Chapter 14 #2
I bought it with my own money. Counted out at the till with the same hands that count out flour.
“Oh my God,” Donatella said, when she saw what I had over my arm, and then she whooped, full-throated, scandalous, in a tasteful boutique on Damen Avenue, and the saleswoman jumped and I went scarlet and grinning all at once.
“Katty. KATTY. Look at you. Who knew. The bakery girl’s got teeth.
” She fanned herself with a pair of stockings she had no intention of buying.
“Whoever this is for is going to need a lie-down.”
“It’s for me,” I said, and meant it, and it came out fierce and a little drunk and entirely true. “I bought it for me.”
“Even better,” she said, and there was something real under the brass, something that saw me clear. “Best reason there is.”
And underneath all of it, under the new shining hair and the black thing folded in tissue in the bag on my arm, the green lace was still on. Still warm. Still his choice against my skin where he’d put it, where he’d told me to feel it all day and think of him.
Two things, then. The green he’d chosen for me, and the black I’d chosen for myself.
I felt them both, walking back out into the cold with Donatella.
The bag was warm on my arm and the day was still good, and then Donatella went quiet.
That was the first wrong thing. Donatella does not go quiet.
She’d been a running commentary—the salon, the florist, Santo, the black thing I’d bought, a whole opinion on every passing coat in the boutique—and then, at the till, while the saleswoman wrapped my scandal in tissue, her phone lit and she lifted it and looked at the screen and stopped talking entirely.
“What,” I said.
“Outside.” Her voice had changed. Flat, low, none of the morning in it. “Come outside.”
The cold hit after the boutique warmth like a slap.
She walked me up the block with a hand on my arm, fast, scanning the street the way I scan a room, the way Tonio scans a room, and I felt my own animal come up to meet hers — the watchful, the counting, the where-are-the-doors — and she steered me into the recessed doorway of a shop that had closed for good, plywood in the windows, and put her back to the street, and showed me the screen.
A photograph.
It was my shop. Filoxenia, my front, shot at night from across the road, the streetlight making a cold pool on the dead asphalt where the man had stood to take it.
There was the new green glass. There was FILOXENIA across it in the deep green Tonio had repainted with his own hands one slow afternoon, tongue between his teeth, getting the curve of the F wrong twice and swearing about it in Italian, and I’d brought him coffee and called him a vandal, and it had been one of the good days.
It looked different in the photo. It looked like a thing being looked at by someone who meant it harm.
Under the picture there were a bunch of words in Italian.
“What does it say.”
“It’s a threat.” Donatella didn’t look up from the screen. “It’s not—Katty. It’s a threat.”
“What does it say, Donatella?”
“I’m not going to translate the whole of it.
” Her jaw set. “You don’t need every word of it in your head.
You need the shape.” She turned the phone a half inch so I could see better, and pointed, the ring catching the gray light.
“It’s details about your shop. Your name.
Tonio’s. And there’s a date next to it.” Her finger moved. “Saturday.”
Saturday.
The wedding.
“Marco found this,” Donatella said, and her voice had gone careful in a way I’d never heard it, the brass stripped right off, and that frightened me more than the photograph.
“This. The threat, the date, the photo. He sent it here. There will be a meeting about this, things have to shift around with the wedding. We have to keep everyone safe.”
And there it was, under the armor, under the red lipstick and the four languages and the spreadsheet she ran the world from—fear.
Real, naked, for one second, before she pushed it back down.
Donatella Caruso was afraid, and she was afraid for me, and the two of those things together turned my legs to water in a doorway on Damen Avenue with a bag of black lace on my arm.
“I’m calling Tonio,” she said, already moving to it, thumb on the screen.
“Dona—”
“No. Listen to me.” She caught my eyes and held them, and she was steel again, the fear folded away.
“Don’t go anywhere tonight. You understand?
And no baking! The ovens stay cold. You don’t go in alone, not for one minute, not at three, not for the bus driver, not for anybody.
And you let Tonio stay. With you. Tonight and every night until this is done.
” Her thumb hovered. “Promise me. Say you’ll let him stay. ”
I said nothing.
“Katty.” Donatella’s voice cracked at the edge. “Promise.”
