CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ADELINA
I am making bread at one in the morning because I went to see my father.
Those two things are the same thing. I do not know how to explain it any better than that.
I got home at two in the afternoon and I was fine, I was completely fine, I did the school run and I helped with a worksheet about fractions and I ate dinner and I said goodnight, and then at twenty o'clock I was lying on my back in a bed in the east wing with my eyes open and a sentence going round.
Go home and get the transport book and look at whose signature is on the authorisations.
So at midnight I came down the back stairs and put the oven on.
There is nothing wrong with me. I want that on the record too.
There is a version of a woman who bakes at midnight that is a sad version and this is not it.
I have four hours of the best kind of work in front of me in a kitchen nobody comes into, and by six there will be nine loaves, and at some point between now and then the sentence will stop going round.
That is the whole system.
It has never failed once.
At twenty to one I hear the boot room door.
Then nothing.
That is what makes me turn round, in the end.
Not the door. The nothing after it. My husband comes in through that door at one in the morning most nights and goes up the front stairs, and it is about thirty steps of floor between one and the other, and tonight it has been about thirty seconds and nobody has crossed my kitchen.
"Salvatore," I say, without turning round. "It's twenty to one and there's a thing on the counter, and I can hear you breathing."
A pause.
"There's a thing on the counter," he says.
"There's a plate. Under the cloth. It's been there since eight."
He comes in.
And I turn round with my hands in a bowl and the first thing I see is that he has his coat on and his right hand wrapped in a towel that is not one of ours, and the towel is dark on the outside of the knuckles, and he has been standing in my boot room doorway for half a minute trying to work out how to get to the front stairs.
I look at the towel.
He looks at me looking at it.
And neither of us says anything at all, and the extractor fan goes, and the oven ticks.
Here is the rule.
You don't ask me what I do. Not ever.
He said it to me in his study before dawn on the day my father signed, with rain coming across the window, and I said yes, and I have meant it every day since, and I have not once in eleven days had to hold myself to it because it has never been in the room.
It is in the room now.
It is standing in my kitchen in a coat with a towel round its hand.
So here is what I do.
I take my hands out of the bowl, and I wipe them on my apron, and I go to the cupboard over the second sink where the first aid box lives, because I found it on the first morning when I was going through everything, and I put it on the table.
"Sit down," I say.
"Adelina."
"I'm not asking you anything."
"I know you're not."
"So sit down," I say, "because I've got nine loaves proving and I'm not going to be able to concentrate."
He sits down at the kitchen table.
It takes him a moment to do it. He looks at the chair the way you look at a dog you have not met, and then he sits, and he is too big for it, and the table is too low for his knees.
I fill a bowl with warm water and put the salt in.
Then I sit down opposite him, and I put the bowl between us, and I hold my hand out, palm up.
He does not move.
"Give it to me."
"It's fine."
"Salvatore."
"It goes back over," he says, which is such a strange sentence that I stop for a second, and then he unwinds the towel and puts his hand in my hand.
It is enormous.
That is the first thing, and it is a stupid thing, and it is the only thing in my head for about four seconds.
His hand covers both of mine. The second knuckle is split across the top, a clean open line about an inch long, and the third one is swollen and the skin is fine, and the back of the hand is bruised up toward the wrist in the shape of something I do not want to think about.
There are older marks under the new ones.
That is the part that gets me. The knuckles have gone flat and there is a pale ridge over the second one where the skin has healed and healed and healed and given up on doing it properly, and there is a scar through the web between the thumb and the finger, and there is a small round one near the wrist that is not a scar from a fist.
I put his hand in the water.
He does not make a sound.
I do not look at his face. I look at the hand, because if I look at his face I will say something, and the rule is the rule, and I am going to keep the rule if it kills me.
I clean it.
It takes a long time. There is grit in the split, which means concrete, and I do not think about concrete. I take it out with the corner of a clean cloth, in about nine goes, and he lets me, and his hand lies in mine like a thing that has been put down.
The bread proves.
The oven ticks. Somewhere out past the boot room a car goes down the drive and the gate does the noise it does. And I sit at a kitchen table at one in the morning holding the hand of the most dangerous man in New York, and clean it, and neither of us speaks for eleven minutes.
When it is dry I put the ointment on and I put two of the little butterfly strips across the split, and I wrap the whole thing, and I do it properly, over the knuckle and round the base of the thumb, because a bandage that is only on the knuckle comes off in an hour.
Then I sit back.
He looks at his own hand.
