“Stop apologizing and braid.”
Eleni snorted from the far bench. She was twenty-three and she did not apologize for anything, ever. She had a mouth on her like a paring knife and hands that already, after four months, knew things it had taken me years to learn. She was scoring loaves with a razor in long clean pulls, didn’t break her rhythm.
“He apologizes to the dough,” she said. “I caught him last week. Said sorry to a koulouraki he dropped.”
“It deserved better,” Theo said, wounded.
“Ha! It deserved the floor.”
I let them go. That was the thing I was still learning to do—let them go. The reflex never left. It came up in me a hundred timesa shift, the old animal that said do it yourself or it doesn’t count, the year of doing every single thing alone built into my muscle so deep it would never fully wash out.
My hand went out toward Theo’s braid to fix it.
I stopped it.
I put it back at my side and I made myself just say it instead. “Tighter at the crown, Theo. You’re losing it at the top.”
He fixed it. Not the way I’d have fixed it. Close enough. Better than close enough, actually, and I had to swallow something to admit that, because the braid was his now, his hands, his pace, his version of the thing my father had taught me.
“Eleni. Warm rack’s not for the tsoureki, they need the rest of the proof. Cannoli shells go on the warm rack. Hands—” I caught the reflex again, the word that had been my whole vocabulary for a year, hands, now, that tray, no please—and I let it come, because it was the right instruction and it cost me nothing now to give it instead of doing it. “That tray. There. Good.”
“Yes, boss,” Eleni said, and moved it, and didn’t drop it, and shot me a look that was almost dry enough to be a smile, the recognition of one stubborn woman by another. She reminded me of someone.
The smell came up. Orange-blossom and toasted sesame and the caramel edge of honey going dark, the butter, the woodsmoke off the deck oven my father would have wept to see. It filled the shop, and it filled it over the noise of three people instead of the silence of one.
That was the thing.
My father had not wanted a quiet bakery. I’d forgotten that, somewhere in the year I’d run this place alone in the cold dark, talking to his photograph and the ovens and nobody. He used to tell me about the shop he wanted, the one he never got, and the thing he always said was that you shouldn’t be able to hear yourself think in it. He wanted noise. He wanted the radiofighting the mixer fighting the customers fighting the back-and-forth of people who knew each other working in the same warm room.
Now Theo was singing under his breath, badly, something he’d caught off Tonio. Now Eleni was telling him to shut up and he wasn’t shutting up. Now the radio was going low and the ovens were ticking and a tray came down on the marble with a clatter and somebody laughed.
I stood in the middle of it.
I let my hands be still at my sides and I didn’t reach for anything, and I let the noise be the noise, and I looked up at the photograph pinned by the coffee machine—my father, faded, smiling at a shop he never lived to see.
“Boss,” Eleni said. “You’re doing that weird thing where you stare at the wall.”
“It’s called supervising,” I said.
Thewallstartedtalkingaround half past seven.
Not the building. The actual wall—the shared one, the brick that divided my proofing room from whatever was happening on the other side of it, which for three weeks now had been a great deal of banging and swearing in two languages. I’d learned to ignore it. I’d learned to ignore a lot of things on the other side of that wall.
This morning, though, it wouldn’t be ignored. A knock first, hard, deliberate, three times. Then a pause. Then hammering—real hammering, the dull heavy thud of something coming through, dust sifting down out of the mortar line, a hairline crack racing up the plaster, and then a chunk of it gave and fell and a hole opened in my wall the size of a serving hatch, andlight came through it, and dust, a great choking cloud of it rolling into my proofing room and settling pale over my rising loaves.
“Mind the rubble,” said the wall.
And then his face appeared in the hole.
Grey. Grey from the hair to the jaw, plaster dust caked into the stubble and the broken-twice nose and the laugh lines, so that for half a second he looked sixty, and then he grinned, white teeth in the grey, and he looked like exactly what he was, which was the most ridiculous man I had ever loved.
“There she is,” Tonio said, through the hole in my wall, delighted with himself. “Hi, sweetheart.”
“You put a hole in my wall.”
“I put a pass-through in your wall. As discussed. As approved!” He braced a dusty forearm on the new lip of brick, settling in, like a man leaning on a bar. The arm was healed now, mostly—the burn had scarred up shiny and tight to the elbow, and he favored it still in the cold. “Come look. Come on. You’re going to love it and pretend you hate it. I want to see it.”
I came to look. I crossed my own ruined proofing room with my arms crossed over my apron, which is the only correct posture for inspecting a man’s mess, and I put my eye to the hole he’d opened in the brick.
