Istoodoutsideherdoorand braced myself.
I’d lain awake all night running the scenarios.
1. She’d be furious.
2. She’d be embarrassed.
3. She’d have decided, somewhere between my leaving and now, that the smart thing was to fire me and find some Greek nephew to break his back on her flour instead.
I had a speech ready for each eventuality.
I pushed the door. The bell went. The heat hit me, the smell of her hit me—sesame and honey and that resin underneath—and Olimpo ambled past my leg to claim his doorway, and I stepped into the warm gold of it ready for war.
“You’re late,” she said. She didn’t sound furious or embarrassed.
I checked the clock over the register. Four exactly.
“I’m on time.”
“It’s past four. You’re standing in my doorway letting the cold in. Hurry up. Coat. Apron. The flour’s not going to walk itself out.”
And that was it. That was the whole of it. No ice, no embarrassment, no reason for any speech. She was at the bench already, hands in the dough, hair scraped up, flour to the wrist, and she didn’t look at me. The kiss—the kiss that had been burning in my mouth since I’d walked out into the dark with my dog and a promise—sat in the room between us, enormous, unmentioned, impossible to ignore.
I hung my coat. I washed to the elbow. I got the apron off the hook and I went and got the flour, two sacks to a shoulder, and I set them where she pointed without being told twice.
Because here’s the trouble—the thing I couldn’t put down, the thing I’d carried out into the cold and home to my empty apartment and back here again at four in the morning like a stone in my coat.
It wasn’t the kiss.
It was the chair. It was the way she’d sat down when I told her to. The way her whole body had folded into it before her face had finished arguing, the way the relief had gone through her like a wave breaking. I’d seen it—I always see things like that. It’s who I am.
But who am I?
I’m the one who sets people down. The one who sees them. I’m the one who notices you haven’t eaten. The one who tells you to sleep and means it and makes you. I’ve had the word for it a long time. My brothers don’t say it out loud—Sicilians don’t—but Sal’s seen it in me, the way I run toward the thing that needs feeding, the way I’d have laid down in front of a train for any of them. It’s in me the way the boxer’s in me. The same hands.
Daddy.
And she—
She might be a little.
The thought had kept me up most of the night and it kept coming now, between the flour and the trays, every time she barked an order and I took it and felt that thing ease in my chest. She might be exactly what I’m made to care for. The woman who commands all day, who’d hand me my head for calling her Kat, who runs her own kitchen like a general—and underneath it, somewhere she’d never name in daylight, somebody so tired of being in charge that she’d melted into a chair the second a steady hand told her she didn’t have to be anymore.
And there it was, the hope, warm and stupid and dangerous, and right behind it, like the cold coming in behind the bell, the thing that killed it.
She didn’t know what I was—maybe she didn’t know whatshewas.
Could I tell her? Did I need to? We’d kissed, but clearly it wasn’t important to her, or if it was, she didn’t want me to know.
No. I shouldn’t tell her. Shouldn’t bring it up again. Shouldn’t make her obey me, shouldn’t tap into that hidden part of me that I was suddenly desperate to show her.
So I made myself a rule, somewhere around the third sack of flour, watching her shape rolls with delicate hands.
I wouldn’t use it. Not again. Not the chair, not the voice, not the set-down—not until she knew what it was and chose it with her eyes open. Straight, or not at all. I’d watch for what she was, because I couldn’t help watching, but I wouldn’t test it, wouldn’t reach for it, wouldn’t take one more thing from her she hadn’t agreed to give.
“You’re staring,” she said, not looking up.
“Just admiring your technique.”
