“Out,” she said, deadly serious.
“I—”
“Out. Now. Whoever you are. I didn’t ask for help. Did I ask you for help?” She wasn’t shouting. That was the unnerving thing—she’d dropped her voice down low and flat and it was worse than shouting, every word laid down like a knife on a counter. “I had it. I was handling it. He was leaving.”
“He was not leaving, he was—” I gestured at the glass, at the spot where I’d had his face. “He came around your counter. He put his hand on you. He—”
“And I was handling it.” She picked up something off the floor as she said it, fast, and turned away to set it on the counter whereI couldn’t see. It was the broken thing, had to be. Why didn’t she want me to see it? “I don’t need a man to come crashing through my door at eleven o’clock at night like—like Saint George. I’ve got it. I had it. I mean what gives you the right, just—who even are you?”
I gave her the grin—the wide easy one, the harmless one, the one that opens bartenders and bookies and bored wives and my own terrifying family—and I spread my hands, shrugged, and said, “I’m the guy who buys too much bread.”
It bounced.
I watched the grin hit her and slide right off, no purchase at all, like throwing water at a wall, and her eyes got, if anything, colder. “I know who you are. You’re the nuisance with the dog. Eleven dollars of bread for a man and an animal, every morning, like you’ve never heard of a grocery store. You think I don’t notice? You think you’re charming.”
“People have said.”
“People are wrong.” She crossed her arms. “Out.”
And here is the strange thing, the thing I couldn’t have explained to Sal or Pietro or anyone, the thing that came up in me right there in the warm wrecked middle of her shop with my pulse still going and a hole burned through my cover and an ugly heat still sitting in me over the hand on her hair: I wanted to laugh. Not at her. At the bounce. I felt the grin go from a thing I was doing to a thing that was happening to me, real, helpless, getting wider, because in twenty-nine years I had never once met a lock my key didn’t fit, and here was one, dug in behind her counter with flour to the elbows and murder in her eyes, completely immune, and it was—God help me—it was the most interesting thing that had happened to me in years.
“You’re enjoying this,” she said. I didn’t stop grinning—I couldn’t help it! It got wider and wider. I could see her getting furious, properly furious now, color coming up in her face. “I tellyou to get out of my shop and you stand there grinning like—what is wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” I said. “I’m having a wonderful night.”
“Get out.”
“You’re welcome, by the way.”
“I’m not going to thank you.” Flat. Final. Like a door. “I didn’t ask. You don’t get a thank you for a thing nobody asked you to do. That’s not how it works.”
“Maybe not in this stinking country, but believe me, that is exactly how it works. That is the whole entire way it works—”
“Not in here it isn’t.”
And I’d have kept going—I could have kept going all night, I’d have stood there and bounced my whole repertoire off her wall just to watch each one bounce, it was that good—except the bell over the door went, soft, and we both turned, and there in the doorway, having nosed the car door open and crossed an entire empty street under his own enormous power on his own private schedule, stood Olimpo.
He took us both in. The wreckage, the heat, the two people squared up across the floor. He sighed the deep sigh of a creature who has seen too much, ambled past me without a glance—his treachery knows no bounds—and went straight to her.
And she changed.
Everything in her that had been knives for me went soft all at once, the second the dog reached her. She crouched down right there on the cracked tile in her too-big apron with the fury still half on her face, and she put her hand under that great drooling jowly head and looked at him like he was the only decent thing to come through her door in a year, and she said something low in Greek I didn’t catch, gentle, the gentlest thing I’d ever heard out of her.
Olimpo, who extends his affections selectively and on his own schedule and has never once hurried for me, leaned his whole bear’s weight into her and his tail went—the slow wag, the cautious approval, the highest honor he gives—and she reached up to the rack without taking her eyes off him and took down a koulouraki, the good ones, and broke it and fed it to him off her flat palm, and let him lick her fingers after, and called him a good boy,kalo paidi, a good boy, the best boy, while two feet away I stood there with my whole arsenal spent on the floor getting absolutely nothing.
The dog got the tenderness. I got the door.
“Your dog,” she said to me, not looking up, scratching the wire under his chin with both hands now, “is the nicest thing about you. By a distance.”
“He’s not actually mine,” I said. “He’s kind of communal.”
“Good. He deserves better.” She stood up. And on the way up—fast, a flick, there and gone before she could stop it—her eyes went to my hands. To the hands that had just had a man’s wrist and a man’s collar and put a man’s face on her glass.
Olimpo, having decided he’d done what he came for, ambled back over to lean on my leg like he hadn’t just publicly chosen sides.
“Although,” I said, giving Olimpo a little scratch. “He likes me the most. Always has time for me—same can’t be said for my fool brothers.”
“Out,” she said, a third time, and pointed at the door.
