Page 53 of Savage Daddy
“No. I get to ask.” My voice came out steadier than I felt, the boss voice, the one that doesn’t betray the thing under it. “This is my block. My window’s the one that got broken. My wall’s the one that got scorched. My loan, my father’s name on the door, my hands on every loaf. So when a man who’s always at my bakery now starts taking calls in a language I don’t speak with his back to me, I get to ask what’s happening on my own corner.”
He held my gaze.
“You signed my name beside yours last night,” I said, lower now. “You wrote four pages about holding the things I carry. And then within the hour you went cold in the dark and told me to trust you. You don’t get to do both. You don’t get the trust and the locked door.”
His eyes flicked.
Past me. Quick—so quick I almost missed it, would have missed it a month ago, before he taught me to read a room. Past my shoulder, through the new green glass at the front of the shop, out to the curb across the street where the streetlight made a cold pool on the dead asphalt. A dark stretch of nothing. An empty curb.
He looked at the empty curb for less than a second.
And then he moved.
Half a step. Smooth, the way he does everything smooth, the big easy body shifting without seeming to decide to, putting his shoulder between me and the window, putting his back to the glass and his front to me, the exact thing he’d done the night of the car on the dark street, the wall, the smooth wall, between her and the door, between her and whatever comes next.
I felt it go through me cold.
There was something out there. On the curb. In the dark across the street where I couldn’t see and he could, where there was nothing to me and something to him. He was reading a threat off an empty stretch of road and he was standing in front of it without a word, his body doing the talking, and the thing he wouldn’t say wasn’t linens and it wasn’t Marco and it wasn’t seating charts.
It was about me.
Something was out there about me, on my own block, in front of my own door, and the man who held the line so I didn’t have to had decided I didn’t get to know.
The powerlessness lit up in me like a pilot flame catching. Small and blue and steady, that first lick of it, the one that runs everything else. I knew it. I’d lived inside it before. It was the feeling of being a thing decided about, a thing protected, a thing kept safe in a room someone else had the key to.
I’d sworn I would never feel it again.
“What’s on the curb, Tonio,” I said.
“Nothing’s on the curb.”
The worst liar I’d ever met.
Iwasgoingtotakeback the thing that was mine.
He could keep the curb. He could keep the Sicilian and the phone and the part he kept. But the work was mine—it had always been mine, the one thing no one could decide for me—and I drove it like a mule that had wronged me.
Through the morning rush.
Past noon. The lunch trade. Then the dead hour, when a person who slept four hours and meant to take care of herself might sit down with a coffee and the books. I didn’t sit. I started the wedding shop instead—the second shop, the ghost shop, the one with no hours—and I tested cannoli I didn’t need to test and braided tsoureki I already had the proportions for and pulled the mastic loaf again, the loaf I couldn’t make, and watched it come out dense and bitter and wrong, and started another, because the failing was a kind of motion and the motion was a kind of not-thinking.
If he wouldn’t be honest, I wouldn’t be good.
So I worked, kept working.
I worked past the point where it does any good. Past the point where a tired body starts making more work than it finishes, dropping things, mismeasuring, the bad economy of exhaustion. The shake came up in my hands around three, the fine bad one, the deep one, not the end-of-day tremor but the one that says the body has spent everything and gone into the walls for more.
I knew that shake. I’d nearly hit the deck on it once. He’d put me in the chair over it.
I kept going.
I kept going on purpose, is the thing, and I knew I was doing it, and I watched him watch me do it from across my kitchen, and there was a low ugly satisfaction in it, the satisfaction of laying my own destruction out on the marble where he’d have to look at it. You want to manage me? Manage this. The room did the small tilt it does and I caught the bench and locked my knees and toldit to hold still and reached for the next thing with a hand that wouldn’t be still, and I dared him with my whole body, the way I’d dared him this morning with what’s on the curb.
He waited until the bell went silent.
He’s good that way—he didn’t do it in front of the bus driver or the last straggling customer, didn’t make it a scene with an audience. He waited until the door was locked and the front lights were off and the ovens had started their long tick down into quiet, the warm gold settling into the gray, and then he set a plate at my elbow. Bread, cheese, the herbs. Sideways. The way that gets past me.
And then he stepped in close, and his voice came down to the soft-steel, the calm one, the one with no anger anywhere in it.
