Page 28 of Savage Daddy
“Admire it from the storeroom. I need the butter.”
“Yes, boss.”
I got the butter. And I told myself: just work. Just be near her. Just haul the flour and take the orders and figure out, slow, in the light, who she actually was—and keep my hands off the only thing I had that could ruin her.
It was going to be the hardest job of my life.
Theglassguywascoming Monday. That was what she’d said, the night of the scorch.
I was worried, though, so I found the guy, called him, asked him what he was going to charge. When he’d given me the figure, I almost passed out. There was no way Kat could afford it, and I knew there was no way that she would accept money from me. So I told him not to bother, that I’d find someone else.
I did know a guy. Not exactly a glass guy, but someone who dabbled. Plus, I could help. How hard could it be?
When I told Kat the change of planes, she looked alarmed and said, “It can wait. We have plywood. No need to get some random idiot to do it.”
“No way,” I replied. “I can’t have a plywood window,” I said. “Plywood says something happened here. Plywood says somebody’s worth leaning on. I need this block to look boring, and a boarded-up bakery is not boring, it’s a flag. So we put the glass in. It’s for me.” She narrowed her eyes at me the way she did when she could see the trick of it but couldn’t find the seam, and then she said fine, your money, your back, and let me do it.
I’m good with my hands. People miss that, under the charm—they see the boxer’s nose and the easy face and they think that’s the whole inventory. But I built things, as a boy, at my mother’s elbow and my uncle’s, and the glass went in clean and true, no rattle, the bead of sealant run smooth as icing, and when it was set I stood back and the morning came through it goldand unbroken and you couldn’t tell anymore. You couldn’t tell anything had ever happened.
Except the name.
FILOXENIA had been painted on the old glass in green—worn, hand-lettered, her father’s green, the green of a man who’d painted it himself. It had broken with the window. They’d salvaged what they could and given up, and there’d been a stretch of plywood with broken letters across it, half a word, half a welcome.
I bought the paint. I matched the green at the hardware place on Halsted, held a chip of the old letter up to a dozen swatches under the buzzing light until I found the one, and I came in early, earlier than four, before she’d be up, and I started in on it with a brush in the cold gray dawn.
I’m not a sign painter. But I am fucking determined. And I now how to Google, and I know how to watch youtube videos. The first F took me an hour and I painted it twice. But I’d watched her father’s letters long enough—three months of standing across the street looking at that word—that I knew the shape of them, the way theIleaned just slightly, the curl on the tail of theA, the small imperfect human hand of it, and I gave it that, gave it the lean and the curl and the human, because a perfect machine-cut FILOXENIA would have been worse than no name at all.
She came out of the back while I was on the second N.
I felt her before I saw her—the kitchen changes when she’s in it—and I didn’t turn around, kept the brush moving, because I’d learned by now that turning around was crowding and crowding was poison. So I stayed on the N and let her stand there.
She didn’t say anything for a long time.
I finished the N. Started the second I. And in the new glass, faint, I could see her reflected behind me, standing dead still in her too-big apron with a tray forgotten in her hands, watchingme put her father’s name back on her father’s shop in her father’s green, and her face was doing something I’d never seen it do—not the cold, not the fury, not the deadpan, none of her armor at all, just a raw open thing she didn’t know I could see in the glass, her mouth pressed tight and her eyes too bright, and I understood that if I turned around she’d put it all away in a half a second and tell me I’d missed a spot.
So I didn’t turn around.
“It’s not perfect,” I said to the glass, easy, light, giving her the out. “I’m not a sign man. You want it redone proper, I know a guy.”
“No,” she said. Her voice came out wrong, thick, and she fixed it fast. “No. Leave it. It’s—” and she stopped, and I waited, and she didn’t finish it, just set the tray down hard and said, “The ovens are at temperature. Stop dawdling,” and went back to the bench, and I let her, and I finished her father’s name and neither of us said another word about it. That was how she let me see it. By telling me to stop dawdling. From her, that was everything.
The wall I did the same morning, the scorched one—primer and two coats while she had her back turned, so that the next time she looked at it there was nothing there to look at, no black fan, no blister, no sentence written in smoke. She came around the corner with a sack of sugar and stopped, and looked at the clean wall, and looked at me, and didn’t say thank you, because she doesn’t, because a thank-you is a thing you owe and she doesn’t owe, and I didn’t want one. I just wanted her to never have to scrub a thing she couldn’t unburn with her shaking hands again.
And the days went on, and they built.
You can’t be in a kitchen this small with someone day after day and not learn their music. The choreography that had been all collisions the first morning smoothed out into something close to a dance. I learned her reach for the bench scraper, her pivotfrom oven to proofing rack, the half-step she did at the corner, and I learned to be the not-there in the spaces she needed, to fold myself small when small was wanted and to be a wall at her back when a wall was wanted, and she stopped having to tell me to be smaller because I’d learned the shape of her movement well enough to leave it room.
And the bossing went on, and I drank it like water. Hands. That tray. Behind you. Hot. Move. No please, no softening. But even so, I though about what wasunderthe boss. I watched for it. I couldn’t help watching for it.The Little. The tired thing that had melted. The thing that wanted to be looked after, protected. I collected it the way I collect everything, every scrap of evidence about who she really was: the way she fed everyone but herself, the way her hands shook at the end of a long day, the way she talked to herself, low and Greek and gentle, the gentlest thing in the building. I fell a little harder every day and I held my rule like a man holding a hot pan—won’t use it, won’t test it, won’t reach—and the hope and the guilt twisted tighter together until I couldn’t tell which was which.
Olimpo installed himself like he’d signed a lease. The worst doorway, every morning, dreaming of birds. He let her feed him the good koulourakia off her flat palm and called her his favorite by leaning his whole bear’s weight on her shins.
And the shop got loud.
Day by day, person by person, it filled. The bus driver said his six words. The nurses laughed in the doorway. The old woman held court. People stayed because there was a thing to stay for, warmth pointed back at them, and the bell kept going, and the cases emptied, and one gray morning I looked up from the trays and the shop was full and roaring and gold and alive, more alive than it had been in a year, her father’s word made true on the new glass in his own green, and Katerina stood behindher counter in the middle of it not knowing what to do with her hands.
I knew exactly how she felt. I didn’t know what to do with mine either.
ItwasaThursdaywhen my cover came home to roost, and it came home wearing two good suits and a leather jacket.
