Chapter 15
Tonio
Five in the morning, and the bakery was like a war zone.
I’d seen Filoxenia at every hour there was. The dead three-o’clock dark, just her and the ovens and the ghost. The lunch crush. The slow afternoon when she worked herself gray to spite me. I’d never seen it like this. Every surface had a job.
The marble ran ranks of cannoli shells like soldiers on parade.
The proofing rack held tsoureki braids glossy under egg wash, gold catching the under-counter light.
The syrup things wept slow into their pans, and the whole place smelled of orange-blossom and toasted sesame and butter going dark, the smell that hits you at the door like a wall after the cold of the street.
But this time she wasn’t alone in it.
Donatella had claimed the far end of the marble, in one of Kat’s spare aprons knotted over a coat that cost more than the ovens, a clipboard in one hand and a pen behind her ear and a second pen in her teeth.
She was running deliveries like an air-traffic controller—two hundred and forty covers, a wedding cake in pieces, the tray counts, the van times—and every few minutes she’d bark a number across the room and somebody would answer it, and the machine of the morning kept turning.
The somebodies were mine. Three of them.
Young Caruso soldiers, off shift, sleeves shoved to the elbow, piping cannoli at the bench with the doomed concentration of men handling explosives.
I’d done that. A week of charm, and when the wedding bore down and Kat needed hands, I’d called in the favor with a grin and a box of the good stuff, and here they were at five in the morning with cream on their forearms, getting yelled at by a baker half their size and loving it more than they’d ever admit.
“No,” Katerina was telling the biggest one, leaning over his shoulder. “You’re choking the bag. Light. Don’t strangle it.” She took it out of his hands, ran a clean fat line into a shell in one pass, gave it back. “Like that. Again.”
“Yes, boss,” he said, and meant it, and the other two snickered, and she shut them up with a look.
In the window seat, the old woman in the coat with three dead husbands sat with a koulouraki in each hand, supervising.
That’s the word she used. Supervising. Which meant eating, and rendering verdicts.
She’d watched the soldiers pipe for ten minutes and pronounced them “boys,” dismissively, the worst thing she had.
She’d watched Donatella run her clipboard and decided, out loud, that she liked her.
She’d watched Kat pull a tray of tsoureki and said something in Greek that made Kat laugh and go pink at once.
I hauled flour. That was my rank in this army and I knew it.
Two sacks to a shoulder, up from the storeroom, past Olimpo in his doorway—who had positioned himself, with his usual genius, in the exact spot guaranteed to inconvenience the most people, and who lifted his great grizzled head as I stepped over him and gave me a grumble that was a whole paragraph of judgment about the hour.
I told him to move. He did not move. I stepped over him.
I racked the flour and I stopped a second, in the corner, out of the current, and I watched her.
She was lit up. That’s the only word. She barked orders.
Hands. There. That tray. The young soldiers jumped.
Donatella threw her a number and Kat threw one back without looking.
She caught the old woman stealing a cannoli before it was set and pointed at her without breaking stride and the old woman cackled, unrepentant, and ate it anyway.
I looked at the bakery now, full to the walls, loud with three languages and a dog and an old woman’s verdicts and young men learning to pipe, the heat of the ovens running, the bread stacked warm, and I thought: this. This is the thing her father wanted. The loud full shop.
I kept the flour coming.
In between everything—the cannoli, the braids, the soldiers needing correcting, Donatella’s numbers flying across the marble—Katerina kept stealing back to the one tray nobody had ordered.
The mastic loaf. Her father’s loaf. The one thing in the whole shop that wasn’t for anybody, that wouldn’t go in a delivery van or onto a wedding table, that she made for no reason except that she had to and couldn’t.
I knew the shape of it by now. I’d watched her fail it a dozen times.
She’d mix it fast and fierce, the way she does everything, the mastic resin worked in early and hard, and she’d put it to prove and she’d watch it like it owed her money, and she’d pull it, and it would be wrong.
Always wrong. The crumb gone tight and mean, the resin sitting bitter on the top like a grudge instead of melting through.
