Page 22 of Savage Daddy
I was, also, the family’s man on this block—seconded to the Carusos, parked here to map a machine that ran up through a corridor of leaned-on storefronts to Gianni Scordato, my own blood, and we couldn’t be wrong, not once, not ever, we had to bring it to the old man airtight or he’d bury us. Eyes on the yard. Patience. The long careful thing. That was two jobs.
And now—now—I was a baker’s hand. At four in the morning. Every morning. Answerable to a woman who’d just laid down the law like a judge handing out a sentence and who would, with genuine pleasure, throw me onto the street the first time I was loud at the wrong old lady or looked at her with the wrong grin.
I thought about telling Sal.
I actually let myself picture it, sitting there in the cold—walking into the back room of the restaurant tomorrow, into the lilies and the place cards and the audit-of-God face, and saying, casual, reaching for the coffee: I got a job.
Watching the pen stop. Watching Sal go completely still, the geological stillness, the listening-to-the-ground stillness, and then the slow turn of his head, and the one word, flat: A job. And me: At the bakery. As the help. She’s going to pay me almost nothing and I’m going to pay her to let me. And Pietro—Pietro would put his head down on the wedding tablecloth, I could see it, he’d weep, he’d have to leave the room. Sal would line his pen up parallel to the edge of his list and say something so dry it would take the whole table five seconds to feel the cut.
I let the comedy of it warm me for exactly as long as it would, which wasn’t long, because under the comedy was the thing the comedy was built to cover, the same way the grin’s built to cover the wound.
I was in.
After three months of standing across this street like an idiot, after three months of buying too much bread and over-tipping and watching a warm gold window come up in the dark and telling myself it was the cannoli, after three months of wanting into a room I had no door to—I was in.
Tomorrow at three in the morning I’d push that door and the heat would hit me and the smell of her would hit me, sesame and honey and that resin underneath, and I’d belong there, I’d have a reason to be there, I’d be inside the warm gold middle of the only place on this dead block that was still alive, with her, hauling her flour, taking her orders, watching her hands in the dough that her hands knew better than she did. I wanted it more than I’d wanted anything in years. More than I’d let myself want anything since I was a boy. The steadiness of the wanting was the part that scared me, because it wasn’t a passing hunger; it was a thing that had decided.
And I was lying to her to get it.
I started the car. Across the street the plywood sat pale and ugly over the hole where her father’s name used to be, and behind it the light was still on, low and gold, and a shape moved in it—her, alone, finishing moving the glass.
She wouldn’t be alone for long.
Chapter 6
Katerina
I’dbeenupsincetwo, adrenaline pumping through my body. Why had I agreed to it? Why had I let Tonio convince me to give him a job?
By three the ovens were going and I’d half-convinced myself he wouldn’t come at all—men like that, they make the grand gesture and then they sleep through it—and at four sharp on the dot the bell over the door went and the cold came in and so did he, and I had my answer.
“You said four,” he said. “It’s four.”
“I said don’t be late. I didn’t say be exactly on time, to the second, like a smug—” I stopped. Started over. “Hang your coat by the door. Wash to the elbow. I got you a present.”
“You shouldn’t have!”
“Don’t get too excited. It’s an apron. Next to mine on the hook. Don’t touch the one that’s mine.”
He hung the coat. And then he was in my kitchen, and the first thing I understood, before he’d lifted a single thing, was that hewas too big for it. The space was built for one woman who knew where everything was, and now there was a man in it who took up the air, broad through the chest and shoulders in a way the morning counter had never quite shown me, and he pushed his sleeves up and I made the mistake of watching him do it.
Forearms gone dark from some summer I hadn’t been part of, the muscle moving under the ink—a Madonna, a set of initials, something in script I couldn’t read and wasn’t going to ask about. Scarred knuckles. He pushed a hand through his hair, that wave of it he could never keep back, and looked around my kitchen like he’d walked into a church, and I turned to the dough so I didn’t have to keep watching him. The irony of it. I’d hated the thug for doing exactly that.
He got the apron, threw it on. God damn if he didn’t look delicious in it.
“Flour,” I said. “Storeroom, back left. The fifty-pound sacks. I need four out by the bench.”
He went. And this part, I’ll give him—this part he was made for. The sacks I broke my back on, that I dragged and shouldered and swore at every morning of my life, he carried two at a time like they were nothing, one on each shoulder, easy, and set them down where I pointed without a grunt, and came back for two more, and the relief that went through me at not lifting them myself was so total and so traitorous that I scowled at the dough to cover it.
“Where do you want—”
“There. No. There. By the bench.” He moved it. “Good. Now stay out of the way while I—no, don’t—” because he’d reached for the dough I was shaping, “—don’t touch that. That’s not a thing you do. That’s a thing I do.”
“I can shape a roll.”
“You cannot shape a roll. Watch.” I rolled one under my palm, the cup of my hand, the dough turning into a tight smooth ball in three seconds.
“I can do that.”
