Chapter 19 #3
“Late,” I said. “Cold. Gentle. You don’t fight it in.
Everybody fights it in—they crush it and they work it hard into the warm dough early because they’re in a rush, because they want to be done, and it comes out bitter and tight and wrong, the resin sitting on top instead of going through.
You wait.” I let the dough come down cool under my hands and I worked the resin in last, barely, folding it through with the flat of my fingers the way you’d settle something to sleep.
“Late. Cold. Gentle. The mastic doesn’t want a fight.
It wants to be let in. Siga-siga.” I heard my own voice do the thing it does on the Greek, the crack, and I let it.
“Slowly, slowly. He used to say it. My father.”
Eleni was quiet. She’d gone serious, the dry mouth shut for once, and she put her hands where mine had been and she folded the resin in slow, and she got it on the first try, the careless gifted girl, the way I never had, and I felt the whole cost of that go through me.
I was giving it away.
On purpose. With my own mouth, into another woman’s hands, watching her learn in minutes what cost me a year, and the old animal in me screamed that I was losing it, that the moment it lived in someone else’s hands it stopped being only mine, stopped being only his.
And I made myself understand what I’d been six months learning—that a thing you keep in only your own two hands dies with your two hands.
That my father didn’t give me the loaf to keep.
He gave it to me to give. You hand it on or it ends, and ending was the one thing I would not let happen to him.
So I gave it to Eleni. And she took it.
Through the pass-through, something stopped.
I looked up, and Tonio was at the window.
The broken nose and the crinkling eyes, a towel over his shoulder, in the middle of his own opening-night chaos.
And he’d stopped. He was watching me teach Eleni the loaf, and his face had gone to the thing it goes to when he sees clear down to the bottom of me, the still, careful attention, because he knew.
He’d watched me fail that loaf a dozen times.
He’d watched me get it right the morning before the world ended.
He knew exactly what it was and exactly what it cost me to hand it to someone else’s hands, and he didn’t say a word, because some things you don’t say across a working kitchen, and his not-saying was the whole of it.
He looked at me until I looked back. Then he gave me the smallest nod, and he went back to his fire.
Somewhere mid-morning, when I’d been on my feet too long and the small of my back had started to talk and I hadn’t noticed because I never notice, a coffee appeared at my elbow.
Through the hole in the wall. Set down on my marble, hot, the steam coming off it.
No note. No comment. Just there, where my hand would find it, the way you set a thing near someone you’ve been watching closer than they know.
I didn’t look up. I didn’t say thank you.
I drank it, the boss out front the whole time, sharp and certain and running my flour and my staff and my shop, and his hand on the line the whole time, holding the part of me up that I’d never once admit needed holding.
The two of us holding the whole loud thing up together, one wall between, a window in it.
When the lull came he leaned through to kiss me, and I put a flour-white hand flat to his chest and stopped him.
“Tonight? You’ve got that thing?” he said, mouth a breath from mine.
“I’ve got that thing.” The church. The basement. The wax and the incense and the wheat and the candles, the small mnimosyno I was going to in the evening, and the loaf I was bringing to it, finally come right. “I’ll be back late.”
“Take the loaf,” he said.
“I’m taking the loaf.”
“Keep the bed warm for me, though,” I said, and he grinned, and I let him have the kiss after all.
The church basement smelled the way it always smelled.
Wax and incense and damp, the cold stone breath of a room under a Greek church that had held a hundred years of the same smells and would hold a hundred more.
The long folding tables with their paper cloths. The candles in their sand. And at the center of it the koliva, the boiled wheat heaped and patterned with sugar and silver dragées and a cross laid in cinnamon, the food of the dead, made for the memory of one man on the anniversary of his leaving.
Last time, I’d fled. I’d spoken to Despina, and I couldnt handle it, and I’d just fled. This time, the grief was for someone else. A woman called Eleftheria, pillar of the community, who died a a year ago. We were all here to remember her.
This time I set the loaf down on the table among the breads, the mastic loaf, finally come right, the pine and honey of it rising up into the incense—and I did not walk away. I stayed beside it.
Despina found me.
Eighty if she was a day, in her black, three husbands buried and no patience left for any of it, and she came across the basement with her sharp eyes already on me and she took my face in both her hands.
Cold hands. They’re always cold, the old women’s hands.
And then she started the old moves, out of pure habit, the way she’d done my whole life.
“Let me help with the trays,” she said first, already turning. “Come, the trays—”
“It’s ok. They’re done, Despina.”
She stopped. They were done. Eleni had done them—Eleni and Theo had come with me, were across the room now portioning koliva into little paper cups. Despina looked at them and looked back at me.
“Then sit,” she said, regrouping, the second move. “Sit, sit, you’re on your feet all day, sit down.”
I sat. But it wasn’t a surrender now. I sat because I wanted to, beside her, not because she’d herded me into it.
“You’ll eat,” she said, the third move, the oldest one, already reaching for a plate. “You’re too thin. You’re always too thin. Stavros’s girl, all bone, what do they feed you—”
“I’ve eaten, Despina.”
She paused. Looked at me. Really looked. Not just the worried scan for problems that she’s done in the past. No. This time she took me in as I really was.
“I see that you have.” Her eyes were bright. “You look good, Katerina.”
I smiled.
She reached across the little table and she put her hand over mine.
“So,” she said. “You let someone carry the flour at last.”
I laughed. It came up out of me bright and helpless, the sound I’d have sworn a year ago I had no capacity for, and I didn’t deny it. I didn’t say I’m fine or I’ve got it or I don’t need—the verbal tics I’d worn like armor my whole life, gone, finally, washed clean.
“I do,” I said. “I let them carry the flour. I’ve got two kids in the shop now, Despina—that’s them, the ones who did your trays, Eleni and Theo, she’s got a mouth on her and he says sorry to the bread.
And there’s a man. I think you know him?
” I felt the pink come up my throat. “The Sicilian. Of all things.”
“I do know him. A good man. The one you were a little . . . mean to?”
I chuckled.
“You remember.”
“I’m old, not stupid!”
More laughter.
“Well, you were right. I like him. No, I love him. He’s loud and he’s ridiculous. There’s a whole family come with him, a great roaring clan of them, and they reached out and closed around me without even asking, and I didn’t—I didn’t fight it. I let them.”
She reached up and laid her cold-warm hand against my cheek one more time, and she held it there, and she said the thing the old ones say, the only thing, the thing that has to be true because they need it to be.
“Your father,” she said, “would be proud of you, koritsi.”
And I let that be true, too. I sat in the wax and the incense and the damp, in the room I’d fled, holding the hand I’d run from, and I let it be true that he’d be proud.
Of the loud full shop. Of the hands that weren’t only mine.
Of the loaf given away. Of the door I’d stopped guarding and the family I’d let close around me and the man who’d kept the bed warm.
“Now,” she said, “let’s not talk about grief. Let’s talk about love.”
I held the old woman’s hand, and I stayed.