“Salon at eight, Baby Girl. You’re a businesswoman. You keep your appointments.” He shook the lace gently, the way you shake a treat at a dog who’s pretending not to be interested.
I took it and put it on, there at the foot of his bed, while he watched me do it with that look, that inventory look, that count-and-keep look, and I felt it go on, the green of it, the cool of it, his choice against my skin.
“Good girl,” he said.
It went down me like warm honey, the way it always did.
“I’m going to think about anything but you all day,” I said, pulling my shirt over my head, lying through my teeth.
“Sure you are,” he said.
ThesalonwasonDamen, and the smell hit me at the door—a wall of bleach and bergamot and money.
I wasn’t used to this—the idea of someone touching me, doing something for me—was alien. I’m the one who does the doing. I haven’t been on the other side of anyone’s hands in longer than I could name.
“Sit,” Donatella said, steering me into a chair by the shoulders with the absolute confidence of a woman who has never once been the one to step aside. “Both of us. Blowouts, the works, a trial run so we know what we’re doing the morning of. I’ve booked it. Relax. I can see you don’t know how. Try anyway.”
She had her espresso in one hand and a phone in the other, and within ninety seconds she was running the room. A girl came to take her coat and Donatella told her to bring two moreespressos and then, without one breath in between, told my stylist exactly what she wanted done to my hair.
My stylist took my hands.
She lifted them off the armrests, both of them, the way you’d lift something to read the maker’s mark, and she turned them over, and she tutted. Flour-wrecked, knuckles cracked, the deep oven burns scarred pale along the insides of my forearms, a year of four a.m. starts written into the skin.
“Oh, these poor hands,” she said, not unkindly. “We’ll do something. A little cream, at least.”
I felt annoyance rise up—these hands made every loaf in my bakery, lady, don’t pity them—and I went to pull them back.
“You’re allowed to enjoy it, Katty.”
Donatella, in the mirror. She wasn’t even looking at me directly; she said it to my reflection, dry, between sips, the way you’d note the time. “Nobody’s stealing the bakery while you sit here. The ovens are cold. The door’s locked. The world is going to keep turning for one Saturday without you holding it up by hand.” She turned the espresso cup a quarter turn on its saucer. “You’re allowed.”
And something that had been braced in me for a year eased. Just a notch. Just enough that when the stylist took my hands again I let her, and let her work the cream into the scars, and let myself, for one whole minute, be a woman in a chair being looked after, and the green lace was warm against me, and I thought about who’d picked it, and I went red and called it the espresso.
At eleven there was prosecco. I don’t know how—I think Donatella simply willed it into being—and somewhere into the second glass she told me a story about Santo.
I never got the punchline.
That’s the thing about a Donatella story. It built and built, this catastrophe with Santo and a uncle’s wedding and a stolen carand a priest, and she did all the voices, Santo’s growl, the priest’s outrage, her own brother roaring across a parking lot in three languages, and the prosecco was in me and the cream was in my poor hands and my hair was being wound onto something hot, and somewhere around the part where Santo apparently tried to bribe a nun, I started laughing and I could not stop, and the laughing kept coming up over the words so I lost the end of it entirely, the actual point of the story drowned in my own helpless wheeze, and Donatella looked at me laughing and her sharp red mouth went soft and she said, “There she is,” the same words Tonio used, and I didn’t even have it in me to be annoyed.
I hadn’t laughed like that in a year. Maybe longer. Maybe ever—the kind that takes you over, that’s louder than you’d choose, that leaves you wiping your eyes and not caring who saw.
After, hair done, both of us shining and ridiculous, Donatella took my arm and steered me two doors down before I’d agreed to go anywhere.
“There’s a place,” she said. “I swear by it. You’re coming.”
It was a lingerie boutique, the kind with one of everything in the window and a saleswoman who looked at our hair and our prosecco flush and clocked us correctly as a good morning, and Donatella was already inside touching things and pronouncing on them like a critic.
And I—loose on prosecco, warm clear through with the strange wonder of a day that was only mine, a day with a closed door and a friend and cream worked into my scars — I went and I bought something for myself.
For the first time in a year. Longer.
I picked it with my own hand off the rack, black, scandalous, deliberate — a crotchless set, the kind of thing that announces its intentions before you’ve got it home, the kind of thing I’d never once let myself want because want was a luxury and the bakery was the dream and there was no money and no time and no oneto wear it for. I held it up and I felt the daring of it go through me bright and hot, the choosing of it, mine, nobody picking it for me, nobody deciding it for me — me, deciding, for once, what I wanted.
I bought it with my own money. Counted out at the till with the same hands that count out flour.
“Oh my God,” Donatella said, when she saw what I had over my arm, and then she whooped, full-throated, scandalous, in a tasteful boutique on Damen Avenue, and the saleswoman jumped and I went scarlet and grinning all at once. “Katty. KATTY. Look at you. Who knew. The bakery girl’s got teeth.” She fanned herself with a pair of stockings she had no intention of buying. “Whoever this is for is going to need a lie-down.”
“It’s for me,” I said, and meant it, and it came out fierce and a little drunk and entirely true. “I bought it for me.”
