“I’ll get it.”
“That’s what you always say.”
“And then I always get it.” He glanced back, and there it was, the corner of a grin, but careful, dialed down, watching me like I was a thing that might bolt. That was new too. He used to grin at me like a man flooding a room with light to see what it caught. Now he grinned at me like a man holding a door open and waiting, and the waiting was somehow worse, the waiting got under my skin in a way the flooding never had.
Just say it,I thought, with a heat that surprised me.Just say you wanted to, last night, just say it so I can throw it back at you, just give me something to push against, you coward, you monster, you—
He didn’t say it.
Instead, he fixed the eggwash. He moved through my kitchen carefully, folding himself small, minding the corners, thoughtful and gentle. We opened, we served, we kept the customers busy. It was our dance, and we did it for hours, until he came for the bench scraper. Without knowing, I reached for the same drawer and we arrived. We stood there a half-second too long, his arm warm an inch from mine, and I felt the want come up through me like dawn coming up over a valley, slow and unstoppable and warming everything it touched, low in my belly, a thrum, a pull,and I hated it and I leaned into it the smallest fraction before I caught myself and stepped back.
“Drawer’s yours,” I said.
“Thanks.” He didn’t look at me when he said it. He’d felt it too. I knew he’d felt it. I could taste the kiss, could feel him on my lips. What was wrong with him, what was wrong with me, why did I feel like this, like a wire pulled too tight, like a kettle just before it screams—
The bell went
Cold came in with it. I looked up out of reflex, half a greeting loaded, and the greeting died, because I didn’t know her. A woman, late twenties, mid-brown hair grown out into something that looked accidental and elegant, a thrifted coat, the kind of stillness I knew from my own mirror—and Tonio, beside me, went tight. I felt it more than saw it. The big easy body of him locked up for half a beat, the grin gone flat the way it goes flat when he’s lying, and I clocked it the way I clock everything, and I thought:here’s another one.
Shesaidshewashere to taste for her wedding. I had a feeling it wasn’t the whole truth. Tonio had made an excuse—something about baseball?—and had headed into the office, leaving me out here alone with her.
“We’re not really open for tasting,” I said, which was a lie, the cases were full, but I say it to people I haven’t measured yet. “What do you want?”
“Cannoli.” She said it like a woman who’d been thinking about cannoli for a while. “My name’s Angela.”
She held out her hand and I took it.
“Katerina.”
“Pietro said your cannoli were the best in the city. I didn’t believe him. He oversells.” She came up to the case and looked down at them, and there was a hunger in the look that wasn’t performed — a real, slightly underweight hunger, the kind I knew, the kind that’s the result of skipped meals and not discipline. “Two.”
I boxed two. She paid swiftly, exact change, counted out fast, a woman used to making money last. She bit into one standing right there at the counter, no plate, and her eyes closed for a second, and that part was real too. Whatever else she was, she wasn’t lying about the cannoli.
“God,” she said, with her mouth full. “Okay. He didn’t oversell.”
“For the wedding?” I said. Flat. Watching her.
“For the wedding.” She wiped a crumb from the corner of her mouth with her thumb. “I’m supposed to be deciding if you cater the dessert table. Two hundred and forty people. The family’s at war over lilies, and there’s no way we choose the cannoli without kicking off some kind of major conflict.”
I leaned on my own counter, arms crossed, and let the silence do a little work, the way Despina taught me without meaning to, and watched her not fill it. She didn’t fill it. She just ate the cannolo and looked at me with grey-green eyes that had shadows under them no sleep would fix, and I thought,you’re like me,and right behind it,and you’re like them.
“You know Tonio, don’t you? You’re his people.” I said.
Same thing I’d said to the three guys. Not a question. “Whatever flavor of them you all are. You’ve got the lean, you’ve got the look, you’ve got it all. So.” I uncrossed my arms. “You’re working something. What is it?”
For the first time she smiled, and it changed her face, made it the face it would’ve been if the last couple years had gone differently. “He said you’d be like this.”
“Did he?”
“He said you’d work me out, and that you’d connect me to him.He also said you’d hate that I came.” She set the half-eaten cannolo down on its paper. There was mischief in her eyes. “He was right three times over.”
The door clicked, and Tonio re-entered. The woman glanced over at him, his whole big body radiating a nervousness I’d never seen on him, and she gave him a small flat look that saidI’ve got this,and to my surprise he took it. He went. Went to the old woman in the window seat, started in on her about her hip, and left the two of us alone at the counter.
“I can’t tell you everything,” she said. Quiet. Precise. No apology in it. “I want to be straight with you about that up front.So. I won’t say everything. Here’s what I’ll say. I work for them. I’m not muscle and I’m not a threat to you. What I do is money—I trace it, I read it, I find the shape of things in the margins. I’m good at it. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at, and it cost me my whole life once, and I’d do it again.” She picked the cannolo back up. “And Iamhere for the cannoli. If you don’t get the contract it’s a crime, and I’ll say so.”
She reached into her coat and took out a folded sheet of paper, and she put it on the counter and turned it so I could read it, and my stomach dropped, because I knew it. It was a copy of one of the buyout offers. The letterhead with the company name I’d torn the original of and thrown in the bin and torn again. The number on it that was an insult, the number under it that was a worse insult, the polite paragraph at the bottom aboutneighborhood revitalizationthat meantsell or we make you.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.