“Hands,” Katerina said.
It took the brothers a second to understand it wasn’t aimed at them.
It was aimed at me. The order, flat, no please, the boss in her full and certain in her own kitchen in front of three of the most dangerous men in Chicago, and I—God help me, in front of my own blood—I put the tray down and turned exactly where she aimed me, to the proofing rack, no argument, no please, because that’s the rhythm now, that’s the music, and behind me I heard the entire bottom drop out of my dignity forever.
Pietro had to leave the counter. He actually walked away to the window and stood there with his shoulders shaking. Sal made a sound I’d never heard him make—a short dry exhale through the nose that, from Sal, is a standing ovation. And Marco said, soft, wonderingly, to no one, “He moved when she said move. The whole man just—moved.”
“He’s adequate,” Katerina said, going back to the bench. “On a good day. He can’t laminate to save his life.”
“He can’t?” Pietro asked, recovering, hungry for it. “Lamination like . . . ?”
“His hands run hot. He breaks the butter every time. He’s a furnace, that one, useless with anything that needs to be cold.” She said it without looking up, dismissive, devastating, and thebrothers drank it down like wine, every word about me from the one person on earth my charm had never once worked on.
It was the easy Caruso who got us back on track. He drifted close to me at the rack, under cover of admiring the bread, and dropped his voice to nothing, and I dropped a name into the small space between us—the operator’s name, the one three rungs up from the collector I’d put through her window, the name I’d pried loose watching the yard by the freight line all week. Marco’s eyes flickered, took it, filed it, and his face never changed at all. That’s the gift of him. He can do business in the middle of a joke and you’d never see the seam.
Then they bought an indecent amount of bread—out of loyalty, out of cover, out of pure delight at my expense—and they went to the door, and Sal stopped, and looked back at me, and looked at the warm gold shop and the full cases and the woman at the bench, and then at me again, and something passed across his geological face that wasn’t teasing at all.
He’d clocked it. They all had. The thing they’d never seen on me in twenty-nine years. I was home, here, in the flour, taking her orders, and it showed on me like flour shows on a dark coat.
“She should come to the wedding,” Sal said. Dry. Devastating. The corner of his mouth not moving at all.
“Out,” I told him.
And he went, the three of them, into the cold, laughing, leaving me exposed in the warm middle of the only place I’d ever wanted to be exposed.
Thecarcamebackon a Tuesday night.
I clocked it through the new glass while she was cashing out, while she counted the till with that little frown of concentration she does, lips moving over the numbers—a sedan,dark, parked at the dead curb across the street under the dead lamp where I used to park, three nights I’d parked there myself watching her shop. I knew that curb. I knew what it was for. And there was a shape in it, a man, not getting out, not driving off, just sitting, the blue glow of a phone lighting the underside of his face every now and then, and the engine off, and the patience of it—the leisurely, settled patience—turned the enforcer in me on like a switch thrown.
This wasn’t a brick through a window. This was a man making sure she saw him. This was the consolidation reminding the holdout that the holdout was still on the list, that the thing I’d done—putting a collector through her own glass, telling him the block was spoken for—hadn’t closed the matter, only escalated it. I’d known it would. I’d known it the second I’d said the words. They don’t walk away from a corner like this. They send a quieter man to sit in a darker car, and they wait for the friend of the family to not be there one night.
And he was lying to her right now, the whole shape of it, the whole reason I stood in her kitchen at all—the man at that curb was the thing I was really watching, the machine that ran up the corridor to a name I couldn’t say, and she thought I was a baker’s hand with a side hobby of mysteriousness, and the bill on that lie was getting bigger every day she didn’t know. I should have been there the night they lit the fire. I should have caught the collector before he ever touched her hair. And now there was a man across the street making a promise with his patience, and I knew exactly who’d sent him.
“You’ve gone quiet,” she said. She hadn’t looked up from the till. “You’re never quiet. It’s unsettling.”
“Just tired.”
“You’re lying.” She slid the drawer shut. “You’re the worst liar I’ve ever met, you know that? The grin goes flat. It went flat just now. What’s out there?”
“Nothing’s out there.”
“Tonio.” She came around the counter then, and she looked, out the new glass at the dark street, and I moved—not fast, easy, casual—I moved to put myself between her and the window without making it a thing, and she clocked that too, of course she did, she clocks everything, and her eyes came back to me sharp and working.
“There’s a car,” she said.
“There’s lots of cars. It’s a street.”
“You moved in front of the window.”
“I’m a big man, I’m always in front of something.”
She didn’t believe me. But she let it go—she’s good at letting a thing go when chasing it would cost her something, and chasing this would have cost her the calm she’d worked all day to hold—and she turned back to closing up, brisk, and I went to help, and that was how we ended up in the small space at the end of the bench at the same time.
The kitchen’s built for one. I’ve said that. And we were both tired, and both wound tight with a thing neither of us was saying—mine the car, hers whatever she’d read in my flat grin—and the choreography that had got so smooth went wrong all at once, the way it had that first morning. She turned to put the cloth on the hook and I turned to take the tray off the rack and we arrived at the same eighteen inches at the same moment, and her shoulder went into my chest, and my hand came up to steady her, and then neither of us moved.
We stood still.
She was right there. The heat I’d been crossing all day pulled flush against me, her hand flat on my chest where it had landed, her face tipped up, flour dusted along her jaw and into the dark hair come loose at her temple, and I could feel the quick of her breath and see the pulse going in her throat, and the kiss—the one she’d given me a week ago, the one that still lived inmy mouth every single morning—rose up between us so loud it drowned the radio out. She didn’t step back. I felt her not step back. I felt her lean, the smallest fraction, up onto her toes the way she had that night, her fist starting to close in the front of my shirt, her eyes going from my mouth to my eyes and back to my mouth, and every cell I have leaned down to meet her, the months of it, the wanting that had decided itself months ago and never once let up, all of it surging up at the same time, and her lips parted, and I felt her breath go warm across my mouth—
