CHAPTER ELEVEN
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MARY
Early Sunday, on my eleventh day, I could not sleep, so I came down and put my hands in flour, which is the only thing I have ever known how to do at three in the morning.
Corinne’s recipe book stood open against the black stone, and my grandmother had written Mary in the margin beside the lard, in pencil, because she was sure I would get it wrong.
I weighed the flour off my palm the way she taught me.
That kitchen has everything in it and no proving drawer, so I lit the oven light, set the bowl on the rack with the door cracked, and laid a wet towel over it.
Flour went up under my thumbnail while I smoothed the towel down, and it stayed there.
Yelena came as far as the doorway in a gray robe with her hand already out for the wet towel.
She has been in that house twenty years and she does not make a sound on limestone.
I shook my head and tucked the towel more firmly around the bowl.
She looked at me the way she looks at a badly taken-up hem, nodded once, and went back up.
On the stair she phoned somebody to report what I was doing awake, and she did not lower her voice for it.
Out past the glass the heat lightning came off the water with no thunder behind it. The whole kitchen went white and then let the white go. Somewhere under my feet the elevator arrived and did not open.
“Mary.”
My skin drew tight under the borrowed shirt before I had turned far enough around to see him. My body had done the arithmetic. Nobody consulted me.
Nicolas stood at the bottom of the short stair in shirtsleeves, the cuffs folded unevenly as if he had dressed without switching on a light. He did not ask what I was doing awake. He did not tell me to go back to bed.
“You’re better with your hands when nobody’s watching,” he said. “Keep going.”
“That’s a strange thing to know about a person.”
“It’s a strange house.”
He went to the machine instead of answering me, which I was learning is what he does.
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Nicolas worked the machine at the far end of that kitchen, brass eagle on the group head, bent drip tray nobody replaces.
He ground and tamped and pulled a short one.
The milk went under the steam wand and shrieked, and he took it off early, at a third of the pitcher, which is the part everybody gets wrong.
Then he reached up and took the cinnamon down off the shelf without hunting for it.
He shook it over the foam. He set the cup by my right hand and sat down, and there was no sugar in it, and he said nothing about any of that.
I picked it up too hot and held it anyway. The cinnamon was mine and the nothing where the sugar goes was mine, and I have had that cup come back wrong from people who love me.
I opened my mouth to ask who told him about the cinnamon, and I heard myself not do it.
I put the question away somewhere and drank the coffee instead.
“You didn’t ask,” I said.
“No.”
He was on the second stool while he said it, the pale one nobody has ever explained to me, and I was standing at the counter beside dough I did not need.
We talked about nothing for two hours. I have had shorter relationships.
“You have two ovens at Warren’s,” he said.
“One working, one decorative. Number Two’s deck is cracked all the way across. Even when the burner catches, half a tray burns and the other half stays raw.”
“Buy another one.”
I wiped my hands down my hip, which is what they do when there is nothing in them. “That oven’s been dead six years and I’m not replacing her. I’ll fix her.”
“Her.”
“Her. She’s older than I am and she outlived my grandmother and she is going to outlive me.”
He turned the cup on the stone without picking it up. “What’s she need?”
“A sound deck, for a start. After that, somebody has to find out why the burner won’t stay lit. Rian offered a thermostat. I told him what I thought of that.”
“You told him no.”
“I told him no, and he went off and read about ovens and came back the next day with a speech. A whole speech. About ovens.”
He laughed. One short one through the nose, and his hand came up to his mouth a beat after it, and he looked honestly annoyed to have lost it.
“He’d have driven out there that night,” Nicolas said.
“I know. That’s the whole reason I said no.”
“My mother cooked on four burners and a comal,” he said. “Casa Ofelia has a kitchen you could hold a deposition in, and she used four burners and a comal until the week she died.”
“What did she make?”
“Picadillo. Black beans. A flan she wouldn’t teach anybody.”
“Not even you?”
“I asked twice. She said a family needs one thing that isn’t written down.” He looked at his hands on the stone. “I’ve thought about that more since she died than I did while she was saying it.”
“Do you cook?”
“I can make three things and my brothers will eat two of them.”
“Which one won’t they eat?”
He put two fingers on the rim of his cup and left them there. “Rian says my rice is a hostage situation.”
The lightning came again and went out again, and for a second the two of us were the only lit thing above South Beach.
“Danny took forty dollars out of the register when he was nine,” I said. “Bought a skateboard he couldn’t ride.”
“What’d Corinne do?”
“Made him work it off. He wasn’t a bad kid, he was—” I put the bench knife down. “He was nine.”
“He cried.”
“He cried the whole time. He cried harder than the crime deserved, and he’s been doing it ever since, and I’ve been the one who says it’s fine.”
