Bonus Chapter Carmelo
Six Months Later
There's flour on my shirt.
I don't know when it got there. Sometime between the third batch of sfogliatelle and the fifth tray of cannoli shells, when Grace reached across me for the pastry bag and her elbow caught the flour canister and it tipped and dusted the front of my shirt and she laughed and didn't apologize and kept piping.
It's four thirty in the morning. The bodega's grand reopening is in five hours.
Grace has been baking since midnight. I've been standing next to her cutting butter into flour and rolling dough, doing what I'm told, which is a sentence I never imagined applying to me in any context and is now the defining feature of my daily life.
She says good boy and I do what she says because I want her to say it again.
The bodega is different now. Same location, same corner, same bell above the door.
But Rosa retired three months ago and handed Grace the keys and the lease and the coffee pot and told her that if she changed the price of the coffee from a dollar twenty-five, Rosa would come back from retirement and beat her with a rolling pin.
Grace didn't change the price of the coffee, but she changed everything else.
The shelves are restocked with Italian imports she sources through Renzo's contacts.
The pastry case, which Rosa used for cellophane-wrapped gas station danishes, now holds sfogliatelle and cannoli and biscotti that Grace bakes fresh every morning at four AM because she taught herself Italian pastry from YouTube and Renzo's mother's recipe book and sheer stubbornness.
The stubbornness she gets from Anna. The lemon tree gene.
The Ferrara women don't quit on things they decide to love. She’s been hyper fixated on this, so after I closed the deal on the restaurant, I hired a general manager to run the place while Claudio got the upstairs suite ready for us to move in.
It is surprisingly spacious, with four bedrooms and two bathrooms, so the brothers can come stay whenever needed.
Our own little compound.
She's standing at the prep table in the back kitchen, which is a generous term for a room that's eight feet by ten feet with a commercial oven Rosa bought in 1987 and a stainless-steel counter and a sink.
Grace is wearing an apron over a tank top, and her hair is up in a knot and there's flour on her arms and powdered sugar on her cheek and she's piping ricotta filling into cannoli shells with the focus of a woman performing surgery.
I'm leaning against the counter watching her.
The knife is at home. Not on my belt, not in my pocket.
At home, in the kitchen drawer, next to the bottle opener and the serving spoons.
I carry it for work. Bonaccorso business, Delvecchio's network, the operations Leone set up six months ago that I run out of the restaurant.
But this isn't work. This is four thirty in the morning in a bodega kitchen with flour on my shirt and my woman piping cannoli and the only weapon in the room is the rolling pin Rosa left hanging on a hook by the oven with a note that said, "for emergencies and bad boyfriends. "
"You're staring," Grace says without looking up.
"Yes."
"You could be helping."
"I am helping."
"You're leaning against a counter. That's not helping and that’s NOT being a very good boy.” She frowns.
"I rolled the dough."
"You rolled the dough wrong. I had to redo it."
"You didn't redo it. You adjusted it."
"I redid it, Carmelo. The layers were uneven. Sfogliatelle requires even layers or the pastry doesn't shatter properly. I showed you three times."
"My hands are too big for the rolling pin."
She looks up from the cannoli. Her eyes find mine and her mouth does the thing it does when she's about to say something that's going to make me feel things I don't have vocabulary for.
"Your hands," she says, "are perfect for a lot of things. I guess pastry dough isn't one of them. We will just have to accept your limitations."
"I don't have limitations."
"You have flour on your shirt, powdered sugar in your eyebrow, and you just got outperformed at dough-rolling by a woman who weighs a hundred and twelve pounds. You have limitations."
She goes back to the cannoli. I watch her pipe.
Her hands are steady, precise, the ricotta filling emerging in clean spirals from the tip of the bag.
Her right index finger taps the pastry bag between each shell.
The rhythm is slow, idle, comfortable. The tapping is different now.
Six months of therapy twice a week and the tapping has evolved from a survival mechanism into something closer to punctuation.
It happens when she's focused, when she's content, when her hands are busy with something she chose.
It doesn't happen when she's afraid anymore.
