Chapter 5 #3
“If,” she said. “If. And I haven’t said yes yet.
If I let you carry flour in my shop, here is exactly how it goes.
” She pointed at the floor between us like she was driving a stake.
“This is my kitchen. Not ours. Not yours. Mine. You’re not a partner, you’re not a hero, you’re not Saint George, you’re a hand.
You do what I tell you. You lift what I tell you to lift and you put it where I tell you to put it and when I say hands, now, that tray, you don’t ask me please, you move.
You don’t touch the recipes. You don’t touch the books.
You don’t touch the photograph by the coffee machine ever, for any reason, do you understand me. ”
“I understand you.”
“You’re loud. I can hear you being loud from here, you’re being loud right now, just standing there.
The shop is not your stage. The customers are not your audience.
You bring that—” she waved a hand at all of me, “—that whole thing in here at five in the morning and start charming the old women, and I will put you on the street so fast your dog will still be parking the car.”
“He’s not my dog.”
“Right—he’s too smart to be your dog.” Not a smile.
The ghost of where a smile would go, which from her was a standing ovation.
“One. One time. You overstep, you turn it into something it’s not, you so much as look at me like you did last night with the grin and the I’m-having-a-wonderful-night—one time—and you’re gone, and you don’t come back, and you find another block to be mysterious on. Are those the terms or aren’t they?”
“Those are excellent terms,” I said. “I accept all of them. I’d like to add one.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t get to add.”
“I want to pay you.”
That stopped her cold. I’d been saving it, because I’d known it would, because it was the move that closed the whole thing—the final inversion, the one that took the last crumb of charity off the table and turned the table all the way over.
“You’re going to pay me?” she asked slowly. “To work for me? In my shop?”
“I need the cover more than you need the labor,” I said, easy, like it was obvious, like it cost me nothing, “and a man pays for what he needs. You’re doing me the favor, not the other way around.
You give me a reason to be on this block and a place to stand while I keep an eye on my business, and I pay you for the privilege, and I haul your flour as part of the deal, and everybody comes out ahead.
You’re not taking help. You’re renting me a corner and getting a strong back thrown in.
It’s commerce. You like commerce. You took the grocer’s money for bread he didn’t need—I watched you do it. This is that. This is exactly that.”
I watched it work on her. I watched her see the trick of it—because she did see it. But I’d built her a story she could live inside, a story where she was the boss and I was the help and she’d accepted no man’s hand.
“You don’t pay me,” she said. “That’s grotesque. You pay me a fair wage’s worth less than nothing because you’re getting your cover and I’m getting a back. We split the difference at insulting. You eat what doesn’t sell, you don’t get the good stuff, and you buy your own coffee.”
“I always buy too much bread anyway.”
“I’m aware. It’s the most suspicious thing about you and now I understand it, you’ve been casing me for months.” She almost—almost—caught it. “Four a.m. The ovens go on at three. Don’t be late. I don’t wait for anybody.”
“I’m never late.”
I offered her my hand. She took it.
“Tonio,” I said.
“Katerina.”
“Kat?” I asked.
“Katerina,” she insisted. “And you better not be late, Tonio.”
Her hand was small and strong in mine. Her grip was like iron, just like her will.
“Deal,” I said.
“Deal,” she said. And then she let go, fast, like she’d touched the oven, and we both stood there a beat too long in the silence after, both of us hearing it land—what we’d just agreed to, what it actually was, the door I’d just walked through and the one she’d just opened, four in the morning, every morning, the two of us alone in the dark with the bread.
I made it out the door and across the street and into the cold of my own car before it caught up with me.
Because look at it. Just look at the thing I’d built for myself, standing in a wrecked bakery feeling noble.
I was the best man at a wedding three weeks out—a wedding eating the whole family alive, two hundred and forty Sicilians at war over lilies and seating and which course Rosa would resign over next, Don Arturo flying in from Palermo to count the courses. That was one job.
I was, also, the family’s man on this block—seconded to the Carusos, parked here to map a machine that ran up through a corridor of leaned-on storefronts to Gianni Scordato, my own blood, and we couldn’t be wrong, not once, not ever, we had to bring it to the old man airtight or he’d bury us.
Eyes on the yard. Patience. The long careful thing. That was two jobs.
And now—now—I was a baker’s hand. At four in the morning.
Every morning. Answerable to a woman who’d just laid down the law like a judge handing out a sentence and who would, with genuine pleasure, throw me onto the street the first time I was loud at the wrong old lady or looked at her with the wrong grin.
I thought about telling Sal.
I actually let myself picture it, sitting there in the cold—walking into the back room of the restaurant tomorrow, into the lilies and the place cards and the audit-of-God face, and saying, casual, reaching for the coffee: I got a job.
Watching the pen stop. Watching Sal go completely still, the geological stillness, the listening-to-the-ground stillness, and then the slow turn of his head, and the one word, flat: A job.
And me: At the bakery. As the help. She’s going to pay me almost nothing and I’m going to pay her to let me.
And Pietro—Pietro would put his head down on the wedding tablecloth, I could see it, he’d weep, he’d have to leave the room.
Sal would line his pen up parallel to the edge of his list and say something so dry it would take the whole table five seconds to feel the cut.
I let the comedy of it warm me for exactly as long as it would, which wasn’t long, because under the comedy was the thing the comedy was built to cover, the same way the grin’s built to cover the wound.
I was in.
After three months of standing across this street like an idiot, after three months of buying too much bread and over-tipping and watching a warm gold window come up in the dark and telling myself it was the cannoli, after three months of wanting into a room I had no door to—I was in.
Tomorrow at three in the morning I’d push that door and the heat would hit me and the smell of her would hit me, sesame and honey and that resin underneath, and I’d belong there, I’d have a reason to be there, I’d be inside the warm gold middle of the only place on this dead block that was still alive, with her, hauling her flour, taking her orders, watching her hands in the dough that her hands knew better than she did.
I wanted it more than I’d wanted anything in years.
More than I’d let myself want anything since I was a boy.
The steadiness of the wanting was the part that scared me, because it wasn’t a passing hunger; it was a thing that had decided.
And I was lying to her to get it.
I started the car. Across the street the plywood sat pale and ugly over the hole where her father’s name used to be, and behind it the light was still on, low and gold, and a shape moved in it—her, alone, finishing moving the glass.
She wouldn’t be alone for long.