CHAPTER FORTY
?
MARY
The following September, the second tray of an eight-hundred-pastelito order was on the steel bench in my own kitchen. Both my hands were in it to the wrist when Rian started shouting from the front of the shop.
“Mary! The drawer’s doing the thing again!”
“Then stop hitting it,” I called back. I did not turn around. The guava was stiffening on me.
Eight hundred guava pastelitos, cut with the wheel and never a knife. Eight hundred again, for another Delgado family celebration. I had been halfway through that number the night three men came in through the back door.
This morning the order was mine, and so was the counter it was going onto. The power bill taped to the fuse box had my name across the top. That was the whole difference.
The good oven’s fan had been going since four. Butter, guava, sugar going past amber, and under it the scorched-flour smell off the deck of the second oven.
Rian came through the swing door sideways, one shoulder at a time. He was carrying the cash tray in front of him like evidence. Nicolas was behind him in a jacket at five in the morning. Luca came last, in shirtsleeves, with his tie already in his pocket.
Three grown men who owned three quarters of a company that no longer owned one brick of my block. They were standing in an aisle built for one woman and a sheet tray.
“Move, Rian. All of you. That oven doesn’t care who you are.”
Nicolas took a step back and put his shoulder on the green tile, which was not the same as moving. Luca lifted his coffee out of the way of nothing. Rian went on reading the cash tray like it had insulted him.
The heel of my right hand went into Rian’s hip before I had decided anything. I walked him three feet down the aisle and he went. I had done that to a loaded rack a thousand times and never once to a man that size.
Luca set his coffee on my clean bench and watched my face while he did it.
“She moved you. He moved. Six feet four and she moved him with one hand and a hip.”
“It’s a kitchen. I’ve been in kitchens,” Rian said.
“You’ve been in this one,” Luca said. “Badly. There’s a man on Eighth Street who fixes registers for money, he’s insured, and you’ve never once let me call him.”
“Am I allowed in this kitchen or aren’t I?”
“You’re allowed in the kitchen. You’re not allowed in the aisle.”
“That’s the same thing,” Luca said, “and she knows it.”
I cracked the door of the second oven and the heat came off the deck in a wall.
“So who actually paid for fixing this oven?”
“It’s up to temperature,” Nicolas said.
“That isn’t what I asked you.”
“I know.”
“I paid for the valve and igniter,” Rian said.
Nicolas did not look up from the machine, where he was making a cortado in one of my grandmother’s cups. “I paid for the replacement deck.”
“You weren’t anywhere near this building, Nicolas.”
“You’d have told me, Rian. You tell me everything, and it takes a long time.”
“And I paid the man who put it all together,” Luca said, comfortably. “It is the only transaction in this family for which all three of us claim sole credit and every invoice contradicts us.”
Danny laughed from the front of the shop, and the back of Rian’s neck went red to the collar.
“Cough it up where I can hear you, Danny,” Rian said.
“I didn’t say anything. I coughed.”
“You coughed at me, Danny.”
“I coughed at the drawer.”
They had bought three different repairs and spent the year claiming one oven. I knew which invoice belonged to which liar. Nicolas set the cortado down by my left hand, no sugar, cinnamon on the foam.
Rian said, “That’s not a cortado. That’s coffee wearing a hat.”
“It’s got cinnamon on it because I like cinnamon on it.”
“Two ounces of milk in a cortado,” Luca said, to the ceiling. “Nicolas puts in three, because she likes it that way, and then he denies the milk.”
“I’ve never denied milk in my life,” Nicolas said.
?
The front of the shop at twenty past five, with Danny on the register, was the best room I had ever stood in.
The case was lit, the street was black, and the lamp over my grandmother’s sign lit every brushstroke.
On the wall by the register the photograph of me outside this door hung framed, with a newer one of the four of us beside it.
Danny had the order book open and both hands still on the counter. I looked at his hands before I looked at his face.
“Six dozen guava, three cheese, and Mrs. Aguilar wants hers warm or she’ll say something,” Danny said.
“She’ll say something anyway.”
“She’ll say it to me, though. That’s the service I provide.” He turned the book around so the column faced me. “The Delgados moved their pickup to this afternoon, the funeral home wants four dozen at eight, and somebody called about a wedding and wouldn’t leave a number.”
“Warm for Mrs. Aguilar means you pull them at seven, not at six,” I said.
“I know when to pull them. I’ve known that since the spring.”
“How much is in the envelope?”
He stopped, and he did not slide his eyes to the door the way he used to.
“Forty. Same as the week before that,” Danny said.
“Say the rest of it out loud.”
“Twelve thousand dollars as restitution to you. Not to the casino. Nobody’s collecting it, and I know that.” He put two twenties in the envelope taped inside the register and shut the drawer with his hip. “You could let me off it.”
“I could. I’m not going to.”
“You’re on the counter till eleven,” I said.
“I know.”
“A year.”
“That too.”
He did not apologize and I did not tell him it was all right. It had not been all right, and neither of us had any use for a sentence like that.
