Chapter 16
Katerina
Ididn’t know where to put my hands.
It was so rare that I didn’t wake and immediately start to work.
In my kitchen, I knew exactly where every part of me went—knuckles in the dough, palm to the marble, eyes on the rising loaves in the ovens.
But here, at this beautiful Sicilian church, as I stood in the kind of dress that I almost never wore, I twiddled my fingers and tapped my toes.
The church had given way to the garden behind it, and the garden had been turned into something out of a fairytale.
Lemon trees in great terracotta pots, the fruit still on them, hard and bright.
White linen on two hundred and forty chairs and white linen waiting on the long tables beyond, and a string trio in the corner under an arch of orange blossom, playing something low and old.
The smell was intoxicating—a wall of it, orange blossom and the dark caramel edge of meat turning somewhere on a fire, and under it the green of crushed grass and the warm stone of the church wall holding the afternoon’s heat.
I counted covers before I could stop myself.
Two-forty, seated by branch—I clocked it without meaning to, the way the chairs ran in family knots, nine of them, each cluster its own weather, the old country at the front and the young blood at the back.
I had catered for events before, and I knew the cost of things.
The linen was immaculate. Italian, hemstitched, handmade. The furniture was—
“Sweetheart, you’ve got to relax.”
Tonio was a wall of dark wool at my side.
I’d never seen him in a suit. This one looked like it was part of him—it fit like a dream.
His tough face, broken nose and crooked smile, juxtaposed with the elegant fabric, his warm crinkling eyes all the more ruinous against the severe black of it.
His hand found the small of my back, warm through the dress, and steered me in through the gap in the chairs with the easy authority of a man who’d been doing it his whole life.
“Breathe,” he murmured, down at my ear. “You look like you’re casing the place for the exits.”
“I am casing the place for the exits.”
“I know. Stop.” His thumb moved once against my spine. “These are people. Just people. Loud, drunk, sentimental people who are going to love you.”
Then the blur started, and I never did get it all back in order.
A tall man, grave and still in the way deep water is still—Dante, the head of the whole Caruso branch—took my hand and inclined his head and said it was good to meet me at last, and on his arm a small dark-eyed woman with freckles she hadn’t bothered to cover smiled at me like she was glad of one more person who didn’t know where to put their hands.
Gemma. She squeezed my fingers and didn’t let go too fast. She was the quiet one in a loud world.
Then a man built like the side of a building, severe enough that I straightened on instinct—Salvatore—who took my hand and bent over it, actually bent, an old-country courtliness that startled a laugh half out of me.
And beside him a woman with scarred knuckles like my own and a handbag that growled.
It growled. A tiny fawn head with one black ear came up out of the bag, four pounds of pure menace, and bared its teeth at a passing waiter with the cool of the room dropping ten degrees around it.
“Midge,” the woman said, flat, not looking up. “He’s fine. Well. Maybe fine is a stretch.”
The dog disagreed and let everyone know.
“It’s mostly men she doesn’t like,” the woman—Cora—told me, dry as anything. “You should be fine.”
“Dogs do tend to like me,” I said, “but it’s mainly because I’m an endless source of treats.” Cora’s mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile but meant the same thing, and I felt the first thread of the day catch in me, the recognition of one guarded woman by another.
And then a man I recognized came at me grinning like trouble made flesh, took my hand and kissed the air over it and said, “So you’re the bakery girl who put my cousin through a window display—God, finally, someone he can’t charm,” and behind him a dark sharp woman in clean lines said something in Italian I didn’t catch and he laughed and pressed his hand to his chest like he’d been wounded.
Marco, who had come into the bakery that one time.
And Serafina—she was really something. Seemed like she was in charge.
The whole warm wicked machine of them, and I was nodding, smiling, drowning, the names already coming loose from the faces.
Tonio’s hand stayed at my back through all of it, an anchor, the only fixed point.
And then the crowd parted, the way crowds part for the thing they revolve around, and there at the head of it was an old man in a linen suit, no tie, silver hair swept back, deep-set dark eyes that took me in the way I take in a room—fast, thorough, missing nothing.
“Don Arturo,” Tonio whispered. “A great man.”
