Chapter 4 #2
It went like that for two hours. Stavros’s girl, look what she made.
Your father would be proud. Eat something, you’re too thin, who’s looking after you down there all alone?
And I smiled and deflected and pressed food into hands and took none in return, and I felt him everywhere—in the words, in the wheat, in the smell of the incense coming down through the floor, in the smooth worn fondness of the woman cutting pie beside me.
He was so close in that basement I could have turned around and handed him the foil.
And he was so gone that the closeness was its own ache.
By half past noon the crowd thinned. The widow was driven home.
The men went out to smoke and stayed out, the way they do.
The tables emptied of people and we started the long unglamorous part, the wrapping and stacking and scraping, and Despina watched me start to fold the foil over the leftover tray and reached over and took it out of my hands.
“No,” she said.
“I’m just—”
“You’ve been on your feet since three this morning, don’t think I don’t know.” She set the tray down. “There’s a pot of coffee in the kitchen that nobody made for the parish. I made it for us. Two cups. Sit down, Katerina, before you fall down, and don’t tell me you’re fine.”
“I’m fine.”
“I said don’t tell me.” She steered me by the shoulder toward the little kitchen and the two chairs and the pot.
“Five minutes,” I said.
“We’ll see,” she said, and poured.
The coffee was strong enough to stand a spoon in, and Despina had put a little plate of my own koulourakia between us.
I wrapped both hands around the cup and felt the warmth go into my fingers and didn’t say anything for a minute, and she let me not say anything, which is a skill, which most people don’t have.
“So,” she said, finally. “The shop. Tell me. And the true version, not the version for the widow.”
“It’s fine.”
“Katerina.”
“It’s the same as it always is. Slow. The street’s emptier than it was.” I turned the cup. “Half the block’s shuttered. They sold out, most of them. There’s a company buying everything up.”
“I heard. The dry cleaner’s gone. The Manolises.” She shook her head. “Forty years.”
“Yeah.”
She watched me over her cup. She’s good at the watching, Despina, better than me, and I’m the one who’s supposed to read a room. “And they’ve come to you,” she said. Not a question. “To buy you out.”
I should have lied. I’m a good liar; I’ve had a year of practice telling everyone I’m fine while the arithmetic eats me. But it was warm in that kitchen and my feet hurt and there was nobody to perform for except the one woman who’d known my father, so it came out before I’d decided to let it.
“A man came by last night,” I said. “Asking. Same as the others. I told him no.”
“What kind of man?”
“He was . . . threatening.”
“Katerina.” Sharper now. She set her cup down. “What kind of man comes to a girl alone in a shop at night?”
I looked at the alarm coming up in her face, the real fear for me, and I took everything I’d felt the night before—the hand on my hair, the smell of him, the inventory eyes, the cold sick turning in my stomach that was still there if I went looking—I took all of it and I folded it down small and put it away where she couldn’t see, and I smiled.
“A pushy one,” I said. “Made his pitch, knocked something over, left. It was nothing. I sent him off.”
“He knocked something over?”
“A frame. It’s fine. I’ll get a new one.
” I waved it away with the hand not holding the coffee.
“These guys are all the same. They lean and they bluster and they think a woman alone’s going to fold, and then she doesn’t, and they go home.
I’ve handled pushier men over a koulouraki count. Don’t make a face.”
“I’m allowed to make a face. He frightened you.”
“He did not frighten me.”
She just looked at me. She has a look, Despina, that’s worse than anything my father ever managed, because his was disappointment and hers is patience, the same patience that horse-with-the-biting-mouth patience.
“And the police?” she said.
“What would I tell the police. A man bought a cookie and broke a frame.” I shrugged. “I’ve got it. It’s handled.”
“Of course you do,” she said. “Of course it is.” And there was a whole world in how she said it, a year of it, that I chose not to hear.
So I gave her something else. To turn her off the scent, mostly, I’ll be honest. To get her off the thug and the not-being-frightened.
“There was another one, actually,” I said. “Last night. After. A different idiot.” And here something in my voice must have shifted, must have come up off the flat, because her eyebrows went up half an inch and her cup stopped halfway to her mouth and she set it back down without drinking.
“What other one? Threatening again?”
I tutted—no. “There’s a man who comes to the shop.