“Who’s out there this morning?” I said.
“Same one as yesterday. He won’t come in.” Danny pulled the bolt on the front door at half past five and propped it with the old brick he had brought back from the alley. This time it was holding the shop open for customers. “I took him a cortado once and he told me the coffee comes to him.”
Across the sidewalk, at the edge of the streetlight, a shoulder in a dark shirt stood where there was always a shoulder. I was not going to ask him to leave.
Yelena Baranova came in before the gates went up on the block. She did not say good morning. She took a tin of merenguitos off the rack, put a folded bill on the counter, and watched me push it back.
“You don’t pay in this shop, ever.”
Yelena put her hand flat over mine and set the money down again exactly where it had been. Then she went out with the tin under her arm, and the bracket over the door rattled with no bell in it. I left the bill where she put it.
?
Luca had a corner of raw laminated dough in his fingers at my marble bench when I came back through the swing door.
“You’re eating that raw and you know it.”
“It’s better raw and everybody knows it.” Luca licked his thumb. “Brighton Beach sends a check every quarter and a card at Christmas. The card is the part I enjoy.”
“They send you a card and you enjoy it.”
“Signed by a cousin who’s never met one of us, in handwriting like a bank manager’s, wishing the family health.” He reached for another corner and I moved the tray. “He’s very correct. He’s frightened of you specifically. It’s the nicest relationship I have.”
“You’ve got two brothers who love you,” I said.
“I said nicest, not oldest.” Luca put the dough down and did not pick it up again, which was as close as he came to conceding anything. “Thursday, by the way. The table sits at noon and you’re in the room, because I wrote the line that puts you in it, and I wrote it well.”
“I know what Thursday is.”
“You own a quarter of this family,” Luca said, “and you’ve never once asked me what the number is.”
“I don’t want the number. I wanted the second oven.”
Four times a year I left somebody else in charge of the ovens and crossed the causeway for that table.
Rian came back through with the cash tray in one piece. “I sit outside that room now. Same chair, better coffee.”
“Does it bother you, sitting out there?”
Rian had sat in a car outside this shop on Thursdays before he ever came through the door of it. He took his time with the answer, which was not like him. “No. I know where you are for the whole of it. That’s the entire thing. That’s all it ever was.”
“You could come in. Luca could—”
“No,” Rian said.
“—arrange it in about four minutes, and you know he could.”
“Luca could arrange a lot of things. The drawer’s fixed,” Rian said.
Rian took the cash tray out front. My hands went on with the wash and my own voice got out ahead of me. Four bars of Cielito Lindo, the second phrase, twice through. Nothing in the shop was wrong, and I hummed it anyway.
From the front of the shop Rian hummed it back at me, flat and in the wrong key, over the drawer going in and out. He did not explain himself.
Nicolas was in the doorway with his shoulder against the frame.
“Sit down. You’ve been up since four.”
“The trays—”
“The trays’ll wait. Sit down.”
There were two stools at the end of my own bench, and I had never been good at using one while there was work left. I took a pastelito off the rack with the flour still under my thumbnail. I sat down on the second stool in front of all three of them and ate it.
“Nobody say anything,” I said, with my mouth full.
“Wasn’t going to,” Rian said, from the doorway.
“I was going to say a great deal,” Luca said.
“I know you were, Luca.”
Nicolas looked at me. Rian looked at me. Luca looked at me and kept his mouth shut, which was the most expensive silence of the morning.
The timer on Number One had four minutes left and the next tray had to go into Number Two. I stood up, and all three of them were in my way at once, on purpose.
Rian’s hands took my hips and set me down a foot to the left of where I had been. They did not come near meeting around me, and Rian took his time letting go.
“Stand there. No—there. You’re in my light and I like it.”
I got the next tray onto my shoulder and turned into Nicolas. His mouth was at the back of my neck, under the knot of my hair. Nicolas’s right hand came flat on my belly and stayed one second, with the oven door open.
“Ours,” Nicolas said, against my neck.
The tray went in. My hands did the tray and the rest of me did nothing at all. I had the door shut before I caught up with myself.
From the bench, with his mouth full of my dough, Luca said, “You’ve got flour to the elbow and up the backs of your legs, Mary, and I’m going to be thinking about the second one all day.”
Danny put the order book down and went out to the front without a word. Luca laughed at my brother’s back and did not take it back.
Then the timer went.
“Out. All three of you, Luca especially. The timer doesn’t negotiate.”
They went as far as the swing door and stopped in it, all three of them, and turned around. Nicolas looked. Rian looked. Luca looked and said nothing at all, twice in one morning.
I pulled Number One’s finished tray, and the tops had gone glassy where the syrup hit them. Through the front glass the street had started to go gray. I untied the apron and shook the flour out of it, and the light off the case caught both photographs at once.
I tied the apron on with Luca’s pen in the pocket, and my grandmother’s book lay open on the counter where it lives now, and three men stood in my kitchen at dawn being no help at all, looking at me on purpose, and not one of them explained it.