Chapter 6
Katerina
I’d been up since two, adrenaline pumping through my body. Why had I agreed to it? Why had I let Tonio convince me to give him a job?
By three the ovens were going and I’d half-convinced myself he wouldn’t come at all—men like that, they make the grand gesture and then they sleep through it—and at four sharp on the dot the bell over the door went and the cold came in and so did he, and I had my answer.
“You said four,” he said. “It’s four.”
“I said don’t be late. I didn’t say be exactly on time, to the second, like a smug—” I stopped. Started over. “Hang your coat by the door. Wash to the elbow. I got you a present.”
“You shouldn’t have!”
“Don’t get too excited. It’s an apron. Next to mine on the hook. Don’t touch the one that’s mine.”
He hung the coat. And then he was in my kitchen, and the first thing I understood, before he’d lifted a single thing, was that he was too big for it.
The space was built for one woman who knew where everything was, and now there was a man in it who took up the air, broad through the chest and shoulders in a way the morning counter had never quite shown me, and he pushed his sleeves up and I made the mistake of watching him do it.
Forearms gone dark from some summer I hadn’t been part of, the muscle moving under the ink—a Madonna, a set of initials, something in script I couldn’t read and wasn’t going to ask about.
Scarred knuckles. He pushed a hand through his hair, that wave of it he could never keep back, and looked around my kitchen like he’d walked into a church, and I turned to the dough so I didn’t have to keep watching him.
The irony of it. I’d hated the thug for doing exactly that.
He got the apron, threw it on. God damn if he didn’t look delicious in it.
“Flour,” I said. “Storeroom, back left. The fifty-pound sacks. I need four out by the bench.”
He went. And this part, I’ll give him—this part he was made for.
The sacks I broke my back on, that I dragged and shouldered and swore at every morning of my life, he carried two at a time like they were nothing, one on each shoulder, easy, and set them down where I pointed without a grunt, and came back for two more, and the relief that went through me at not lifting them myself was so total and so traitorous that I scowled at the dough to cover it.
“Where do you want—”
“There. No. There. By the bench.” He moved it. “Good. Now stay out of the way while I—no, don’t—” because he’d reached for the dough I was shaping, “—don’t touch that. That’s not a thing you do. That’s a thing I do.”
“I can shape a roll.”
“You cannot shape a roll. Watch.” I rolled one under my palm, the cup of my hand, the dough turning into a tight smooth ball in three seconds.
“I can do that.”
“How much you want to bet?”
“I’ll pay for the roll, if it’s bad.”
“Hmmm. Ok. Let’s see what happens when you try.”
He tried. What he produced was a lumpen, lopsided thing that looked like it had been in a fight and lost, and he held it up between two fingers, delighted with it, and said, “It has character,” and I took it off him and reshaped it without a word while he fished a dollar out of his pocket and put it on the counter.
He smiled that sexy smile and I ignored it and gave him the next-easiest job, which was greasing the trays.
Of course he found a way to make even that take twice as long because he kept stopping to look at things.
His dog—Olimpo—had come in with him and conducted his own survey of the premises—the cold floor, the warm floor by the ovens, the doorway to the storeroom—and chosen the doorway, of course, the single worst place a creature his size could lie down, directly across the path I’d be walking forty times before dawn, and he sighed the enormous sigh of a dog settling in for the long haul and put his head down and was instantly, profoundly asleep.
“He can’t sleep there,” I said.
“You try moving him.”
I didn’t try moving him. I stepped over him, the first of the forty times, and he didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow, comfortable as a king in my doorway like he’d lived here all his life.
The trouble with a kitchen this size is that two people in it are always almost touching.
I knew the choreography of one body in it—the pivot from the bench to the oven, the reach for the bench scraper, the half-step to the proofing rack—and now there was a second body learning the same small floor and getting it wrong, and every few minutes we’d arrive at the same eighteen inches of space at the same time and have to negotiate it.
I turned with a tray and there he was. I reached past him for the flour and my shoulder went into his arm, and the arm was warm and solid and didn’t move, and I moved instead, fast, too fast.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be sorry, be smaller.”
