“She’d take my head off,” I said. “She doesn’t say two words to me. She fed the dog and told me he was the nicest thing about me by a distance and threw me out of her shop. That’s the whole relationship. That’s everything that’s ever happened.”
“Bring the dog, then,” Pietro said. “He’s the only one of you with a chance.”
They laughed. I let them.
I couldn’t invite her to the wedding—it was madness. But maybe there was something else I could do.
Chapter 4
Katerina
Theglasscameupoff the tile in tiny pieces. I tried to be careful, but I was tired. I misjudged a piece, and with a sharp stab of pain, a bright bead of red welled up on the side of my thumb. I put it in my mouth, and kept sweeping with the other hand.
I’d been at it since three. The bread that paid the rent was in the ovens, the radio was going low, some woman with a voice like smoke singing about a harbor.
The frame was on the counter. What was left of it, at least. The web of cracks had spread over the frame, fine lines branching out across my father’s face, across the apron he was grinning in, the apron I had on now. I’d propped it up against the coffee machine where it lived because I didn’t know what else to do with it. I had a roll of tape. I’d thought about taping the cracked glass back into the frame, holding the broken thing together with a clear strip, and I’d actually started, and then I’d stopped, because tape over my father’s face was somehow worse than thecracks. So I left it propped, broken, and told myself I’d get a new frame from the dollar place on Halsted when I had a free hour.
Of course, I never had a free hour.
“Sorry, Baba,” I said to him, to the cracks. “I’ll fix it.”
He grinned back at me from under the spiderweb, younger than I’d ever known him.
The thug I could understand. That was the strange thing. I could take the thug and put him in the tin with the loan and the gas bill and the supplier whose patience was thinning, because the thug was just one more weight, one more thing leaning on the place.It scared me—of course it did. The hand on my hair. The smell of him. The eyes going down me like inventory. I acted brave, of course, because I had to. You show weakness and it’s like blood in the water for a shark. I could be brave and afraid in the same body. I’d had practice.
What I couldn’t understand was the other one.
The nuisance. The dog man. He’d come through my door like the building was on fire and he’d had that collector’s face against my own front glass before I’d understood he was moving, and it had been—I made myself find the word, the true one, the one I didn’t want—it had been frightening, how fast and how quiet he’d done it. No shouting. No show. A man who buys eleven dollars of bread for himself and an animal had walked in and turned a grown man into something he could carry, and then he’d turned around and grinned at me like he’d done me a favor.
I dropped a piece of glass into the dustpan.
When he’d turned around, when the collector was gone and the bell had stopped, my eyes had gone to his hands. Fast, before I could stop them. The hands that had just had a man’s wrist. Scarred knuckles. Steady. I’d looked at his hands and something in me had—
No.
I stood up. Knee popped. I tipped the glass into the trash and ran the thumb under the cold tap and watched the red thin out and go.
No. That was exactly the thing. That was the whole and entire thing. A man does you a violence dressed up as a kindness and your stupid lonely animal body looks at his hands and goes warm somewhere, and that is precisely, exactly, how it gets you. That’s the door. You let one in because he was useful, because he was strong, because for one half a second it felt good not to be the only thing standing between yourself and the man at the counter, and then you’ve handed it over, you’ve handed over the flour and the books and the lease and the dream, and it stops being mine and his, mine and my father’s, and starts being a thing some grinning stranger did for you, and then you owe. You always owe. Help has strings. I’d never met the kind that didn’t. My father’s protection had been love and it had still been a cage; my own grief-shaped pride was the only cage I’d ever picked for myself.
I straightened the cracked photograph an inch, trying to put it true. Saint Spyridon watched me do it from his place above the register, dark and gold and patient.
Then I looked out the front window. Across the street. At the curb where, three nights running, there had been a car with a shape in it and sometimes a dog’s head in the passenger glass. I looked before I knew I was looking, the way you reach for a railing on a stair that isn’t there.
The curb was empty. Gray morning, dead street, plywood on the dry cleaner’s window, nothing. Of course nothing. I’d thrown him out.
I was furious that I’d looked. I was furious in a way that had no place to go, so I put it where I put everything, into the work. I wiped my hands down my father’s apron, hard, leaving two pale flour streaks. The loaves wanted turning. The communitything was today—the koliva, the trays, the whole long Saturday of feeding people who’d actually asked to be fed, who said thank you and meant it and didn’t break anything—and the church van came at nine and I was nowhere near ready.
“Ela,” I told the cracked face by the coffee machine. Come on. “We’ve got it. Both of us. We’ve got it.”
I started loading the trays.
Thechurchbasementsmelledlike wax and incense. Under that, coffee and dust. The room was only used on Sundays and saints’ days, so it had the musty smell of damp, too. I’d been carrying trays in from the van since nine and by ten the long tables were groaning and the women were arranging and rearranging with meticulous precision.
The koliva I’d made at four that morning, in the dark, with the radio going. Boiled wheat, sweet and soft, mounded on the silver platter and pressed smooth as snow, dusted thick with powdered sugar, and over the white a cross laid in cinnamon and silver dragées, and around the edge, in blanched almonds set one by one with my thumb, the dead man’s initials. Pomegranate seeds at the corners, red as anything, because the wheat is the body that’s planted and the seeds are the blood and the sweetness is what we hope for them. My grandmother taught me. My father stood at her elbow and learned it and then he stood at mine.
The man we were burying again—you bury them more than once, that’s what the mnimosyno is, the forty days, the year, the every-year-after—had been a tailor on Halsted forty years and a friend of my father’s longer than I’d been alive. I’d never made his koliva while my father was alive to make it with me. That was the math of this year. Every ritual I did for the first time alone.
The widow found me by the platter. Tiny, in black, in the black she’d be in now for the rest of her life. She took my face in both her cold hands and looked at it the way the old women look, like they’re reading a letter.
