Page 85 of Savage Daddy
Somewhere mid-morning, when I’d been on my feet too long and the small of my back had started to talk and I hadn’t noticed because I never notice, a coffee appeared at my elbow.
Through the hole in the wall. Set down on my marble, hot, the steam coming off it. No note. No comment. Just there, where my hand would find it, the way you set a thing near someone you’ve been watching closer than they know. I didn’t look up. I didn’t say thank you. I drank it, the boss out front the whole time, sharp and certain and running my flour and my staff and my shop, and his hand on the line the whole time, holding the part of me up that I’d never once admit needed holding. The two ofus holding the whole loud thing up together, one wall between, a window in it.
When the lull came he leaned through to kiss me, and I put a flour-white hand flat to his chest and stopped him.
“Tonight? You’ve got that thing?” he said, mouth a breath from mine.
“I’ve got that thing.” The church. The basement. The wax and the incense and the wheat and the candles, the small mnimosyno I was going to in the evening, and the loaf I was bringing to it, finally come right. “I’ll be back late.”
“Take the loaf,” he said.
“I’m taking the loaf.”
“Keep the bed warm for me, though,” I said, and he grinned, and I let him have the kiss after all.
Thechurchbasementsmelledthe way it always smelled.
Wax and incense and damp, the cold stone breath of a room under a Greek church that had held a hundred years of the same smells and would hold a hundred more.
The long folding tables with their paper cloths. The candles in their sand. And at the center of it the koliva, the boiled wheat heaped and patterned with sugar and silver dragées and a cross laid in cinnamon, the food of the dead, made for the memory of one man on the anniversary of his leaving.
Last time, I’d fled. I’d spoken to Despina, and I couldnt handle it, and I’d just fled. This time, the grief was for someone else. A woman called Eleftheria, pillar of the community, who died a a year ago. We were all here to remember her.
This time I set the loaf down on the table among the breads, the mastic loaf, finally come right, the pine and honey of it rising up into the incense—and I did not walk away. I stayed beside it.
Despina found me.
Eighty if she was a day, in her black, three husbands buried and no patience left for any of it, and she came across the basement with her sharp eyes already on me and she took my face in both her hands.
Cold hands. They’re always cold, the old women’s hands.
And then she started the old moves, out of pure habit, the way she’d done my whole life.
“Let me help with the trays,” she said first, already turning. “Come, the trays—”
“It’s ok. They’re done, Despina.”
She stopped. They were done. Eleni had done them—Eleni and Theo had come with me, were across the room now portioning koliva into little paper cups. Despina looked at them and looked back at me.
“Then sit,” she said, regrouping, the second move. “Sit, sit, you’re on your feet all day, sit down.”
I sat. But it wasn’t a surrender now. I sat because I wanted to, beside her, not because she’d herded me into it.
“You’ll eat,” she said, the third move, the oldest one, already reaching for a plate. “You’re too thin. You’re always too thin. Stavros’s girl, all bone, what do they feed you—”
“I’ve eaten, Despina.”
She paused. Looked at me. Really looked. Not just the worried scan for problems that she’s done in the past. No. This time she took me in as I really was.
“I see that you have.” Her eyes were bright. “You look good, Katerina.”
I smiled.
She reached across the little table and she put her hand over mine.
“So,” she said. “You let someone carry the flour at last.”
I laughed. It came up out of me bright and helpless, the sound I’d have sworn a year ago I had no capacity for, and I didn’t deny it. I didn’t say I’m fine or I’ve got it or I don’t need—the verbal tics I’d worn like armor my whole life, gone, finally, washed clean.
