Chapter 1: Enzo
Davide Rossetti owns one knife.
I’ve opened every drawer in this kitchen twice. Takeout menus. A corkscrew. A charger for a phone that no longer exists. One knife. The blade bends when I press it into a tomato.
“Davide.” I hold it up so he can see it from the couch. “Explain this.”
“It’s a knife.”
“It bends.”
“It cuts.”
“It apologizes.” I set it down. “Tomorrow I’m buying you a real one. That’s not a request.”
“You’ve been here nine days and you’re renovating my kitchen.”
“Nine days, nine dinners.” I start unpacking the bag. “You’re welcome.”
He comes off the couch to inspect the haul. Tomatoes. Garlic. Onions. A bundle of basil that survived the walk better than I expected. Bread from the stall run by the old man who spent ten minutes telling me about his sister in Bari, and who by theend of it had decided I was going to meet her. Davide picks up a tomato and turns it over as if it might have a price tag hidden somewhere.
“These look good,” he says.
“They look good. That’s the problem.” I take it back and press my thumb in near the stem. “They’re grown to look good. A tomato should give a little. Like it’s tired. These are athletes. I don’t want an athlete. I want a tomato at the end of its career, thinking about a beach.”
“So why did you buy six?”
“Because we work with what the city gives us.” I line them up on the windowsill. “My father does the same thing with tourists.”
He laughs. That laugh is half of why I’m here and not in the team tower a block away, where the federation has the whole squad stacked behind a buffet and a swipe card, with a man in the lobby whose entire job is confirming we’re asleep. I wanted a kitchen. Davide had a spare room and a real stove. He had no idea what was about to happen to his life.
The onions go in first. Low heat. Oil. Patience.
I push my hair out of my eyes with the back of my wrist because my hands are busy. I’ve let it grow this year. Long enough to need pushing. Long enough that the federation photographer sighed at me. It stays. After the year I had, a man changes the one thing he’s allowed to control.
The knife fights me through every slice, and I tell it so, in Italian, because some conversations shouldn’t be translated.
“Stir,” I say, and hand him the spoon. “Slow. When they go quiet, tell me.”
“They’re onions. They’re already quiet.”
“They’re loud right now. Listen.”
He bends over the pan. He listens. This is a man who marks the fastest wingers in the league every weekend, and he is holding his breath over a pan of onions because I told him to,which is everything anyone needs to know about Davide. My mother would feed him until he begged for mercy.
“You know what my father cooked forty years on?” I say. “Two burners. You know what he never had?”
“A bending knife.”
“A bending knife.” I point at him. “Correct. You’re learning.”
When the onions go quiet and sweet, I take the spoon back and build the sauce properly. Garlic sliced thin enough to read through, into the oil and out again before it can turn bitter. The tomatoes crushed by hand, because the day a machine does that step is the day the dish stops being my father’s, and my father’s sauce is the reason half our street forgives him his opinions. Salt. Time. The basil waits on the counter. Basil goes in at the end.
Davide sets the table, which in this apartment means moving a laptop and finding two forks that match, and opens a bottle of red wine to go with the pasta.
We eat at the small table by the window because I refuse to eat over a couch. For a while nobody talks, which is the correct review.
“You think the mister starts you against Austria?” he says, when his plate is half gone.