Chapter 12
Katerina
My hands made the tsoureki without me.
That’s what happens when you do a thing ten thousand times.
The hands learn it and then they leave you out of it.
Over, under, pull taut. Three strands going to a braid, glossy with egg wash, the smell of orange-blossom and yeast coming up warm off the bench, and I wasn’t there for any of it.
My hands were there. The rest of me was three blocks south in the dark front of the shop, watching the back of a man on a phone.
I should have been happy.
I had every reason in the world to be happy. We’d signed the contract. He’d said I love you. We’d felt so close, so incredibly close.
This morning he’d chosen my underwear.
It was in the contract now, in my own hard small hand—Daddy picks your underwear—and I’d written it scarlet and woken up to him laying it out on the foot of the bed like it was nothing, a thing of dark green lace that echoed the dress I’d worn to dinner, soft as a held breath, and I’d put it on in his bathroom with my face hot and felt it against my skin all morning.
The one vanity. Except it wasn’t mine anymore, it was his, he’d chosen it, and every time I moved I felt it and felt him choosing it and the feeling went down low and warm and stupid and made me lose count of the koulourakia twice.
I should have been settled. Settled was the whole point. He held the line so I didn’t have to. I’d put it all down—the loaf, the books, the year—and he’d taken it, and that was supposed to be the end of the holding.
You have to trust me.
That’s what he’d said. You have to trust me. And I’d melted into him and said I do, Daddy, I trust you. I’d meant it. In that second I’d meant it all the way down.
Now it was three in the morning, and the old tide came up.
Nothing’s free.
Every hand has a string. You just haven’t found it yet.
I looked up from the braid.
He was across the kitchen, hauling a sack of flour from the storeroom to the rack. He’d brought me coffee an hour ago and set it sideways at my elbow without a word, the way I’d taught him, the way that gets past me. He was being good. He was being so good it made my teeth ache.
I cataloged him.
The set of his jaw, easy. The hands, sure. The grin he threw at the dog when Olimpo grumbled in his sleep, real. All of it real. That was what made it impossible. There wasn’t a false note in the whole man this morning. I trusted him, I did. But I also had this feeling.
Something was out there. Something about me. And he was carrying it for me, to protect me.
I pulled the braid taut.
He wanted me to trust him. To put my blinkers on and just work.
I knew how to do that. I’d done it my whole life.
Not this time.
I set the braid on the tray and reached for the next three strands, and my hands started over without me, over, under, pull taut, and I watched the back of him crossing my kitchen in the cold gray light, and I decided, the way I decide a flour order, the way I decide everything down to the koulouraki count.
I was not going to let it lie.
Iwent at it sideways first. You don’t go head on. My father taught me that without meaning to, watching him deal with the men who came to the old place wanting things—you smile, you offer coffee, you let them think you’re slow, and you find the shape of the thing before you ever say the thing.
So I rolled cannoli shells and didn’t look up.
“So tell me more about Marco,” I said. Easy. Light. A woman making conversation over the dawn work. “Your cousin’s husband. The one who married—Serafina, was it?”
“Marco.” I heard the smile come into his voice from across the kitchen.
“Marco’s the charming one. Runs a nightclub.
Everybody underestimates him, which is exactly how he likes it.
” A laugh, low. “He’ll be at the wedding being insufferable.
You’ll like him. Everybody likes Marco. That’s his whole problem. ”
“Sounds a lot like you!”
“No way! Nothing like me. I’m handsome!”
“Mm.” I pressed dough around the form. “And he calls you a lot, does he? Late?”
A beat. Small. I felt it more than heard it, the way you feel a draft when a door’s been opened somewhere in a house.
“He calls when he calls.” Still easy.
I looked up then, because I needed to see the face, and that was a mistake, because the face was annoyingly, infuriatingly gorgeous this morning.
He had flour to the elbow and a smear of it on his jaw and the broken boxer’s nose that should’ve been a flaw and wasn’t, and his hair pushed back where he’d run his hand through it, and he caught me looking and the grin tipped sideways, knowing, and I felt the green lace against my skin and hated the both of us.
I went back to the shells.
“So what did he want?” I said. Less sideways now. “Last night. On the phone.”
“Family business.” He hauled the proofing rack a quarter turn. “Boring. Linens. Logistics. Tella’s making everyone insane about the seating.”