She doesn't flinch at Italian. She speaks it daily, with Renzo on the phone every morning, with the customers who come in for the imported goods, with me in bed when her mouth forgets English and switches to the language her body kept when her mind couldn't. The Italian comes back in pieces, some days fluent, some days fragmented, and she doesn't force it. She lets it arrive.
She finishes the cannoli tray. Twenty-four shells, filled, dusted with powdered sugar, arranged in rows on parchment paper. She slides the tray into the display case and comes back to the prep table and starts on the biscotti.
"The espresso machine gets delivered at seven," she says. "Can you make sure the counter is clear?"
"Yes."
"And the sign. Renzo is bringing the sign at eight. I want it up before we open."
"What does the sign say?"
"Graziella's," she says. "The sign says Graziella's."
Her name. On a sign. Above a door. On a corner in South Philadelphia where she bought coffee every morning for three years from a woman who told her she was too thin and her hair was a crime; who handed her the keys to the place when she retired because Rosa saw what I saw, what Renzo saw, what Javi saw: a woman who deserved more space than she was taking up.
"Good name," I say.
"Damn right it is." She cracks eggs into a bowl. "Now come here and separate these yolks. Even you can't screw up egg yolks."
I push off the counter and stand next to her at the prep table.
Our arms touch. Her shoulder against my bicep, the height difference compressing the contact into a diagonal line of warmth.
She cracks and I separate and the eggs cooperate because even eggs know better than to argue with Grace when she's in her kitchen at four thirty in the morning with a reopening in five hours.
The biscotti dough comes together under her hands and I slice almonds, then she folds them in. The kitchen smells like heaven and the coffee that's been brewing on Rosa's ancient machine since we got here at midnight.
"Carmelo, hey, can you pay attention, please?"
"Yes."
"Put the biscotti in the oven. Three fifty. Twelve minutes."
I slide the tray in and set the timer on my phone. I turn around and she's right there. Not at the prep table. Right there, in front of me, between me and the oven, and her hands are on my belt and she's unbuckling it.
"Grace."
"Graziella."
"Graziella. We open in four and a half hours."
"Then I better be quick." She pulls the belt free and drops it on the floor. "Sit."
There's a stool in the corner. Metal, backless, the kind Rosa used to sit on when her knees were bad. I sit on it and Grace steps between my knees and puts her hands on my shoulders and pushes me back until my shoulder blades hit the wall.
"You've been watching me bake for four hours," she says. "Staring at me. Not helping."
"I separated the yolks."
"You separated the yolks and stared at my ass while I piped cannoli. Don't think I didn't notice."
"I wasn't staring at your ass."
"You were absolutely staring at my ass. You've been staring at my ass since the first night you sat at table four and watched me carry plates. Six months of dating and you still stare at my ass while I work. It's pathological."
"It's appreciation."
"It's going to get you in trouble." She drops to her knees.
She's kneeling between my legs and smiling because she is enjoying the fact that the Bonaccorso Butcher is about to come undone on a stool in a bakery.
She unbuttons my jeans. She pulls them down enough to free me and her hand wraps around me.
I'm already hard because I've been watching her bake for four hours and her tank top is thin and her arms are flexing when she kneads and her hips move when she reaches for the high shelf and I have been staring at her ass, she's right about that, and I'm not apologizing for it.
Her mouth closes around me, and my head hits the wall behind me.
The sound I make bounces off the tile and the stainless steel and the ceiling.
Her hand grips the base while her mouth works the rest and she's not teasing, not building.
She's efficient. The same competence she brings to the dining room and the pastry case and the cannoli shells, applied with devastating focus to taking me apart.
My hands go to her head. Her hair is coming out of the knot, dark strands falling around her face, and I gather them in one hand and hold them back so I can see her face and her mouth on me.
Her eyes flick up and she watches me while she works, and the eye contact combined with her mouth is going to end this faster than either of us planned.
She pulls off just as I’m about to bust and stands.
She unties her apron and pulls down her pants and her underwear, kicks them off one leg and climbs onto my lap on the stool, straddling me, and I grip her hips and she sinks down and the stool creaks under our combined weight and neither of us cares if it holds.
Her hands are on my shoulders, her forehead against mine, and her hips roll and snap and grind in the rhythm she sets, always her rhythm, always her pace.