Chapter 11
Tonio
Iwoke before the dark thought about going gray. There was a woman asleep on my chest and a great gray heap of dog at the foot of the bed. His eyebrow twitched. Maybe he was dreaming of sparrows. Maybe of chasing cats. I wanted to let him dream.
Katerina was heavy on me in the good way.
Dead weight, total weight, the weight of a person who has finally, blessedly, let go of holding herself up.
Her face was turned into my neck. Her breath came slow and even against my throat.
Under the blanket I had her foot trapped between my calves where she’d jammed it last night to be a menace, and it had gone warm against me hours ago, and she had not stirred since.
Last night had been magical. Feeling her go small, finally let go of it all and just being. She needed this sleep, and I didn’t want to wake her.
Ovens at three. That was the rule of Filoxenia, the iron rule.
Three o’clock, every day, no exception, because the bell goes at four and people need to rely on us.
And it was already past four now, the dark already old, and the ovens were cold and the proofing rack was empty and the day was going to be short.
Good.
I made the decision lying right there, with her breath on my neck. Today the ovens went on late. Today the bus driver could have his loaf at six instead of four. The woman on my chest had not slept a full night in a year and she was sleeping one now, and I was not going to be the one to end it.
I eased out from under her by degrees, the way you ease a sleeping child off your arm, one inch at a time, swapping my chest for a pillow so slow she never surfaced.
She frowned in her sleep, hunted for the warmth, found the pillow, and accepted it.
At the foot of the bed Olimpo opened one amber eye, regarded me wearily, and closed it again with a grumble that was a whole sentence.
I stood in the gray and looked at her a minute.
Her face, asleep, with no armor on it. This was just a woman, dark hair loose across my pillow, mouth soft, the tired around her eyes finally getting a chance to dissipate. I’d have stood there an hour. I made myself go cook.
The kitchen’s small and the stove’s bad and I cook on it anyway, because cooking is life.
Eggs. I cracked four into the pan and went slow with them, low heat, the way you have to or they go to rubber, and I cut a hunk of her bread, a heel of yesterday’s that I’d carried home like a thief—and I put the kettle on and I watched the eggs come together soft and yellow.
At five I went back in.
I sat on the edge of the bed and put my palm into the loose hair at the back of her head, slow, no hurry, and I said her name once, low.
“Kat.” She made a small sound. Burrowed.
I stroked the hair and said it again, gentler, “Wake up, Baby Girl,” and watched her surface from the sleep, from somewhere far down, her eyes opening on me with no fight in them at all, just sleep and confusion and then—when she remembered where she was, who I was—a worry so soft and undefended it nearly put me on the floor.
“The ovens,” she said. Croaked it. Already reaching for responsibility.
“Not yet.”
“Tonio—it’s—what time—the bell—”
“Water first.” I had the glass ready on the nightstand and I put it in her hand and folded her fingers around it. “Drink that. All of it. Then there’s eggs. Then we talk about the ovens.”
“I don’t have time for—”
“You have time for this.” Flat. Soft-steel, the voice. “Food first. That’s the rule. You eat, then you have the day. Not before.”
She drank the water. Grumbled the whole way through it, small and silly, a sound that didn’t belong to the woman who runs a kitchen, and I loved it so much.
I put the plate in front of her—eggs, the bread, the heel of her own loaf—and I sat there and made sure she ate it, every bite, the way she’d made me prove I could carry flour.
When she tried to leave the crust I gave her a look and she ate the crust.
“There,” she said, around it, glaring, “happy?”
“We’re getting there.”
She jammed her feet against my thigh, both of them, ice cold on purpose, a declaration of war. I yelped. She did not move them. She watched me over the eggs with a thing in her eyes that was almost a smile. I let the cold feet stay, because I wanted to feel her body against me.
Plate clean. I took it.
“Good girl,” I said, and watched it land—watched the color come up her throat, watched her breath catch, watched the word do to her in the gray morning what it had done across the marble, go down through her warm and helpless and chosen.
“Stop,” she said, not meaning it.
“Later,” I said, “there’s a thing. Something special. We’re going somewhere tonight, you and me, after the shop, and there’s—” I almost said it. A contract. I held it. “—there’s something to sign. Something between us. I’ll tell you when it’s time.”
