own small surrender, and I caught it and didn’t make a thing of it, just said the dishes to the old man at the table and watched Katerina watch me do it with a look in her eyes I was learning to read—relief, the relief of one less thing.
Then I got out the paper.
“What’s that,” she said. Already suspicious.
“It’s the thing.” I smoothed it flat on the cloth. “The contract.”
“A contract?”
“Well, not yet.”
“So it’s just . . . paper?”
“Angela and Pietro have one. Pietro wrote theirs like a lawyer—it’s a monster, three pages, it reads like a lease.
” I clicked the pen. “I don’t want ours like that.
I want it warmer than that. Funnier. Ours.
But real. We write down what it is, what it isn’t, what you’ve agreed to and what you never will, so it’s there in ink and neither of us has to wonder in the dark.
” I slid the pen across to her. “And you hold the pen first. Because the first thing’s yours. ”
She looked at the pen. She looked at the saint. She picked up the pen.
And of course—of course—she treated it like a flour order.
She wrote KATAIFI at the top first, in capitals, hard small letters, pressing so the pen near tore the cloth-thin paper, and under it in smaller hand: stops everything.
Anytime. No earning. No explaining. She underlined it twice.
Then she sat back and looked at me like a woman who has opened the negotiation and intends to win it.
“Rules,” she said. “We start with rules, because rules are the part that affects me and I want them tight. Read me what you’ve got and I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it.”
“I love you,” I said, before I could stop it.