And her jaw would go hard—that specific hardness, the one she didn’t even know she did, the one that meant she’d failed him again—and she’d put it aside without a word and go back to the cannoli.
She did it now. Mixed it between two trays of tsoureki, fast, the resin crushed and folded in while the dough was still warm and working, and she covered it and went back to the cream, and I carried flour and watched her not-watch it, and I felt the morning’s gold curdle a little around her, just around her, a private weather only she stood in.
When she pulled it the crumb was tight.
I saw it from across the room. I saw her break the heel off and look at it and I saw the jaw go hard, and she put it down on the marble, the failed loaf, dense and bitter and wrong, her father’s Sunday she could not make, and she turned back to the bench and picked the piping bag up like it had done something to her.
From the window seat the old woman spoke.
She’d been watching. She watched everything, that one, over her koulourakia, missing nothing—she’d clocked the loaf, clocked the failing, clocked the jaw.
She said it in Greek first, then again half in English for the room, dry, unhurried, a woman who’d buried three husbands and had no patience left for waste.
“My mother put the mastic in at the end,” she said.
“In the cool. Not in the heat like that, koritsi, what are you doing. You fight it in too early.” She broke another koulouraki and ate half.
“You’re rushing it. Like everything. You young ones, you rush the loaf like you rush your lives, and then you wonder why it comes out hard.
” She waved the other half at the failed heel on the marble.
“Late. Cold. Gentle. The mastic doesn’t want a fight. It wants to be let in.”
Katerina went still.
She stood with the piping bag in her hand and she didn’t move, and I watched her face change, watched something arrive in it, something old.
“He said that,” she said. Quiet. Not to the old woman.
Not to me. To the air, to the photograph by the coffee machine, to a man fifteen years dead.
“Late and cool. He used to say it. Siga-siga.” Her voice cracked the smallest bit on the Greek.
“He told me a hundred times and I never—he couldn’t show me.
He never got the chance to show me. He just said the words and I thought I knew what they meant. ”
She set the bag down.
She didn’t say anything else. She went to the cool end of the bench, away from the ovens, away from the heat, and she started again—but slow this time.
Slow, which I had never once seen her be.
She made the dough plain and let it rest and didn’t rush it, and she didn’t crush the mastic into the heat, she waited, she let the dough come down cool under her hands, and then, late, last of all, she worked the resin in gentle, barely, folding it through with the flat of her fingers the way you’d settle something to sleep.
Late. Cold. Gentle.
She did it with her whole body gone careful, gone reverent, and the old woman watched and said nothing now, and even Donatella had gone quiet at the marble, and the soldiers had stopped their snickering, and the whole loud shop had dropped its voice around her without anyone deciding to.
She proved it. She baked it. She didn’t watch it like it owed her money this time.
She left it alone—gave it room—and went and ran a few trays of cannoli with her hands steady and her face very still, and I carried flour and watched her wait, and the smell started coming up off the deck oven about ten minutes in, and it wasn’t the bitter resin smell of all the failures.
It was pine. Pine and honey, warm, melting through.
She pulled it.
She set it on the rack and let it breathe a minute, the way you have to, and I saw the cost of that minute in her shoulders. Then she broke it.
The crumb opened soft. Open and tender and right, the resin gone through it instead of sitting on it, melted into the whole of the loaf so the pine ran sweet under the honey, and the smell of it filled the shop, filled the whole bright crowded room, pine and honey and a dead man’s Sunday morning, and Katerina stood over it and went completely silent.
She pressed her wrist to her mouth, hard, the burn-scarred wrist, and she held it there and looked down at the broken loaf and then up at the photograph by the coffee machine, at her father pinned there in faded color, and she said something in Greek so quiet I couldn’t catch it.
Three words, maybe four. Soft as a held breath.
Agápi mou, the start of it, maybe—my love, the thing she’d said into my neck—or maybe it wasn’t for me at all, maybe none of it had ever once been for me, maybe it was for him, the whole bakery, the whole year, the loaf finally come right, all of it always for him.
I wanted to kiss her, but I didn’t. I gave her space—there would be time for kisses later.
The bell went, mid-morning, and I knew before he was through the door.
There was something off with him.