“He owes the Coliseum two point four million dollars,” Nicolas said.
“I say the number out loud sometimes to hear whether it’s gotten any smaller.”
“Has it?”
I scraped the dough off my fingers with the back of a spoon. “No. It’s a debt. It sits there being a number and it doesn’t care who’s saying it.”
“You’ve said it to me before.”
“I’ll keep saying it. It’s the only part of this I’m allowed to hold.”
He let that stand, and the wine fridge cycled on behind him and filled the quiet up.
“You know what they’d do to you on Calle Ocho for putting cinnamon in a cortado?”
“Tell me.”
“Nothing. They’d take your money and smile at you and then talk about you for a year.” I put my elbows on the stone, which put me nearer to him than I had been all night. “That’s how it works there. Nobody corrects you. They outlive you.”
“It’s a coffee,” he said. “You’ve turned it into a religion.”
“It’s a cortado. You put cinnamon on it, so you already know.”
I was looking at his mouth while I said it. Everything low in my belly had gone heavy and wet, and it had nothing to do with ovens or with my brother or with anything I would have written down.
“How long have you been in this house?”
I had to work it out. That was what got me. I stood there with my thumb in the flour and counted back to the last night on Calle Ocho, and I arrived late.
“It’s the eleventh day.”
I had counted them at the start the way you count a sentence. Somewhere in the middle of it I quit, and nobody told me I was allowed to. I had stopped wanting out, and I knew it standing there with flour on my hands.
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Nicolas watched the heat lightning go off a third time over the bay, further out. The fog took it and spread it flat across the city.
“There are two cars on Ocean Drive that never move,” I said. “Same two, every time I look down. Whose cars are they?”
“Sokolov’s. Three days. They’re parked where you can see them because that’s the whole message.”
“Rian saw a third car outside Warren’s on Thursday. It left when he crossed toward it. Osiel has the plate, and we’ve put a man on the shop.”
“What’s the message?”
“That they don’t have to hide.” He said it with no weather in it at all. “A man who hides is working. A man who parks is waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“For me to do something stupid where people can see it.”
I went to the glass. From the fifty-first floor the drive is a channel of streetlight with two dark shapes standing in it. “How many men?”
“Two in each car. They change them at six.”
“Do they know my name?”
“Yes.”
Then he put both hands flat on the stone.
“You don’t go down to the street without Rian or a driver he assigns. That’s not a rule I’m asking you about.”
I had a whole speech for that. I had been building it for eleven days out of every door in that house that opens the wrong way.
What came out of me was silence, and underneath the silence was something warm and low and disgraceful, which was relief.
He had decided it for me. I could have hit him. I could have hit myself harder.
“I’m not going to fight you about the street. I’m telling you that the way you did it—”
“I know how I did it.”
“Then you could ask me,” I said. “It’s a whole thing people do. You put it in the shape of a question.”
“I could.” He did not move. “It wouldn’t change what happens.”
“That isn’t the point of asking.”
“I know what the point of asking is.”
He made a second one without announcing it, and while his back was turned the sky went white over the water and gave the whole kitchen away and took it back.
I reached for the cup at the same moment he pushed it toward me. My hand came down across the back of his hand and the ceramic was too hot on the far side of it, and neither of us took anything away.
I counted. I got to eleven and then I lost the number. I looked once at the flat of his pants, and then I made myself into a woman who had not looked.
“Your hands are shaking and it isn’t the cold,” Nicolas said.
“I know what it isn’t.”
“If I move first, you’ll let me. That’s why I’m not going to.”
The burn on the back of his right hand was under my palm the entire time he said it. He took his hand away before I took mine away, and I have decided since that he did that on purpose too. I would have let him, and I knew what he was and what he had paid for. I am not sorry that I would have.
The cup stood between us with nobody’s hand on it.
There is a contract with my name on it in this house and a stack of paper with my brother’s name on it across the causeway, and I have read exactly one of the two. I said the next part to the cup first.
“I want to see the paper on my brother’s markers. The markers, in his own hand, not a number somebody says at me.”
“I’ll get it.”
“That’s not a yes.”
“It isn’t.” He put his cup in the sink, which nobody in that house has ever done, and went up the stairs without saying goodnight.
I stood where he left me. The dough had proved under the wet towel while I was not watching it, up over the lip of the bowl. The glass had gone from black to the color of dishwater. I paid for those two hours with the sleep I came down to earn, and with being a stranger, which I had been good at.
I punched it down and folded it and set it back and covered it over again. My hands did that. I was not in the room for it. My cup stood empty beside Corinne’s book.
I was bought for two point four million dollars by a man who came downstairs in his shirtsleeves at three in the morning and made me a coffee. It was light out before I remembered that nobody in that house had ever asked me how I take my coffee.