31. Delilah #2
It’s so strange and shocking that it actually gets through to the Instagram Live Idiot standing in the middle of my bakery. He glances back, sees Yuri…
… and then makes a very poor choice.
“What’re you?” he taunts. “Her security?”
Yuri’s gaze stays on the man, even when he speaks out of the side of his mouth to me. “Ms. Dorsey? May I?”
A request.
Mine to grant or refuse.
The old Delilah would try to make this smaller. She’d laugh so everyone else could relax, then offer the man a cookie on his way out. Maybe she’d even apologize for upsetting him.
Do-It-All Delilah, now providing complimentary emotional support to people who call her livestock.
New Delilah says, Fuck that.
“Please remove him, Yuri.”
Yuri smiles.
It is definitely not a friendly little smile.
He moves before Livestream Larry can react.
One second, the phone is six inches from my nose. The next, Yuri has the guy’s wrist folded neatly behind his back and his cheek pressed against the glass case. The raspberry thumbprints tremble on their doilies.
“Hey!” the man yelps. “Get off me!”
“You were asked nicely,” Yuri sighs.
The phone clatters onto the counter. Igor catches it before it can hit the floor. With one thumb, he ends the livestream, then leaves it beside the tip jar.
Yuri marches the man toward the door. “I know my rights!” he shrieks, sneakers skidding uselessly over the tile.
“So does Ms. Dorsey.”
At the threshold, the man grabs the doorframe.
Yuri peels his fingers off one at a time until the man is forced to relinquish his grip.
There is a brief, ugly thunk when Moncler meets metal frame as Yuri drags him through the doorway. Then Yuri and his new friend disappear from the bakery and around the corner.
I’m sure they’re just gonna have a nice little chat. Man-to-man.
It takes a second for normal life to resume, but eventually, it does. Priya restarts the espresso machine. Cameron lowers his arm from his face. I straighten the raspberry thumbprints.
“Next customer,” I call. “And just so you know, there’s a new rule: Recording incurs a twenty-percent asshole surcharge.”
The line starts moving again.
No one dares to give me a hard time.
At twenty to five, when the case is down to one sad cheese danish, Priya and Jolene have both gone home, and Cameron is mopping, the bell over the door rings and Kane walks in.
He’s in his usual uniform: black coat, black gloves, snow on his shoulders. He goes to the end of the counter, sets his gloves down, and says, “Tell me about this morning.”
“Something tells me you already know about this morning,” I reply.
“I know what Yuri told me. Now, I want it from you.”
In broad strokes, I give him the rundown. I gloss over the details—like the various animals I was compared to—because I get the feeling that if I spend too much time elaborating on them, there might be a dead body wrapped in a Moncler jacket found buried in the marshes sometime soon.
When I finish, Kane’s response is immediate: “I’m putting a man on your door.”
“You already have men on my door,” I tell him. “They come in and buy cookies.”
“That’s different. I want one outside. Not a customer. Someone standing on the sidewalk between eight and close, and one on the back door in the mornings while you’re in here alone.”
I open my mouth to argue.
Then I think about Cameron’s arm over his face. Cameron is twenty-two. He puts half his paycheck toward a car he hasn’t bought yet and he takes the bus in from Woodhaven to get to work.
He deserves to feel safe.
“Okay,” I say.
Kane’s eyebrows go up a fraction of an inch. “That was easier than usual.”
“Don’t get used to it.” I go back to wiping the counter. “One rule, though: Your guys aren’t allowed to hassle my customers. And for God’s sake, they need to smile. He can’t sulk around looking like he’s guarding a funeral. It’s a bakery. People bring their kids.”
“That’s two rules,” Kane says.
“Don’t sass me. I’ve had a day.”
Kane’s mouth twitches. He picks his gloves back up. “Fine. One smiling Bratva guard at your front door.”
Which is when I remember the other thing I’ve been meaning to bring up for two weeks.
I fold the rag and set it down. “Since you’re here. I want to talk to you about your people.”
“What about them?”
“They’re in here every single day.”
“Is that an issue?”
“Every day, Kane. Yuri buys cookies. Igor buys jam pastries. There’s a man with a neck tattoo who orders four cinnamon rolls and eats them standing at the window like he’s guarding them.
Yesterday, somebody bought two whole poppy seed cakes at seven in the morning and paid with a hundred and wouldn’t take change. ”
“That would be Mikhail. He has grandchildren.”
“That’s not the point.” I lean my hip on the case. “The point is I know what this is. You told them to come. You’ve got fifty guys buying pastries to prop up my numbers so I feel good about myself, and I’m not—” I stop and swallow. “I don’t want to be a charity.”
