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“I asked if you were hungry.”
She turned around just as I started adding some wood to the nearest oven.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Firing up the oven.”
“But why?”
I pulled a sealed bin from the small refrigerator under the counter and removed several neat globes of dough.
“Because I had promised to make you a custom pizza,” I said. “Yet somehow I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”
Melanie leaned against the sink and dried her hands on a nearby towel. She looked slightly confused. “I’ve had your pizza, Dominic.”
I spread flour across the countertop, running my hands through it, enjoying the comfortable feeling of performing a task that was as familiar to me as breathing. “Not like this you haven’t,” I told her. “Come on, I’ll make you whatever you want.”
“Right now?”
“Unless you have other plans,” I said, rolling out the blob of dough and keeping an eye on Melanie. She smoothed her hands down her thighs like she was nervous. She was looking down so I couldn’t read her expression.
“I thought you wanted me to leave,” she said softly.
I stopped rolling, ready to just be honest. “I think you know damn well I don’t want you to leave.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
“What else am I thinking?”
“That you can’t wait to try this one-of-a-kind pizza.”
She exhaled deeply and raised her head. She was smiling now. “You’re a puzzle, Dominic Esposito. Anyone ever tell you that?”
“Occasionally. By the way we’re taking your suggestion about the happy hour menu.”
She clapped her hands together and beamed. “You are?”
“Yup. Gio’s all for it,” I said, thinking about the brief conversation I’d had with my brother on the topic. He’d been enthusiastic about Melanie’s plan, and I realized I’d only been holding out because the concept didn’t match my vision of the traditional family-style atmosphere I remembered from the first Esposito’s. But in the end I understood something Melanie already knew; this was a new place in a new neighborhood, and our goal was to make the customers happy so they kept coming back.
I went to work on the dough, flattening and shaping. Melanie stayed put at the sink, but I could feel her watching me.
“That’s so easy for you,” she said, sounding amazed. “It’s like watching an artist.”
“Been doing it for a while,” I said as I stretched the dough into a perfect flat sphere.
“How long?”
I paused, remembering. “Gio and I were really small when we came to live with our grandparents. They were always working at the restaurant, so the two of us ended up spending most of our time there too. I was around eight when they finally started letting me into the kitchen to roll out dough, just for fun. The kitchen was my grandfather’s domain. He was a big man anyway, but in the kitchen he was larger than life, a veritable god. He could have avoided the hot kitchen and stuck with managerial tasks, but he wouldn’t. He would always come up with some excuse about keeping the discipline. The truth was he didn’t have much of a head for business and he couldn’t stand being away from the kitchen.” I rolled the dough vigorously just as I’d done ten thousand other times. “The first little pie I ever made I was too proud of to even eat. I brought it home, stuck it safely under my bed, then forgot about it until Donna did the spring cleaning months later.”
“I’m picturing you,” Melanie said, smiling and coming a little bit closer, “this smartass little kid making trouble for everyone in the middle of a busy Manhattan restaurant.”
I chuckled. “So that’s how you see me? A constant creator of mischief?”
She smirked. “Oh stop, I didn’t mean it like that. But I bet you were quite a handful back then.”
I’m still quite a handful, honey.
