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As I prepped a porterhouse back at my tiny studio apartment he asked about how I became a butcher.
“You don’t see that many women in the meat business.”
I rolled my eyes like it was such a sexist thing to say even though he was right. “I probably shouldn’t admit this to a lawyer, but I was a middle school juvenile delinquent,” I told him as I mixed finely chopped garlic and balsamic vinegar for the marinade. “I kept getting into fights, mostly with boys who were picking on my sister because she wasn’t into them. I got suspended a bunch and the school said they’d expel me if my parents didn’t figure something out. So Mom and Dad shipped me up to the Poconos to my aunt Rosie’s house for ninth grade and Rosie decided I needed to get my own ass kicked a little. She had a pal who ran a farm that employed former convicts right after they got out of prison to help them transition back to life in the real world. Rosie sent me there every day at dawn before school. It was just me and a bunch of ex-cons mucking shit out of stalls, hauling bags of feed, castrating the bulls, all of it. I loved those guys. I loved those early-morning hours.” I didn’t talk about how the stench of manure clung to me while I slept through my first year of high school or how I smoked rolled cigarettes and sometimes the odd joint with the guys every morning.
I did say that they were the hardest-working dudes I’d ever met in my entire life. Them and the farmers. The farm did all their own butchering. After a couple of months, I convinced the bull master, Frank, to let me watch the slaughter and quartering of a cow. I threw up when the cow collapsed on the ground in front of me. Frank said I should become a vegetarian if I couldn’t stomach where the meat came from. I cleaned up after myself and helped him butcher the whole animal and then we did the pigs and then packaged it up for restaurants all over the East Coast. I learned the difference between happy meat and industrial meat. I could taste it even then. I also loved preparing dinners for the men on the farm and for Aunt Rosie. I kept up the cooking when I got home and eventually saved up enough money for culinary school because I thought it might give me more job options, even though all I wanted to do was get back to the basics of butchering. I’d explained all of that to Jack while I cooked. By then the steak was out of the cast-iron skillet and resting on my counter. I sprinkled it with salt and pepper and served it on my two chipped plates that I’d taken from my mom and dad’s house.
“This steak tastes like Christmas morning,” Jack gushed.
“You eat steak on Christmas morning?”
His cheeks flushed pink, which was terribly sexy. “No. I mean it tastes like pure joy. My Waspy friends had Christmas trees and got all these presents, and all my parents ever gave me for Hanukkah was socks and boxer shorts and acne cream. For me Christmas morning was this magical perfect moment of wish fulfillment. That’s what this steak is like, the perfect gift.”
I couldn’t think of a better thing to be than someone’s perfect morning.
He ate the rest of it in five swift bites, pushed his chair away from the table, and kissed me. That kiss was like Christmas morning and later that night I had my first orgasm with another human. All the men before had made me finish the job myself. I had filthy dreams about him for weeks until our next date and we were inseparable after that. Poor Zelda Grossberg didn’t know the price of that brisket.
With his tiny cherubic face Jack looked like a little angel even though he carried himself like a very serious man, always walking faster than anyone else on the sidewalk. I was two inches taller than him, more if I wore heels, which he encouraged me to do. By then I’d outgrown my teenage awkwardness and embraced my height and strength. I loved being strong enough to throw a two-hundred-pound beef quarter over my shoulder with nary a grunt. Jack had no interest in lifting anything heavy. He didn’t even know how to change a tire when we met, bless his well-mannered Main Line soul. The two of us fit together in unexpected ways—Jack was organized to a fault where I was messy. I taught him how to have fun, drove us through the night to Montreal just to try a specific poutine, painted our bedroom electric blue, enrolled us in a kickball league. Jack encouraged me to stay in, to rest, regroup, and snuggle.
We were both young and ambitious. I started doing small catering gigs and then this fancy restaurant asked me if I wanted to do a pop-up with them. I was featured on a TV show on the Travel Channel about food trucks. My reputation swelled along with my bank account though neither really had anywhere to go but up. Some investors offered to put up a little cash for my very own restaurant. My. Very. Own. Restaurant. I was an accidental success and it always felt like it could be snatched away.
Once Sophie came along, I brought her with me some nights. I nursed her in the pantry while eking out a menu with one hand and squeezing my boob into her mouth with the other. But mostly I left her with my mom, which Jack hated. What choice did I have? The first couple of years are all that matter in the food industry. I guess you could say the same about the first years of having a kid. Still, I wanted my little girl to see me succeed. That’s what I told myself every time I left her, that I was modeling what a strong, successful woman looked like and wasn’t that as important as any of the other parts of parenting? That’s when Jack started pressing me to have another baby, when he told me maybe I should slow down at work. That’s when we started resenting each other, when our marriage began to fray around the edges, and I was too busy to see it. And then came my betrayal, the one he wasn’t able to forgive. I hated thinking about it, hated remembering how we’d once loved one another so much we couldn’t breathe without the other one and then how we’d lost track of why we’d chosen each other in the first place.
Carla thankfully changed the subject. “Where are you now?”
“A gas station in between Palermo and the town where our relatives are from.”
“The legendary Caltabellessa.” We’d grown up hearing Rosie mythologize the village like it was Atlantis.
“Dad is so jealous,” Carla said. “You know that, right? He has been dreaming of a find-your-roots trip forever.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said to my sister. “But Dad doesn’t have a passport, or any cash, and Mom only leaves Philly to go down the shore.”
“Well, bring him back a flag or an apron that has the flag on it,” Carla said.
“I’ll get him something nice. I’ll call you when I get there. I’m hoping to figure all this out as fast as I can and get back.”
“You’re so crazy. Why don’t you stay for the week and enjoy yourself? That’s what Rose wanted. It’s all paid for and who knows, maybe that deed is real.”
“We both know it isn’t. And I’ve got a ton to do back in Philly.” The last of the bankruptcy paperwork, making sure my workers would get unemployment, finding a divorce attorney who would work for pork chops.
“Sara, chill out. Everything will still be there when you get back. All the paperwork, all the problems.”
Pippo walked out of the gas station, his hands filled with caffeine and more pastries.
“I gotta go. Love you.” I ended the call with my sister and rushed over to help him.
“You like cannoli?”
“Do I look like a savage? Who doesn’t? But, cannoli from the gas station?”
“The gas stations have the best cannoli. You trust me.”
“ ‘Leave the gun, take the cannoli,’ ” I joked. He smiled, but he’d definitely heard this line from every one of his American clients.
“How much longer until we get there?”
He gestured down the road. “Fifteen minutes and then we go up the mountain and then maybe another thirty more. When we arrive, I will take you to the hotel and you can sleep.”