She set the plate aside and came up onto her knees on the bed and kissed me, and it wasn’t small, it had her hands in it, fisted in my shirt the way she fists everything, and I felt the want come up through me hot and immediate, my whole body answering, the furnace lit—and I held it.
I kissed her back and held the line and did not take it further, because the morning was hers to wake into soft, and tonight was for the rest.
“Ovens,” I said against her mouth. “Now we go put the ovens on. Together. Late, for once.”
“Okay, Daddy,” she agreed, wondering at the word like it was foreign, and let me pull her up. “Whatever you say.”
By eight o’clock Donatella Caruso had annexed the marble end of the bench like she owned it, and there was not one thing any of us could do about it.
She’d set up a command post. Laptop open, screen full of a spreadsheet color-coded in shades I didn’t have names for.
A wedding planner the size of a missal, tabbed and flagged and bristling with sticky notes in three colors.
Two phones face-up on the marble, both lit, both buzzing.
A pen behind her ear and another in her hand and the red lipstick on like a warning label nailed to a fence, and over the coat that had cost more than my car she’d knotted one of Katerina’s spare aprons—FILOXENIA stenciled across a chest that had no business in a bakery—and she wore it like it was couture, like she’d chosen it, like the whole place was a set she’d had built.
She was running two hundred and forty covers like an invasion of a small country.
“No,” she said into the first phone, in Italian, fast, the words clipping out of her, “no, you sent me that quote on Tuesday and now it’s Thursday and the number’s grown legs, I don’t care what the market did, you’ll honor Tuesday’s number or I’ll call Bianchi and you’ll spend the rest of the season watching me hand him every event I touch—” She didn’t wait for the answer.
She put the phone down, picked up the other one, and without one breath in between switched into French—flawless, cool, a different woman entirely—soothing some florist in Lyon about lilies versus something with a longer name, her voice gone silk where a second ago it had been a blade.
And the whole time, when the linen vendor stonewalled her on the phone she’d set down, she turned the ring on her finger. Round and round. Tella turns the ring when she’s not winning yet. She wasn’t winning yet. But, knowing her, she was going to win.
“What I don’t understand,” Katerina said, low, to me, at the bench, “is what she is to you. Exactly.”
Fair question. I’d been turning it over myself.
“My cousin Serafina,” I said, hauling a sack onto the rack, “married a man called Marco. Marco Caruso. That’s her brother.” I jerked my chin at the hurricane. “So she’s—” I stopped. There wasn’t a clean word for it. “Marco’s my cousin’s husband. That makes Donatella my cousin’s husband’s sister.”
Katerina looked at me.
“Right,” I said.
Donatella came off the French call and caught the tail of it.
“I’ve decided we’re just family,” she announced, to the room, to nobody, dropping the phone.
“It’s simpler. Marco married a Scordato, the Scordatos are running half of Chicago through this man’s brother and his brother’s brother, the whole thing’s a knot, and life is short.
Family.” She pointed the pen at me. “You’re my cousin now, Toe.
Congratulations. You’ll come to Easter. You’ll hate it. ”
“I already hate it.”
“See? Family.” She went back to the spreadsheet.
The problem with three people in Katerina’s kitchen is that Katerina’s kitchen was built for one.
Donatella did not know the dance and did not intend to learn it. She had decided that physics would accommodate her, and she stood exactly where she stood with the serene confidence of a woman who has never once been the one to step aside.
So it all came apart.
I turned with a tray of tsoureki braids and there she was, dead in my path, head down over the planner, and I had to pull up so hard I nearly put the braids on the floor.
I went for the bench scraper in the drawer, and Donatella’s elbow was already there, parked, immovable, and we collided and she didn’t so much as look up, just said “mm” and kept writing.
I hauled fifty pounds of flour from the storeroom and there she was standing square in the storeroom doorway on a phone call, and I stood there with a quarter of my body weight in milled wheat over one shoulder and I said, “Tella,” and she lifted one finger—one minute—and finished her sentence in Italian, and I stood and held the flour while she negotiated table linens, because she would not move out of a doorway on principle, the principle being that doorways, like everything else, were hers.