Chapter 15 #3
That’s the thing I keep coming back to, after. She was right. Every word of it was true. You don’t move on a room full of two families’ guns. Ego is not a plan. The wedding was a fortress, the safest walls in the city, every dangerous man we had stacked into one ballroom with their eyes open.
The soldiers picked their piping bags back up.
The old woman put a koulouraki in her mouth.
The radio kept playing. The room let its breath out, all at once, the held silence breaking into the ordinary noise of a busy morning, and I felt it go out of me too, the relief settling deeper, the danger reshaping itself in my chest from a thing with teeth into a thing I could name and stand in front of and dismiss.
A tantrum. A snub. Saturday a fortress. Nothing happens Saturday.
I almost believed it all the way down.
I went and got more flour.
By the time the helpers cleared out the shop smelled of the loaf that finally came right.
The soldiers had gone, cream-handed and grinning, with bread under their arms. Donatella had swept out with her clipboard and her brass and a kiss to Kat’s cheek and a promise to be back at dawn.
The old woman had been walked home by a neighbor’s boy, full of koulourakia and compliments.
And it was just us, the way it’s mostly been—me, her, the dog, the radio low—except the air was different now, threaded all through with pine and honey, the smell of her father’s Sunday hanging in the warm where the loaf cooled on the rack.
She was wound tight under the calm.
I could see it. She’d held the morning together—the loaf, the man in the coat, the wedding she would not let anything ruin. It was all still in her, coiled, looking for somewhere to go.
So I spoke to her.
“Sit,” I said. Soft. The chair turned to face out, the way I turn it. “Down. Now.”
She sat. She didn’t fight it, which told me how far gone she was, and I put a plate of pastries at her elbow and I crouched in front of her and put my hands on her knees and waited until she looked at me.
“You’re done,” I said. “Day’s over. The ovens are cold. The door’s locked. I’ve got the security—it’s al good. There’s nothing left to do tonight, so put it down.” I picked a koulouri held it to her. “Eat. All of it. Don’t make me invoke the contract on the first night I’ve got you home tired.”
The corner of her mouth went up—the near-smile, the standing ovation—and she ate.
Slow at first, then like a woman who’d forgotten she was starving, and I watched the coil come out of her bite by bite, watched the boss and the books and the man in the coat all drain off her into the warm gold quiet, until she was just Katerina in a chair, small and tired and finally, blessedly let down off the holding.
“Good girl,” I said, low, and watched it go through her the way it always does, the color up her throat, the breath catching, the whole proud meticulous woman gone soft for the held second of it.
When the plate was clean I took it and set it aside and pulled a stool over close so our knees touched, and I told her about Saturday, because I could feel it sitting in her under everything else, the wedding she was terrified of, the family she didn’t know how to belong to.
“Here’s how the wedding goes,” I said. “You listening? Because this is the rule and there’s no arguing this one.
” I tipped her chin up with two fingers.
“You’re not a baker tomorrow. You’re done being a baker by ten in the morning.
The team comes in early, you direct, the desserts get finished and boxed and loaded, and then the van takes them to the venue and the team goes with them to plate and serve, and they handle all of it, every cannoli, every braid, the cake you and Donatella drew up.
You don’t touch it after ten. You don’t lift a finger.
” I watched her start to object and I put my thumb on her lip, gentle.
“No. After ten you go upstairs and you put on the dress you chose—the one that makes me forget my own name—and you let me put you in the car, and you come to the wedding as my woman. On my arm. In front of all of them. Don Arturo’s people, the Carusos, my cousins, the whole loud clan of us.
And you let them see you, and you dance with me, and you let the family you’re so scared to belong to close all the way around you, because that’s where you’re going to be from now on, honey, inside it, with the rest of us. ”
She was quiet a long moment.
“I don’t know how to do that,” she said, finally, small. “Belong to a thing like that.”
“You stand next to me,” I said. “That’s the whole of it.
You stand next to me and I do the rest. You’ve spent your whole life being the one who holds the room up by hand.
Saturday you don’t hold anything. Saturday you get held.
” I took her hands, the burn-scarred ones, and pressed my mouth to the inside of her wrist where the scars run pale.
“Let me promise you that. The desserts go out, the team clears, and you come dance with me and let it be a good day. Let me give you that.”
She let me.
The loaf cooled on the rack, finally come right, her father’s dream made real.
The shop sat dark behind the new green glass, FILOXENIA in the deep paint I’d lettered with my own hands, the curve of the F still a little wrong.
Across the city, off a plane that afternoon, Don Arturo was already somewhere in Chicago, settling in for his daughter-in-law’s people’s wedding, for family, for the loud full room.
And tomorrow was the wedding.