Page 48 of Savage Daddy
“Yes.”
“That’s what I told the designer. Three times.” She straightened up. “He said it would ‘compromise the line.’”
“The line’s already compromised. It’s on the floor.”
“That’sexactlywhat I said.” Donatella stabbed the schematic with the pen. “I told him we need to consider the practicalities and he looked at me like I’d asked him to bake it in a microwave.”
“That’s what they do,” Kat said, and there was something new in her voice, something I’d almost never heard pointed at another person—recognition. “All vision and no execution.”
“All vision and no execution,” Donatella agreed, grim, and the two of them looked down at the marked-up schematic together, shoulder to shoulder now instead of across the marble, two commanding women who’d discovered they commanded the same army, and something settled between them, grudging and real.
I stood by the rack and didn’t say a word, because you don’t get in the way of a thing like that. You just get to watch it.
“You two,” Donatella said to me later, “seem to be hitting it off, Toe.”
“We work together.”
“Mm.” She went back to the schematic, but she was smiling, the warmth coming up under the sharp. “This family loves drama, you know. We feed on it. Marco will be insufferable.Santo will pretend he doesn’t care and then ask me forty questions. Sera will be kind about it, which is worse.” She glanced at Kat, then at me, and the needle went in soft and clean. “I felt it the second I walked in last night. The whole room had a temperature. I’ve been to a lot of rooms with that temperature. I know what it means.”
Katerina, marking the schematic, said nothing, but her ears had gone pink.
And here’s the thing I didn’t expect: Donatella was kind to her.
Not soft—Donatella doesn’t do soft, same as Kat doesn’t—but kind in the way the sharp ones are kind, sideways, through the work. She started asking Kat real questions, about the loaves, about the Greek things she wanted on the table, about her father, and she listened to the answers, and she made a note in her missal that wasn’t logistics, and once she said something dry enough that Katerina actually laughed—a real one, surprised out of her, the kind that changes her whole face—and the sound of it went straight through my chest, because I have spent weeks now learning to be glad of the small things in this woman, the cold feet, the half-smiles, thestop dawdling, and here was a stranger pulling a real laugh out of her over a cake schematic, and I had never been so grateful to anyone in my life.
She was happy. For a minute Katerina was just plainly happy, talking shop with a woman who got it, and I leaned on the rack and let it land on me and didn’t try to do anything with it.
When the bag was packed and the schematic settled and the linen vendor beaten into submission, Donatella stood, untied the borrowed apron, and went to the front of the shop to put herself back together, and she did it in the new glass.
“I like you, Katty,” she said. Flat. To the glass. The highest thing she’d say. “You don’t take my crap but you’ve got a heart. That’s rare. I’ll be back Tuesday with the seating, which is going to be a fucking war.” She uncapped her lipstick, applied a lick,then tucked it away. Pulled her coat closed. “Goodbye, cousin,” she said to me, and went out into the cold, and the bell went, and the warm gold closed back over the gap she left, and the shop was ours again, quiet, the two of us and the dog and the radio low.
Katerina let out a breath she’d been holding all day.
“I’m taking you somewhere,” I said.
She looked at me.
“Come on, honey. Let’s go.”
TheplaceItookher was small and old and Greek, three blocks the wrong way and worth it, a dozen tables and a tin ceiling and an icon of some saint or other. I’d picked it on purpose. I wanted her somewhere that smelled like home, somewhere her shoulders might come down.
She’d worn a dark green dress. Something she’d picked, and she kept tugging at the hem of it like it might betray her. She was beautiful—unbelievably so.
She let me order for her, which was its own small surrender, and I caught it and didn’t make a thing of it, just said the dishes to the old man at the table and watched Katerina watch me do it with a look in her eyes I was learning to read—relief, the relief of one less thing.
Then I got out the paper.
“What’s that,” she said. Already suspicious.
“It’s the thing.” I smoothed it flat on the cloth. “The contract.”
“A contract?”
“Well, not yet.”
“So it’s just . . . paper?”
“Angela and Pietro have one. Pietro wrote theirs like a lawyer—it’s a monster, three pages, it reads like a lease.” I clicked thepen. “I don’t want ours like that. I want it warmer than that. Funnier. Ours. But real. We write down what it is, what it isn’t, what you’ve agreed to and what you never will, so it’s there in ink and neither of us has to wonder in the dark.” I slid the pen across to her. “And you hold the pen first. Because the first thing’s yours.”