"Where did you learn that," he says.
"Restaurant."
"That isn't a restaurant bandage."
"It's a restaurant bandage if the restaurant's got a salamander grill and my uncle.
" I stop. "And my brother had a thing when he was six where he couldn't breathe and they put a line in the back of his hand and it came out, and I watched the nurse do it, and then I did it for forty days at home because they showed me how. "
Salvatore does not say anything.
"You've got an old scar near the wrist," I say, "that isn't from hitting anybody."
"No."
"Okay."
And I get up, because I have gone right to the edge of the rule and I can feel the edge of it under my foot, and I go back to the bowl.
"Adelina."
"Mm."
"I want you to stop."
I put the dough down.
"What?"
"The plate under the cloth. The bread. The crews on a Sunday. The hand." He is still sitting at the table looking at the bandage. "I am not going to be able to pay you back for any of it and I do not want it to be a thing that is owed between us, so I am asking you to leave it alone."
I stand at that counter with flour on my hands and I feel something go up through me that I do not have a name for yet.
"No," I say.
He looks up.
"No?"
"No." I turn round. "You don't get to do that.
You do not get to sit at my table and let me hold your hand for eleven minutes and then tell me it was a transaction, because it wasn't, it was a Tuesday, and I would have done it for Frankie, and I would have done it for a man asleep in a laundromat doorway on Eighteenth Avenue, and I did do it, every single week, for six years, and nobody ever once told me to stop. "
"That isn't what I."
"I know what you meant." My voice is not steady. "You meant it kindly. That's worse. Do you know how many people in my entire life have ever told me to leave it alone? None. Not one. Everybody takes it."
The fan goes.
"So no," I say. "You can't have that one. Ask me for something else and I'll give you it."
And Salvatore Marchetti sits in a kitchen chair at half past one in the morning and looks at me for a very long time.
"That's my sentence," he says.
"I know it's your sentence."
And then I nearly do it.
It comes right up. It is all the way up, it is in my mouth, I have the shape of it ready and I have had the shape of it ready since four o'clock this morning in a booth at my uncle's restaurant.
Whose name is on the transport authorisations.
Nine words. He is sitting down. His hand is bandaged and he is tired and he is in my kitchen at two in the morning and he has just told me he cannot pay me back, and there has never been and there will never be a better moment in my entire life to ask that man that question.
He watches me not say it.
That is the part I am not ready for. He is looking at the table and then he is not, he is looking at me, and his face does not change at all, and he says:
"Ask me."
"No."
"Adelina. Ask me."
"It's not one of yours," I say.
"What?"
"It's not a question about what you do." I have both hands on the edge of the counter behind me.
"It's a question about what you are. And I've had one of those put in my head today by a man who does it on purpose, and if I ask you tonight it'll be because he aimed it, and I'm not going to be a thing he aimed. "
The oven clicks over.
"So I'm going to sit with it," I say, "and I'm going to ask you in my own time, in my own words, when I want to know the answer instead of when he wants me to."
Salvatore is very still.
"That's better than anything I'd have done," he says.
"I know."
"It's better than anything I'd have done at any point in my life."
"Yeah, well," I say, and turn the loaves. "I'm not tired yet."
There is a noise in the doorway to the back stairs.
My brother is standing in it in pyjamas with his hair on one side and his inhaler in his fist, and he has clearly been there for some portion of this, and he is looking at Salvatore's hand.
"Matteo."
"I heard the oven."
"Go back to bed."
"Is he okay," Matteo says.
"He's fine."
"Is he okay," my brother says again, to Salvatore, directly, because he has never once in his life accepted an answer from the wrong person.
Salvatore holds up the hand.
"It's a hand," he says. "It'll go back over."
Matteo comes into the kitchen and stands next to the table and looks at it with the deep, unhurried, entirely unembarrassed attention of a nine year old, and Salvatore lets him, and holds it still for him.
"You're a shark," Matteo says.
"Matteo."
"No, it's not." He does not take his eyes off the hand.
"It's not an insult. Sharks have to keep swimming or they die, that's a real thing, it's because of the water going over their gills, they can't stop, not even to sleep, they have to keep going forever.
You come home at one in the morning with your hand like that and then you go out again at seven. "
Nobody says anything.
"I'm just saying I worked out what you are," my brother says, and yawns enormously, and goes back up the stairs.
And I stand at the counter with nine loaves proving behind me, and my husband sits at the table with a bandage on his hand, and he does not move for a very long time.