Kane’s eyes cloud over. “You think I ordered my men to buy your food?”
“It sounds like something you would do, doesn’t it?”
“I did not order anyone to do anything,” he says. “After Christmas, they asked me where the food came from. All I did was give them the address. They did the rest themselves, and they’d have done it even if I’d never met you.”
I stare at him, a little bit at a loss for words.
“They come back,” he continues, “because it’s good. Because you’re good. Not to make me happy or because of some chain of fucking command.”
The espresso machine hisses in the quiet.
“Oh,” I say.
“Yeah,” he growls. “Oh.”
There’s a fuzzy, warm feeling that happens in my chest when someone compliments my work, but it’s not pride.
It’s not really a comfortable feeling at all, at least not for me.
It’s my brain running around looking for the exit, for the obvious joke.
Well, it’s really just butter and time. Anybody could do it.
I have been doing it since I was nineteen.
For the first time, I make myself stand in the heat and just take it.
“Okay,” I say. “It’s good.”
“What is?” he asks, clearly pushing me toward the answer he has in mind.
“The food. My food.” I clear my throat. “They come back because it’s good.”
“Say the rest of it.”
“There is no—”
But he glares at me until I fold. “Fine. Okay. They come back because it’s good,” I say, “because I made it, and I’m good.”
Finally, he smiles. “There. Was that so hard?”
“Yes, actually. It was excruciating. I need to lie down.”
And then, because why stop at excruciating when agonizingly torturous is still available, my phone goes off on the shelf beside the register.
Call from: MOM.
It’s the first time her name has come up since the twenty-fourth of December.
Kane looks at the phone, then at me. He waits for me to decide what to do on my own.
I pick it up with shaky fingers. “Hello?”
“Delilah,” my mother says in an oddly formal, choked voice. “You’re a very hard woman to reach.”
“I’ve been at work.”
There’s a pause with a lot of things in it. Then she starts in on a speech that she has obviously workshopped several times over.
Honestly, I don’t even hear most of it. I just get the gist. She talks about how bad the last month has been.
About the neighbors, and Father Dunn asking after us, and how a family can’t just fall apart over one bad night, and how your father would be sick over this, Delilah, sick, and how we are the only people any of us have got.
So many buzzwords tossed in the mix. Unity. Forgiveness. Family.
“The seventh of February,” she says. “I want us all to sit down together as a family. A Sunday dinner, like we used to do, and we’ll all start over. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
The seventh of February. One year to the day since we buried my father, which is also the day my husband and my sister ordered two steaks and two ice creams at the Marriott by the Brooklyn Bridge.
Does she even know how fucked-up that is?
“Alright,” I say.
She exhales. “Oh, good. Now, I’ll do the roast, and you can bring—”
“No.”
“Pardon me?”
“I’m not bringing anything. No dessert, no rolls, no salad, no ice.
Nothing.” I look at the case in front of me, at the empty trays and the smear on the glass where a man’s cheek was slammed down this morning.
“I’m not coming at eleven to set up. I’m not counting the guest list. I’m not carrying the chairs up from the basement, and I’m not doing the dishes after.
I’ll come at the time you tell everyone else to come, and I’ll sit down, and I’ll eat. That’s it.”
Silence.
“That’s a strange thing to make conditions about,” she says.
“Yeah, well, I’m making them. Take it or leave it.”
“Fine,” she says, thin as onion skin. “Fine. Whatever you want.”
“One more thing. I’m bringing someone.”
“Bringing—who?”
“My boyfriend.”
I hear her set something down. “You’ve been divorced for three weeks.”
“Yep. Sure have.” I put on my airiest voice. “Six o’clock, right? Can’t wait. We’ll be there.” I hang up before she can get another word in, and then I put the phone facedown on the shelf and hold onto the edge of the counter for a second.
When I turn around, Kane is watching me.
“Boyfriend?” he asks.
“It was faster than explaining.”
“Mm.”
I take a breath. “You’ll come, though?”
He looks amused. “It isn’t a holiday.”
“No. It isn’t,” I agree. “Which means it’s outside our deal. You don’t owe me it, and I can’t count it toward anything, and there’s nothing in it for you.”
Kane doesn’t answer.
“But I’m asking you to come with me,” I say. “Because… honestly, because I want you there.”
He looks at me for what feels like a long time.
Then he smiles and says, “Can’t wait. Just one question.”
I grimace, bracing for the worst. “Fire away.”
“Are you preparing the slideshow, or should I?”