The old man reached out and took my hand.
Both of his around my one, the weathered palms closing over the flour-scarred, oven-burned, mess of it, and he turned it the smallest amount, the way my stylist had turned it, except this old man wasn’t pitying it.
He was reading it. He looked at the burns and the cracked knuckles and then up at my face, and he said something in Sicilian, low and weighted, every word found acceptable before he let it go.
Tonio’s throat worked.
“He says—” My loud man, who never runs short, stopped. Started again. “He says these are working hands. He says you can always tell.”
The old man patted my hand once, finished, and moved on into the crowd, and I stood there with my chest gone tight and didn’t know where to put my hands all over again.
The ceremony was beautiful.
We took our seats when the strings shifted, and the garden that had been a swarm of greeting went quiet all at once, two hundred and forty people folding their noise away.
I sat with my knee against Tonio’s and my heart pounding in my chest. There was only the front of the garden, the arch of orange blossom over the old stone, and the man standing under it.
He’d been there in my bakery, too, but since then Tonio had told me more about him.
He had been a ghost. He went away to a city called Catania and came back with the sound turned down on his whole life—laughter, anger, hope, all of it dialed low.
But, Tonio said, his soon-to-be-wife had saved him. Brought him back to life.
Then the music turned again, and everyone rose, and she came up the aisle.
Angela.
It took me a beat to recognize her. It was hard to believe this was the same woman who’d been in my bakery, trying the cannoli.
Here she was in white, looking comfortable, radiant, happy.
She came up that aisle with her chin level and her eyes on the still man under the orange blossom, and the whole brittle vigilance I’d clocked over a cannoli had melted clean off her and left something I could only call luminous.
I looked at Pietro’s face when he saw her.
It was the thing that broke me, in the end—not the white, not the music, not even my own grief that I felt coming up the back of my throat.
It was his face. The stillness cracked. I saw joy and surprise and disbelief, the look of a man being handed the one thing he’d spent every day teaching himself he’d never have.
They said the old words.
Half of it I didn’t follow—Latin, then Sicilian, the priest’s voice rolling the dialect out the way water rolls over stone—but you don’t need the words.
I know the shape of a vow even in a language I can’t speak.
Somehow, I felt my father in the words, my mother.
I thought of them when they’d married, two people standing up in front of everyone they had and saying this one, this one, out loud, where it couldn’t be taken back.
And the tears came.
I didn’t fight them. That was new for me too.
The old Katerina would have looked at the ceiling and breathed through her nose and locked the jaw and won.
But this Katerina, the new one, let them come.
The grief and the joy came up the same nerve, the way the sting and the pleasure came up the same nerve over his lap.
I couldn’t have told you which was which. I’m not sure there was a difference.
Tonio’s hand found mine.
It just appeared, his fingers threading through mine in my lap, warm and sure and scarred, and I gripped them and didn’t look at him for a long moment because I knew if I looked I was finished.
Then I looked.
The loud man was crying.
Not loud. That was the thing. Tonio Scordato, who sings badly and curses in three languages, who feels everything at a volume that exhausts everyone around him—he was sitting beside me gone completely silent, the wet standing bright at the corner of his eye.
His jaw was set hard against it. His hand crushed mine.
He’d told me he’d spent two years trying to break Pietro’s silence with sheer affectionate volume and it had cost him every time it went unreturned, and now here was the silence breaking on its own, for a woman in white, and Tonio couldn’t make a sound.
I lifted our joined hands and pressed my mouth to his knuckles, the way he presses his to my wrist, and he didn’t look at me, couldn’t, but his thumb moved once across my skin and I felt the whole of what he couldn’t say.
Around us the clan went still and soft together.
Two hundred and forty loud, drunk, sentimental Sicilians, the most dangerous men in the city stacked shoulder to shoulder in good suits, the old don at the front with his weathered hands, the brothers, the wives, the small dark woman with the chihuahua who’d surely have bitten the priest given an opening—all of them gone quiet and wet-eyed at once, the whole roaring machine of two families dropping its volume in the same breath, because underneath everything they did and everything they were, they loved each other the way only people who’ve buried their own can love.