“Because nothing’s free,” I said. “That’s why. Because a man doesn’t buy eleven dollars of bread for months and sit in the cold and come crashing through a door for nothing, Despina, nobody does anything for nothing, and the bill always comes, it just comes later, when you’ve stopped watching for it. You think I don’t know that walk? The two men are the same. They both come into my shop like they already own it. One wants the lease and one wants—” I gestured, vaguely, at the air where his grin had been, “—the gratitude. The thank you I wouldn’t give him. And the second I give it, the second I say oh thank you, my hero, I owe him. And then it’s his story. Then I’m the woman he saved. And it stops being mine.”
She didn’t interrupt. She let me build it.
“Everyone who’s ever taken care of me did it by holding the leash,” I said. “My father loved me to the bone and he still decided everything, where I went, who I saw, because he was protecting me, and protecting me meant obeying him. That’s the only version of being looked after I’ve ever had. Love that’s also a fence. And I’m done with fences. I run one thing in this entire world and it’s mine. The flour’s mine. The books are mine, God help me, the terrible books. The lease is in my name and the day I let some grinning Italian carry the flour for me out of the goodness of his heart is the day it’s not mine and his anymore. It’s something a man did for me. And then it’s not the dream. It’s just a shop with a girl in it who couldn’t manage on her own.”
“Katerina—”
“I’d rather lose it on my own two feet than keep it on somebody else’s. I mean that. If I go down I go down doing everypart of it with my own hands, the way he wanted, the way we said. Not handled. Not rescued. Not co-signed.” I sat back. “So that’s why I’m terrible to a man who likes me. Because the ones who like you are the worst ones. And they always leave you in the end.”
I’d convinced myself, anyway. It’s a good speech. I’d given a version of it to the man at the loan desk, who’d asked who’d co-sign and watched my face when I said nobody. It had the shape of something true and the heat of something true and I believed every word of it the way you believe a wall is holding because you’re leaning on it.
Despina let it sit. She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table. And then she said, quiet, not unkind:
“You say that to me, too.”
“What?”
“Every week I come to your shop with food and you don’t eat it. Every week I say let me help, let me send my niece, let me sit with the books, I’m good with numbers, you know I am—and every week you take my hand, warm, so warm, and you put it back on my side of the counter.” She wasn’t angry. That was the awful part. Anger I could have hit back at. “I’m not a man who likes you,koritsi. I’m not buying anything. I knew your baba before you were born. I held you the day you were christened in the room over our heads. And you push me away exactly the same as the dog man. Same hand. Same warmth. Same no.”
“That’s different—”
“It’s not different. It’s the same fence, only you built this one. You stand inside it and you call it the dream and you starve in there and you call it honoring him.” She leaned in. The smooth worn fondness gone hard for a second, the way only the people who love you longest can go hard. “You’re drowning. Don’t make the face. You think I can’t see it? Stavros’s girl, too thin, on her feet since three, the whole parish watching her feed everyoneand eat nothing and go home to an empty street with a broken frame she won’t even let a friend mend. You’re drowning, and you keep telling everyone you’ve got it, and that—” she put her finger on the table, “—is not honoring your father. That is breaking his heart. Wherever he is. If he could see you this alone—”
“He’d be proud,” I said, too fast. “The widow said it. You said it. Look what she made. He’d be proud I kept the doors open.”
“He’d be proud of the bread,” Despina said. “He’d be heartbroken about the girl.” She let that land. “He spent thirty years in other men’s shops, Katerina, working other men’s dough, and you know what he talked about? Not the shop. The shop was the excuse. He talked about a table full of people. He talked about feeding his own. He wanted the bakery so he could fill it. With family. With friends. With noise. Not so his daughter could stand alone in the dark in his apron and call it loyalty.”
“You don’t know what he wanted.”
“I knew him before you did.”
“It’s mine,” I said, and I heard it come out smaller than I meant it, defended like a child defends a thing she’s already half lost. “It’s the last thing of his that’s mine.”
And then she did it. She set down the thing she’d been carrying the whole conversation, the true thing, gentle, like setting a hot tray on a cloth so it doesn’t crack the marble.
“You’re not protecting the shop,” Despina said.
I looked at her.
“You think you’re protecting the shop. From the men, from me, from all of us with our hands out trying to help carry the flour.” She reached across and put her hand over mine, on the table, warm, the way I do to everyone, the move I use to push people away made into the move that pinned me. “You’re protectingyourself. From one more person walking in and mattering. Because the last one mattered, and then he left,and it nearly killed you. So you don’t let anyone carry anything, because if they carry it, they’re in, and if they’re in, they can leave, and you cannot survive one more person leaving. That’s not the dream, koritsi. That’s a girl who lost her father and decided never to risk it again.”
The kitchen was very quiet. The coffee had gone cold in my hands. Somewhere up through the floor the priest’s voice rose and fell over someone else’s grief,aionia i mnimi, may the memory be eternal, and I had no answer for her. That was the thing. I’m never short of an answer. I had nothing. She’d reached past the wall and the fence and the speech and put her finger right on the one beam holding the whole structure up, and I couldn’t say it wasn’t true, and I couldn’t say it was, so I did the only thing left.
I took my hand back.
“I have to go,” I said. I stood. Knee popped. “The trays. The van. I’ve got an order for tomorrow I haven’t started.”
“Katerina.”
“Thank you for the coffee.” I was already moving, already gathering my coat, already turning my back, retreating the way I always retreat, into the work, into the weight, away from the warm hand that had got too close. “It was good to see you. I mean it.”
“Sit down. Finish your coffee.”
“I’ve got it,” I said, from the door, reflexive as a heartbeat, the verbal tic, the whole creed of me in three words. “I’m fine. I’ve got it.”
And I went out into the cold before she could land another true thing.
Itwasbarelysixwhen I came out of the church and the sky had already gone from steel to coal, the streetlights doing their orange best and mostly failing. The cold had teeth in it now, the real kind, the kind that finds the gap at your collar. I pulled my coat tight and put my head down and started the walk home the way I’d done it ten thousand times, the route I could do asleep, which most mornings I half was.