“Tella was at the bakery yesterday handling the seating herself.” I set a shell down. “She didn’t need to call you about it at—what was it. Past midnight.”
The rack stopped turning.
“Katerina.”
“In Sicilian,” I said. “Fast. With your back to me. Your grin went out.” I wiped my hands on my apron, slow, and faced him full across the kitchen with the bench between us like a border.
“I’m going to ask you a straight question now and I’d like a straight answer, because I am not good at the other kind and I don’t think you’re as good at it as you believe you are.
What are you actually doing on this block, Tonio? ”
And there it was.
The morning-man grin held for one more second—he tried, I’ll give him that, he reached for it the way I reach for a lie when I’m cornered—and then it went flat.
Drained right off him. I watched it happen the way I’d watched it happen last night, the easy leaving, the steel coming up underneath, the soldier rising into his eyes where I could see him.
“There are secrets I need to keep,” he said.
Quiet. Even. No apology in it, and that was almost the worst of it, the no apology.
“I told you that the first night,” he said.
“I sat at your counter and I told you straight—there are things I won’t say.
And I meant it then and I mean it now. It’s not because I don’t—” his jaw worked, “—it’s not about you.
It’s the opposite of about you. But there’s a part I keep—a part of me—and this is it, and I’m asking you to let it be. ”
“No,” I said.
“Katerina—”
“No. I get to ask.” My voice came out steadier than I felt, the boss voice, the one that doesn’t betray the thing under it.
“This is my block. My window’s the one that got broken.
My wall’s the one that got scorched. My loan, my father’s name on the door, my hands on every loaf.
So when a man who’s always at my bakery now starts taking calls in a language I don’t speak with his back to me, I get to ask what’s happening on my own corner. ”
He held my gaze.
“You signed my name beside yours last night,” I said, lower now. “You wrote four pages about holding the things I carry. And then within the hour you went cold in the dark and told me to trust you. You don’t get to do both. You don’t get the trust and the locked door.”
His eyes flicked.
Past me. Quick—so quick I almost missed it, would have missed it a month ago, before he taught me to read a room.
Past my shoulder, through the new green glass at the front of the shop, out to the curb across the street where the streetlight made a cold pool on the dead asphalt.
A dark stretch of nothing. An empty curb.
He looked at the empty curb for less than a second.
And then he moved.
Half a step. Smooth, the way he does everything smooth, the big easy body shifting without seeming to decide to, putting his shoulder between me and the window, putting his back to the glass and his front to me, the exact thing he’d done the night of the car on the dark street, the wall, the smooth wall, between her and the door, between her and whatever comes next.
I felt it go through me cold.
There was something out there. On the curb.
In the dark across the street where I couldn’t see and he could, where there was nothing to me and something to him.
He was reading a threat off an empty stretch of road and he was standing in front of it without a word, his body doing the talking, and the thing he wouldn’t say wasn’t linens and it wasn’t Marco and it wasn’t seating charts.
It was about me.
Something was out there about me, on my own block, in front of my own door, and the man who held the line so I didn’t have to had decided I didn’t get to know.
The powerlessness lit up in me like a pilot flame catching.
Small and blue and steady, that first lick of it, the one that runs everything else.
I knew it. I’d lived inside it before. It was the feeling of being a thing decided about, a thing protected, a thing kept safe in a room someone else had the key to.
I’d sworn I would never feel it again.
“What’s on the curb, Tonio,” I said.
“Nothing’s on the curb.”
The worst liar I’d ever met.
Iwas going to take back the thing that was mine.
He could keep the curb. He could keep the Sicilian and the phone and the part he kept. But the work was mine—it had always been mine, the one thing no one could decide for me—and I drove it like a mule that had wronged me.
Through the morning rush.
Past noon. The lunch trade. Then the dead hour, when a person who slept four hours and meant to take care of herself might sit down with a coffee and the books.
I didn’t sit. I started the wedding shop instead—the second shop, the ghost shop, the one with no hours—and I tested cannoli I didn’t need to test and braided tsoureki I already had the proportions for and pulled the mastic loaf again, the loaf I couldn’t make, and watched it come out dense and bitter and wrong, and started another, because the failing was a kind of motion and the motion was a kind of not-thinking.