49. Delilah
DELILAH
The line clicks and he’s gone.
I stand there with the phone against my ear for longer than I need to, listening to nothing.
I’m scared, and I think of being alone in the shop at two in the morning, when the ice machine drops a load and you think somebody’s come in the back door to murder you in a way that will make some future Netflix subscribers very happy.
I am valuing you properly for the very first time.
I put the phone down on the café table.
Then I pick up his envelope and the card inside it with the neat blue numbers. I fold both in half, then again, and put them in the trash under the coffee filters and the balled-up newspaper I used on the case.
Old men love to hear themselves talk. My father could turn a burnt-out taillight into a lecture about the decline of American manufacturing. Osip Vetrov came into my shop, got told no, and had to leave with something in his hand, even if all he had left was a scary sentence.
That’s when I decide something, standing at the trash can with the lid still swinging.
I’m not going to spend Easter Sunday scared in my own building.
So I go into the walk-in, get four lemons and a block of butter, and I make lemon bars, which is what I make when I need to remember who I am.
The shortbread base and the curd on top, powdered sugar over the whole tray after it cools.
I eat two of them standing up at the steel table and then I take the rest home in a box.
There, in the comfort of my own living room, I open the bottle of prosecco I’ve had in the fridge since New Year’s and drink two glasses in front of the television with my feet up.
It’s not the celebration I pictured. But it’s mine. That’s good enough.
On April eighth, Skye calls me at the shop to tell me the divorce is final, filed, and entered.
“You’re unmarried,” she says. “Congratulations. Your life is yours again.”
The house in Sheepshead Bay is mine, too.
Sole title, no claim on it. The bakery is mine, free and clear, and the title report that says so is in the safe where only I can reach it.
Connor is at his father’s place in Bay Ridge and has no right to my equipment or my recipes or my last name, which he never had anyway.
My mother has left four voicemails since Palm Sunday.
I’ve listened to two of them, both times while doing dishes, but I haven’t bothered to call back.
Vivian is planning a wedding across the borough. I know this because Cousin Jenna texted me about a venue in Bay Ridge, and I wrote back good luck to them and put my phone in my apron pocket.
And the shop makes money.
I still don’t quite believe that. Priya and I do the Monday numbers in the office on the new steel cot, and the numbers keep going the right direction.
March beat February. The first three weeks of April beat March.
Half of it is the leftover attention from Christmas, and I know that curve will fall back down to earth eventually.
But the other half is people who came in once for the piping hot gossip and came back for the croissants and the coffee.
“You know what this means,” Priya says. “It means we can fix the compressor.”
We giggle, and then we do indeed fix the compressor.
A man named Wendell makes four grand for three and a half days’ work.
He sings while he tinkers, which is a pain in the ass, but when he leaves, the walk-in holds at a reliable thirty-seven degrees without any of the godawful racket it used to make.
I kinda miss his singing when he’s gone.
Then, for the first time in three years of owning this building, I plan ahead.
I get a legal pad, write MAY-JUNE-JULY at the top, and draw columns.
The deck oven has a hot spot on the left that I’ve been rotating trays around since the day I bought it.
There’s a guy in Ridgewood who rebuilds them.
Nine hundred to have him look at it, maybe twenty-two hundred to do the work, and if I do it the week after Memorial Day, I can run everything through the convection for four days and only lose the bread.
The curb comes out of insurance, mostly. The contractor says it’ll take until the third week of May for the apron and the bollard, but we’ll be fine making do until then.
On a fresh page, I write FRONT OF HOUSE and list what I want.
Four small tables instead of two. A real espresso setup, not the slow-as-molasses contraption behind the register. A case with lights in it that actually work. Paint. A second person on the counter for the weekend shift so Jolene isn’t out there alone during the Saturday morning rush.
I take the whole day off on a Wednesday, which I have never done. I sleep until nine, which feels illegal. Priya and I book her cousin’s place in the Poconos for the second week of August. Another thing to look forward to. A future. A hope. A dream.
It feels so, so good.
Best of all—or so I keep telling myself—is that Kane doesn’t come.
Not once. No text, courier, or envelope on my desk with something of Connor’s inside it. Nothing.
Josef and his merry band of fellow introverts stay stationed outside the back door, as per usual. At this point, I think of them as part of the building.
But Kane himself stays on his side of whatever line we drew. Some nights, I wonder if I imagined the whole winter.
Most of the time, I don’t hate it.
At night, I do.
Because night is when I climb into bed in my quiet house, look over at the nightstand, and see what rests there.
The photo album.
I start at the beginning every time.
Us in the closet with my hair coming down, caught with locked lips.
Orthodox Christmas, with forty-something Makovs crammed into one frame and me sitting on Kane’s thigh, glaring, fighting a smile.
Kane in the strawberry apron at four in the morning with his sleeves shoved past his elbows.
The lopsided cake that says HAPPY 32 LILAH with a band of dense crumb through the middle of it that only I would notice.
I squint at my own face. I look happy, don’t I?
I still do. That’s the trouble. It’s the only place I’ve ever seen it.
Every night, I get to the end and consider throwing it all away. But I always stop myself. Destroying these pictures wouldn’t remove the fact that they happened. It would only mean I’d chosen to lose the memories.
And I’ve spent my whole life having things taken away from me.
I don’t need to add this to the pile.
So I put the photo album back down once again and turn out the light.
I tell myself, This is what happiness feels like.
I almost believe it, too.