I looked at the photograph of my father’s name in the green Tonio had painted, shot from across a dark street by a man who meant me harm, and I felt the green lace warm against my skin where he’d chosen it that morning, a hundred years ago, in a gray bed when the only thing in the world was his hands.
I didn’t promise.
I just said, “Call him,” and hated, even then, the part of me that had to be made to.
Of course he stayed.
Donatella, not knowing what was going on between us, called him from the doorway on Damen.
She sounded surprised at how quickly he seemed to agree.
By the time we got back to the block Tonio was already there, parked where he could see the curb and the new glass and both ends of the street at once, and he’d come up out of the car and across the sidewalk to meet me with his hands already reaching, his face already changed—the soldier up in his eyes where I could see him now, since I knew, since there was no more pretending the killer wasn’t there under the baker’s hands.
He held me on the cold sidewalk and looked at me over my head, scanning, and then he walked me inside and locked the door and pulled the front lights and stood with his back to the new glass the way he does, the wall, between me and the dark.
“You’re safe,” he said. “I’ve got the door, I’ve got the curb, I’ve got it.
Nobody gets near you.” His thumb traced my jaw.
“And later—later we’re going to have some fun, you and me, because you’ve been good all day and I want to hear about your morning, and because I’m not going to let a photograph turn this house cold. ”
I should have been frightened. Part of me was. But the larger part of me, but the part we’d been working on together, felt only this: he was here, and he would protect me.
The safety of it was enormous. It went all through me, warm, total.
“Come here,” he said, and the voice had changed—gone down into the soft-steel, the one with no hurry in it. “Into the kitchen. Where it’s warm.”
I went. The under-counter light was the only light, gold and low, the ovens long cold and quiet, the radio off. Olimpo was a gray heap across the doorway to the storeroom, one amber eye tracking us, an opinion already forming.
“Undress for me,” Tonio said.
Just that. Easy. He leaned back against the marble bench with his arms loose and his eyes steady, and he watched me, and the watching was the whole of it.
I felt the day still on me—the salon shine, the prosecco gone soft and warm in my blood, the bag with the black lace in it that I’d carried home and not mentioned, the green lace I’d taken off at noon in a salon bathroom and replaced with my own daring, my own choice, just to see.
Just to see.
I undressed. Slow, because he was watching slow, because it felt like an event.
The sweater. The jeans. And then I stood at the marble in the thing I’d bought, the black, the scandal, the crotchless set I’d picked with my own hand and paid for with my own money and grinned at my own nerve while Donatella whooped—and I watched his face when he saw it.
I could see him fighting his delight.
“Now,” he said, low. “Now that’s interesting.”
He pushed off the bench and came toward me.
“I picked the green,” he said. He said it gently, almost sadly, like a man reading a figure that doesn’t reconcile.
“Didn’t I. This morning. I held it out, and I told you.
Under everything. All day. Every minute, out with Donatella, the salon, all those people — and you’d feel it, and you’d think of me.
” He stopped a foot from me, and his eyes went down me, that inventory look, that count-and-keep look, except now there was a discrepancy in the ledger and he’d found it. “And you said you’d be good.”
“I said I’m always good.”
“Mm.” He started to circle me. Slow. Behind me, the heat of him at my back, then the other side, taking me in from every angle, the black lace, the bare of me it left framed and offered, humming low in his chest the whole way around like a man appraising.
“You took the green one off,” he said, from somewhere behind my ear.
“Somewhere out there, today, you took off the thing I chose, and you put on this.” His hand came up and brushed the strap on my shoulder, one finger, and I shivered.
“You bought this for me, didn’t you. You went out, in the middle of my morning, with my lace on your skin, and you stood in some shop and you picked this out, knowing—knowing exactly—what it’d do to me when I saw it.
” He came back around to my front, and his eyes were dark and his voice had gone to silk.
“You disobeyed me on purpose. Just to see what I’d do. ”
I lifted my chin.
The prosecco was still in me, gone warm, and the day’s wonder, and the new thing he’d opened up in me that I was only just learning to play with—the mouth on me loose now in this new direction, the brat I’d never once been allowed to be surfacing under his hands like the Little did, like everything did with him.
“Maybe I did,” I said.
He went very still. And then he nodded. Slow. The way you nod when a number you suspected gets confirmed.