Page 68 of Savage Daddy
“I made a mistake,” he was saying, “okay, I made a mistake, this isn’t—this wasn’t a real job, you understand? Nobody told me it was you, nobody said there’d be a made man, I was sent to rattle. That’s all. Just rattle. Words. A photo. Make the lady nervous, make her think about the wedding, that’s the whole job, I swear to God—”
“Keep walking,” I said.
“It’s a pride thing.” He had the door now, half through it, and the fear had loosened his tongue all the way off its hinges. “It’s personal, it’s not—it’s not strategic, it’s a slight. He took it personal. The wedding. He wasn’t invited. His own cousin getting married, the Scordato wedding, family, the whole family, and he doesn’t get a card? A man like that?” The babble had gone almost pleading now, like if he made me understand it had only ever been a tantrum I might let it cost him less. “He doesn’t forget a thing like that. You don’t snub a man like Gianni and not hear about it. That’s all this is. That’s all it ever—”
The bell went and the cold came in and he was gone, out into the gray, half-running, and I stood there in the warm with my heart still going and didn’t decide fast enough whether to put a boot through the door after him and break his jaw for the name he’d just dropped on my floor like loose change.
Gianni.
I let it go. He was gone, and the name was already said, and you can’t unsay a thing or unbreak a jaw, and there were six people behind me who’d just watched me put a man into the tile.
But it sat wrong in me, and I stood with it a second before I turned around, turning it over the way I don’t usually bother to turn things over, because that’s Sal’s job, that’s Pietro’s, theweighing—I’m the one who hits the thing, not the one who studies it.
It sat wrong because it was almost a relief.
That was the wrong of it. A snub. A man’s wounded pride.
Ego, you can manage. Ego is loud and ego is stupid and ego makes mistakes. A plan scares me. A tantrum I can stand in front of.
So the relief came up in me and I let it, and I should have known better, because relief is the thing that walks in wearing a good coat.
“No goodstronzo.”
Donatella, from the doorway, putting her clipboard back together, her voice gone flat and certain and a little loud.
“You heard him,” she said. “It’s not a plan. It’s a snubbed little man having a fit because he didn’t get a wedding invitation.” She said it with contempt, the contempt doing half the work of the comfort. “He wants to be felt. He sent a clown in a coat to say a scary word and make us all jump and call the wedding off so he gets to win something. That’s the whole of it. Pride.” She came up front, and she put it together for everyone, and it was good, it was clean, it was the kind of thing that brings a room’s shoulders down. “And here’s the thing about Saturday. You want to know the safest place in the city of Chicago to be on Saturday afternoon? That wedding. Every soldier both families own, standing shoulder to shoulder. Don Arturo’s people, off the plane, the real ones, the old-country ones. The Carusos, all of them. My brothers.Him”—she pointed at me—“and his cousins, and his cousins are not gentle men.” She let that land. “Nobody on this earth moves on a room like that. It would be suicide. A snubbed little man who throws a tantrum because he wasn’t invited is not a man who walks into the most heavily armed wedding in the Midwest to make a point. Saturday is the one place nothing happens. Saturday we’re untouchable.”
She was right.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to, after. She was right. Every word of it was true. You don’t move on a room full of two families’ guns. Ego is not a plan. The wedding was a fortress, the safest walls in the city, every dangerous man we had stacked into one ballroom with their eyes open.
The soldiers picked their piping bags back up. The old woman put a koulouraki in her mouth. The radio kept playing. The room let its breath out, all at once, the held silence breaking into the ordinary noise of a busy morning, and I felt it go out of me too, the relief settling deeper, the danger reshaping itself in my chest from a thing with teeth into a thing I could name and stand in front of and dismiss. A tantrum. A snub. Saturday a fortress. Nothing happens Saturday.
I almost believed it all the way down.
I went and got more flour.
Bythetimethehelpers cleared out the shop smelled of the loaf that finally came right.
The soldiers had gone, cream-handed and grinning, with bread under their arms. Donatella had swept out with her clipboard and her brass and a kiss to Kat’s cheek and a promise to be back at dawn. The old woman had been walked home by a neighbor’s boy, full of koulourakia and compliments. And it was just us, the way it’s mostly been—me, her, the dog, the radio low—except the air was different now, threaded all through with pine and honey, the smell of her father’s Sunday hanging in the warm where the loaf cooled on the rack.
She was wound tight under the calm.
I could see it. She’d held the morning together—the loaf, the man in the coat, the wedding she would not let anything ruin. It was all still in her, coiled, looking for somewhere to go.
So I spoke to her.
“Sit,” I said. Soft. The chair turned to face out, the way I turn it. “Down. Now.”
She sat. She didn’t fight it, which told me how far gone she was, and I put a plate of pastries at her elbow and I crouched in front of her and put my hands on her knees and waited until she looked at me.
“You’re done,” I said. “Day’s over. The ovens are cold. The door’s locked. I’ve got the security—it’s al good. There’s nothing left to do tonight, so put it down.” I picked a koulouri held it to her. “Eat. All of it. Don’t make me invoke the contract on the first night I’ve got you home tired.”
The corner of her mouth went up—the near-smile, the standing ovation—and she ate. Slow at first, then like a woman who’d forgotten she was starving, and I watched the coil come out of her bite by bite, watched the boss and the books and the man in the coat all drain off her into the warm gold quiet, until she was just Katerina in a chair, small and tired and finally, blessedly let down off the holding.
“Good girl,” I said, low, and watched it go through her the way it always does, the color up her throat, the breath catching, the whole proud meticulous woman gone soft for the held second of it.
When the plate was clean I took it and set it aside and pulled a stool over close so our knees touched, and I told her about Saturday, because I could feel it sitting in her under everything else, the wedding she was terrified of, the family she didn’t know how to belong to.
