The bell went mid-morning, in the lull after the rush, and I had a tray of koulourakia in one hand and flour to both elbows and I looked up the way you look up when the bell goes—half a smile already loaded, the morning-man face—and there in my doorway, stepping over Olimpo, who lifted his head and thumped his tail at the sight of them, stood my brother, my cousin, and the easy Caruso, all three, taking in the warm gold of the shop with the mild expressions of men out for bread.
And then they saw me.
I watched it land on each of them in turn, which was its own small comedy. Pietro first—his eyes went to the apron, to the flour, to the tray, and the whole thing arrived in his face at once and lit it up like Christmas. Sal second—Sal didn’t light up, Sal went still, the geological stillness, the listening-to-the-ground stillness, his eyes moving slow from the apron to the tray to my flour-dusted forearms and back to my face, processing, recalculating, a man watching the laws of physics fail in front of him. And Marco last, easy Marco, who took it all in with that disarming smile already half-built and then let the smile go wider and wider as he understood exactly what he was looking at, because Marco understands things fastest of all.
“Toe,” Sal said, finally, very quietly. “What is on you?”
“It’s an apron.”
“I can see it is an apron.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
Pietro made a sound. A strangled, joyful sound, a man trying to hold a laugh and losing the whole war. “He’s working,” he said, to Sal, wondering, like he was reporting a miracle. “Sal. He has a job. He took a job. Look at him. He’s covered in—is that flour, Tonio, is that flour on you—”
“It’s a bakery,” I said, with all the dignity I had left, which by then was not a great deal. “Things get floury. It’s the nature of the work.”
“The nature of the work,” Marco repeated, delighted, drifting up to the counter, leaning on it the exact lazy way I lean on it, the family resemblance suddenly very loud. “He says ‘the work.’ Like a man who has work. Like a tradesman. Pietro, our Tonio has a trade.” He looked at the cases, at the cases I’d helped fill, at the loaves I’d hauled the flour for. “And he’s good at it, look, the place is full. The bakery girl finally let you behind the counter, eh? Took you, what—twelve mornings? Fourteen?”
“It’s not relevant how many mornings.”
“It’s deeply relevant,” said Sal, who had recovered enough to be devastating, lining his disbelief up parallel to the edge of his disapproval the way he lines up his pen. “You said you were surveilling. You sat at the table—our table—and you said: I am keeping eyes on the block. You did not say: I have become the help. You did not say: I am being paid in stale bread to take orders from a Greek girl with a broom. That part you left out, Tonio. I would remember that part.”
“I’m paying her, actually.”
The silence that followed that was one of the great silences of my life. Pietro had to put a hand on the counter.
“You are paying her?” Sal asked.
“To work for her?” Pietro breathed.
“In her shop?” Marco finished, and the three of them looked at each other, and then at me, and I felt my whole face go hot underthe flour, and I would have given a year of my life for a single one of my deflections to work, and I reached for the grin, the wide easy one, the one that opens bartenders and bookies and bored wives—
“So what’s new with you guys?”
It bounced.
“He’s deflecting,” Pietro told Sal, gleeful.
“He’s deflecting so badly,” Sal agreed. “It’s almost sad. Tonio, it is almost sad.”
And that’s when Katerina came out of the back.
She came out with a sack of sugar on her shoulder and stopped at the sight of three large strange men in good clothes filling up her shop, and I watched her read them—fast, the way she reads everyone, the working sharp part of her clicking through the inventory. Two suits, no ties, the watches, the way they held the room, the deference in how the easy one leaned and the iron in how the still one stood, and Olimpo thumping his tail at them like he knew them—and I saw her get to the bottom of the read and arrive exactly where I’d known she’d arrive, because she’s not a stupid woman, she’s the least stupid woman I’ve ever met.
Same flavor as the dog man. Some of them. Some kind of them.
She set the sugar down. She did not smile.
“We’re not hiring,” she said. “And the cannoli’s not Sicilian, before one of you tells me how my grandmother did it wrong.”
I have never in my life seen Sal blink the way he blinked then. Marco actually laughed out loud, a real one. And Pietro looked from her to me and back with an expression of such pure dawning understanding that I wanted to put my own face in the tray.
“Signora,” Marco started, deploying the smile, the strategic one, the one that has charmed politicians and journalists andbored wives across a dozen rooms. “We don’t want work. We’ve only come to admire the—”
“You’re his people,” she said, cutting through it clean, jerking her chin at me. Not a question. “You’ve got his whole—” she waved a hand at all of them, at the whole thing, the way she’d once waved a hand at all of me, “—that. The watch. The leaning. He does the leaning too. Drives me up the wall.”
“She’s got us,” Marco said, charmed, hand to his chest. “Signora, you’ve got us cold.”