Mornings. Every morning, for months.” I rolled my eyes hard enough to hurt.
“Buys eleven dollars of bread for one man and a dog. A great drooling gray dog, the size of a pony, that he says isn’t even his.
Over-tips. Stays. Leans on my counter like it’s a bar.
Thinks he’s the most charming creature God ever made.
” I broke a koulouraki in half and didn’t eat it.
“Italian. The accent. You know the type. Looks at me like I’m—“ I stopped. Started over. “He thinks he’s irresistible. He’s a nuisance. ”
“Mm,” said Despina, who’d gone very still and very pleased in a way I didn’t like.
“Anyway. Last night, after the first one, this one—he must have been outside, parked, I don’t know, watching the street like a creep—he comes crashing through my door.
Saint George. Charges in like the place is on fire, grabs the thug, throws him against my own front window, tells him off, and then—” I jabbed the koulouraki at her, “—then he turns around and grins at me. Grins. Like I’m supposed to swoon.
Like he’s done me a great favor. In my shop. That I had handled.”
“He defended you.”
“I didn’t ask him to.”
“He saw a man frightening you and he—”
“He saw nothing of the sort, he saw a thing he could put his nose into, and he put it in, the way men do, and then he stood there waiting for his medal.” I dropped the broken cookie on the plate.
“I threw him out. I had to say it three times. He stood there the whole time grinning wider and saying he was having a wonderful night, and—” I ran out of road.
“Anyway. A nuisance. I told him we were closed today and he can go to hell.”
Despina was quiet. She picked up her coffee. She drank it, slow, looking at me over the rim the whole time, and when she set it down she was smiling, and the smile was the kind that’s seen something it intends to keep.
“This man,” she said. “He likes you.”
“He likes himself. There’s a big difference.”
“He comes every morning? For months? He buys bread he doesn’t need so he can stand in your shop and look at you, and last night he sat in the cold outside watching to make sure you were safe, and when a man frightened you he came through your door without thinking.
” She ticked it off on her fingers, calm as anything, like a woman reading a recipe back to make sure it’s right.
“And you, koritsi—you threw him out three times.”
“Yes.”
“Why,” said Despina, gently, leaning in, “are you so terrible to a man who likes you?”
And I opened my mouth to answer her, and the answer that came up was longer than I meant it to be, and harder.
“Because nothing’s free,” I said. “That’s why.
Because a man doesn’t buy eleven dollars of bread for months and sit in the cold and come crashing through a door for nothing, Despina, nobody does anything for nothing, and the bill always comes, it just comes later, when you’ve stopped watching for it.
You think I don’t know that walk? The two men are the same.
They both come into my shop like they already own it.
One wants the lease and one wants—” I gestured, vaguely, at the air where his grin had been, “—the gratitude. The thank you I wouldn’t give him.
And the second I give it, the second I say oh thank you, my hero, I owe him.
And then it’s his story. Then I’m the woman he saved. And it stops being mine.”
She didn’t interrupt. She let me build it.
“Everyone who’s ever taken care of me did it by holding the leash,” I said.
“My father loved me to the bone and he still decided everything, where I went, who I saw, because he was protecting me, and protecting me meant obeying him. That’s the only version of being looked after I’ve ever had.
Love that’s also a fence. And I’m done with fences.
I run one thing in this entire world and it’s mine.
The flour’s mine. The books are mine, God help me, the terrible books.
The lease is in my name and the day I let some grinning Italian carry the flour for me out of the goodness of his heart is the day it’s not mine and his anymore.
It’s something a man did for me. And then it’s not the dream.
It’s just a shop with a girl in it who couldn’t manage on her own. ”
“Katerina—”
“I’d rather lose it on my own two feet than keep it on somebody else’s.
I mean that. If I go down I go down doing every part of it with my own hands, the way he wanted, the way we said.
Not handled. Not rescued. Not co-signed.
” I sat back. “So that’s why I’m terrible to a man who likes me.
Because the ones who like you are the worst ones. And they always leave you in the end.”
I’d convinced myself, anyway. It’s a good speech.
I’d given a version of it to the man at the loan desk, who’d asked who’d co-sign and watched my face when I said nobody.
It had the shape of something true and the heat of something true and I believed every word of it the way you believe a wall is holding because you’re leaning on it.