The wanting of it went through me like a current and I went rigid against his chest.
Because wanting is the luxury I have never let myself have. Want was the thing I cut out of myself the year my father died.
I looked up at him.
He was already looking down at me.
Even though it was impossible, somehow I felt like he knew what I’d been thinking.
He didn’t say anything.
He just bent his head and pressed his mouth to my forehead, slow, the way he does, and held it there, his hand spread warmon my back and his heart going under the hidden Madonna where my cheek had been, and let the silence be the answer.
For one held breath I let myself have it. The future. I stood in his arms in a garden full of strangers who’d become, somewhere in this golden impossible day, not strangers at all, and I let the fortress stand open and the want come all the way in, and I let myself believe it, the way I’d let myself laugh at the salon and cry at the vows and be served at the table—the new things, the dangerous things, the letting.
For one held breath.
I should have known better. I’m the one who survives by not being seen, by counting the exits, by trusting the cold animal that says nothing’s free. I’d silenced it all day. I’d had the best day of my life and I’d let the want all the way in, and the cold animal had gone quiet, satisfied, and I’d stopped listening to it.
That was the breath I had. Then we went to check on the shop.
Itwasmyidea.
Near midnight, the candles guttering and the dancing gone to the slow drunk end of itself, I leaned into Tonio in the dark of the garden and said it, the baker’s reflex that no amount of being served all day could kill. Ten minutes. Just to see it whole. I’d been gone from my shop one full day, the longest in a year, and the not-knowing had a hook in me, and I wanted to lay eyes on the green glass and the green letters and know it was standing. He looked at me a long moment, the soldier flickering behind his eyes, and then the indulgence won the way it wins with him, the man who lets me reach for the plate before he tells me to sit, and he said ten minutes and got the car.
The block was dark and quiet.
The drive over had been nothing, the city slid past empty and cold, and Tonio’s hand stayed on my knee the whole way and his eyes stayed on the mirrors. I’d had visions of the shop in tatters, in flames, destroyed. There had been a Caruso soldier watching the place all day, but even so, my mind went to a dark place. We turned onto my street and the headlights swept the dead asphalt and the closed shutters of the block Gianni’s people had bullied one tired owner at a time, and then they found Filoxenia.
Whole. Intact. The new green glass unbroken, FILOXENIA across it in the deep paint Tonio had lettered with his own hands one slow afternoon, the curve of the F still a little wrong, all of it standing in the dark exactly as I’d left it.
My chest loosened.
I felt it go, the day’s last held thing, the hook coming out. “See,” I said to myself. “See. Nothing happened. You worried for nothing. It’s standing. It’s fine.”
“Wait.” Tonio’s hand came out across me, low, a bar. His voice was careful. “Let me look first. Stay—”
But I was already out of the car.
I was lit up from the inside, that’s the truth of it, drunk on prosecco and joy and the old don’s hands and a future I’d let myself have for one held breath, and I had my key out and I was crossing the cold sidewalk to my own door because it was mine and it was standing and I’d been afraid for nothing all day, and I heard Tonio’s door open hard behind me and his voice—Katerina, wait—and I didn’t wait.
Olimpo got there first.
He’d come out of the car ahead of all of us, the great grizzled shape of him moving with that surprising fast he keeps under the heaviness, and he reached the threshold of my shop a stride before I did, the doorway he’d claimed for weeks, the doorway he slept across and grumbled in and inconvenienced everyone from—
And he locked up.
All four legs went stiff. The hackles came up the whole ridge of his back, orange roan bristling, and a sound came out of him I had never once heard in all the weeks he’d lain in my kitchen judging me—not the grumble, not the verdict, a low rolling thing from somewhere deep in his chest, ancient and certain and afraid, and he would not go through the door. He who had claimed that doorway as his own. He planted himself at the edge of it and refused, his amber eyes fixed on the dark of my shop, and the low sound climbed.
“Olimpo?” My key stopped an inch from the lock. “What—”
Then the smell hit me.
Wrong. So wrong. Heavy and sweet-sharp and chemical, nothing like the orange-blossom and butter and woodsmoke that hit you at my door like a wall—this was the opposite of that, the anti-smell, pouring out under the door and through the seams of the frame, the whole shop swimming in it, my whole warm bright shop drowned in something that caught at the back of my throat and made the world tilt.
Gas. The shop was full of gas.
“Tonio—” I got his name out and that was all.