“I’m working on it.” He wasn’t. He didn’t move out of a space until I told him to, and I started telling him to, started bossing him around my own kitchen with a directness I hadn’t used on a living soul in a year—hands, that tray, hot, behind you, move, no, the other way—and he took every order like I was handing him a gift, no please, no thank you, just did it, and I am not proud of this but there was a thing that happened in my chest the third or fourth time he turned exactly where I aimed him without a word of argument.
A thing I had no business feeling. Some part of me that had been clenched for a year easing by a single notch.
I bossed him harder to make up for it.
“You missed a tray. Grease it properly, you’re not painting a fence. Wider strokes. No—give it here.” I did it myself. “Just—stand there. Hold these. Don’t drop them. Can you manage that?”
“I’m a very capable man.”
“Not according to that cursed roll you made.”
“I’m an innovator.” He grinned. The grin still worked on him the way it didn’t work on me—lit the whole broken-nosed face of him up, crinkled his eyes, and I felt it land somewhere low and inconvenient and I aimed myself at the deck oven and the work and refused it.
He smelled like cologne and cold air and, underneath, like the storeroom flour now, like the shop, like he was already part of it.
“Come on,” he said, “give me more to do. I want to learn.”
I raised an eyebrow.
The thing about lamination is that it’s a job that can’t be charmed.
You can talk your way past a lot in this life but you cannot talk your way past butter.
The butter has to be cold and the dough has to be cold and the room is warm and your hands are warm, and the whole art of it is being fast and gentle at the same time, folding the cold block into the cold dough and rolling and folding again so it goes into the oven in five hundred layers and comes out a thing that shatters when you bite it.
I’ll be honest: I gave it to him because I wanted to watch him fail.
I’ll admit that. After the flour, after watching him make the heavy work look like nothing, I wanted to hand him something his strength was useless on and watch him learn what my hands knew.
I rolled the dough out and laid the butter on cold and showed him the fold, slow, twice, and stepped back and let him try.
His hands were too hot. That was the first thing.
He’s a furnace, that man—I felt it every time we crossed in the kitchen, the heat coming off him—and the butter started going under his palms before he’d even folded it, smearing, breaking through the dough in greasy streaks, and he frowned at it like it had personally betrayed him and pressed harder, which is exactly wrong, and within a minute he had a flat torn slick of butter-soaked dough that would bake into a brick.
“Gentle,” I said. “You’re not subduing it.”
“This is me being gentle.”
“You’re about as gentle as an earthquake.
” I took it off him—it was past saving—and he looked so genuinely wounded by his own failure, this big man defeated by a cold block of fat, that something nearly came up out of me and I crushed it.
“Some things you can’t muscle,” I said. “Go grease the trays. You’re good at the trays. ”
“I’m the best at the trays.”
“Well. Let’s say that you’re adequate at the trays.”
By then they were coming in, the morning such as it is. And I had told him—I had laid it down like a stake in the floor—that the customers were not his audience, that he was a hand and not a hero, that he so much as charmed one old woman and he was on the street.
So, of course. Of course he charmed every one of them.
He got the early bus driver, the man who never said three words, to say six.
He had the night nurses, gray-faced off their shift, actually laughing in my doorway over something I didn’t catch, and I loaded them down with the warm bread the way I always do and one of them caught my eye over his shoulder and gave me a look, woman to woman, that I pretended not to see.
And the old woman in the three-husband coat—she held court like always, except now she had a court.
He sat with her. He sat down across from her at her window seat with a coffee he’d poured himself and let her tell him about her hip and her son who never called, and he leaned in, and he made a face at the right moment, and she swatted his arm and called him a charmer and meant it as the highest praise she had, and the shop—
The shop was loud.
That’s the thing I wasn’t ready for. The shop was loud, and warm, and full, the way it hadn’t been in a year, the way it used to be when my father stood in the window and filled it.
People stayed. They didn’t take their bread and go—they stayed, because there was a thing to stay for now, a warmth pointed back at them, and the radio played under it and the cases emptied and the bell kept going, and I stood behind my counter in the middle of it and felt it happening to my shop and didn’t know what to do with my hands.