“Here’s how the wedding goes,” I said. “You listening? Because this is the rule and there’s no arguing this one.” I tipped herchin up with two fingers. “You’re not a baker tomorrow. You’re done being a baker by ten in the morning. The team comes in early, you direct, the desserts get finished and boxed and loaded, and then the van takes them to the venue and the team goes with them to plate and serve, and they handle all of it, every cannoli, every braid, the cake you and Donatella drew up. You don’t touch it after ten. You don’t lift a finger.” I watched her start to object and I put my thumb on her lip, gentle. “No. After ten you go upstairs and you put on the dress you chose—the one that makes me forget my own name—and you let me put you in the car, and you come to the wedding as my woman. On my arm. In front of all of them. Don Arturo’s people, the Carusos, my cousins, the whole loud clan of us. And you let them see you, and you dance with me, and you let the family you’re so scared to belong to close all the way around you, because that’s where you’re going to be from now on, honey, inside it, with the rest of us.”
She was quiet a long moment.
“I don’t know how to do that,” she said, finally, small. “Belong to a thing like that.”
“You stand next to me,” I said. “That’s the whole of it. You stand next to me and I do the rest. You’ve spent your whole life being the one who holds the room up by hand. Saturday you don’t hold anything. Saturday you get held.” I took her hands, the burn-scarred ones, and pressed my mouth to the inside of her wrist where the scars run pale. “Let me promise you that. The desserts go out, the team clears, and you come dance with me and let it be a good day. Let me give you that.”
She let me.
The loaf cooled on the rack, finally come right, her father’s dream made real.
The shop sat dark behind the new green glass, FILOXENIA in the deep paint I’d lettered with my own hands, the curve of the F still a little wrong.
Across the city, off a plane that afternoon, Don Arturo was already somewhere in Chicago, settling in for his daughter-in-law’s people’s wedding, for family, for the loud full room.
And tomorrow was the wedding.
Chapter 16
Katerina
Ididn’tknowwheretoput my hands.
It was so rare that I didn’t wake and immediately start to work. In my kitchen, I knew exactly where every part of me went—knuckles in the dough, palm to the marble, eyes on the rising loaves in the ovens. But here, at this beautiful Sicilian church, as I stood in the kind of dress that I almost never wore, I twiddled my fingers and tapped my toes.
The church had given way to the garden behind it, and the garden had been turned into something out of a fairytale. Lemon trees in great terracotta pots, the fruit still on them, hard and bright. White linen on two hundred and forty chairs and white linen waiting on the long tables beyond, and a string trio in the corner under an arch of orange blossom, playing something low and old. The smell was intoxicating—a wall of it, orange blossom and the dark caramel edge of meat turning somewhere on a fire, and under it the green of crushed grass and the warm stone of the church wall holding the afternoon’s heat.
I counted covers before I could stop myself. Two-forty, seated by branch—I clocked it without meaning to, the way the chairs ran in family knots, nine of them, each cluster its own weather, the old country at the front and the young blood at the back. I had catered for events before, and I knew the cost of things. The linen was immaculate. Italian, hemstitched, handmade. The furniture was—
“Sweetheart, you’ve got to relax.”
Tonio was a wall of dark wool at my side.
I’d never seen him in a suit. This one looked like it was part of him—it fit like a dream. His tough face, broken nose and crooked smile, juxtaposed with the elegant fabric, his warm crinkling eyes all the more ruinous against the severe black of it. His hand found the small of my back, warm through the dress, and steered me in through the gap in the chairs with the easy authority of a man who’d been doing it his whole life.
“Breathe,” he murmured, down at my ear. “You look like you’re casing the place for the exits.”
“Iamcasing the place for the exits.”
“I know. Stop.” His thumb moved once against my spine. “These are people. Just people. Loud, drunk, sentimental people who are going to love you.”
Then the blur started, and I never did get it all back in order.
A tall man, grave and still in the way deep water is still—Dante, the head of the whole Caruso branch—took my hand and inclined his head and said it was good to meet me at last, and on his arm a small dark-eyed woman with freckles she hadn’t bothered to cover smiled at me like she was glad of one more person who didn’t know where to put their hands. Gemma. She squeezed my fingers and didn’t let go too fast. She was the quiet one in a loud world.
Then a man built like the side of a building, severe enough that I straightened on instinct—Salvatore—who took my handand bent over it, actually bent, an old-country courtliness that startled a laugh half out of me. And beside him a woman with scarred knuckles like my own and a handbag that growled.
It growled. A tiny fawn head with one black ear came up out of the bag, four pounds of pure menace, and bared its teeth at a passing waiter with the cool of the room dropping ten degrees around it.
“Midge,” the woman said, flat, not looking up. “He’s fine. Well. Maybe fine is a stretch.”
The dog disagreed and let everyone know.
“It’s mostly men she doesn’t like,” the woman—Cora—told me, dry as anything. “You should be fine.”
“Dogs do tend to like me,” I said, “but it’s mainly because I’m an endless source of treats.” Cora’s mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile but meant the same thing, and I felt the first thread of the day catch in me, the recognition of one guarded woman by another.
And then a man I recognized came at me grinning like trouble made flesh, took my hand and kissed the air over it and said, “So you’re the bakery girl who put my cousin through a window display—God, finally, someone he can’t charm,” and behind him a dark sharp woman in clean lines said something in Italian I didn’t catch and he laughed and pressed his hand to his chest like he’d been wounded. Marco, who had come into the bakery that one time. And Serafina—she was really something. Seemed like she was in charge. The whole warm wicked machine of them, and I was nodding, smiling, drowning, the names already coming loose from the faces.
