At five I went back in.
I sat on the edge of the bed and put my palm into the loose hair at the back of her head, slow, no hurry, and I said her name once, low. “Kat.” She made a small sound. Burrowed. I stroked the hair and said it again, gentler, “Wake up, Baby Girl,” and watched her surface from the sleep, from somewhere far down,her eyes opening on me with no fight in them at all, just sleep and confusion and then—when she remembered where she was, who I was—a worry so soft and undefended it nearly put me on the floor.
“The ovens,” she said. Croaked it. Already reaching for responsibility.
“Not yet.”
“Tonio—it’s—what time—the bell—”
“Water first.” I had the glass ready on the nightstand and I put it in her hand and folded her fingers around it. “Drink that. All of it. Then there’s eggs.Thenwe talk about the ovens.”
“I don’t have time for—”
“You have time for this.” Flat. Soft-steel, the voice. “Food first. That’s the rule. You eat, then you have the day. Not before.”
She drank the water. Grumbled the whole way through it, small and silly, a sound that didn’t belong to the woman who runs a kitchen, and I loved it so much. I put the plate in front of her—eggs, the bread, the heel of her own loaf—and I sat there and made sure she ate it, every bite, the way she’d made me prove I could carry flour. When she tried to leave the crust I gave her a look and she ate the crust.
“There,” she said, around it, glaring, “happy?”
“We’re getting there.”
She jammed her feet against my thigh, both of them, ice cold on purpose, a declaration of war. I yelped. She did not move them. She watched me over the eggs with a thing in her eyes that was almost a smile. I let the cold feet stay, because I wanted to feel her body against me.
Plate clean. I took it.
“Good girl,” I said, and watched it land—watched the color come up her throat, watched her breath catch, watched the word do to her in the gray morning what it had done across the marble, go down through her warm and helpless and chosen.
“Stop,” she said, not meaning it.
“Later,” I said, “there’s a thing. Something special. We’re going somewhere tonight, you and me, after the shop, and there’s—” I almost said it.A contract.I held it. “—there’s something to sign. Something between us. I’ll tell you when it’s time.”
She set the plate aside and came up onto her knees on the bed and kissed me, and it wasn’t small, it had her hands in it, fisted in my shirt the way she fists everything, and I felt the want come up through me hot and immediate, my whole body answering, the furnace lit—and I held it. I kissed her back and held the line and did not take it further, because the morning was hers to wake into soft, and tonight was for the rest.
“Ovens,” I said against her mouth. “Now we go put the ovens on. Together. Late, for once.”
“Okay, Daddy,” she agreed, wondering at the word like it was foreign, and let me pull her up. “Whatever you say.”
Byeighto’clockDonatellaCaruso had annexed the marble end of the bench like she owned it, and there was not one thing any of us could do about it.
She’d set up a command post. Laptop open, screen full of a spreadsheet color-coded in shades I didn’t have names for. A wedding planner the size of a missal, tabbed and flagged and bristling with sticky notes in three colors. Two phones face-up on the marble, both lit, both buzzing. A pen behind her ear and another in her hand and the red lipstick on like a warning label nailed to a fence, and over the coat that had cost more than my car she’d knotted one of Katerina’s spare aprons—FILOXENIA stenciled across a chest that had no business in a bakery—and she wore it like it was couture, like she’d chosen it, like the whole place was a set she’d had built.
She was running two hundred and forty covers like an invasion of a small country.
“No,” she said into the first phone, in Italian, fast, the words clipping out of her, “no, you sent me that quote on Tuesday and now it’s Thursday and the number’s grown legs, I don’t care what the market did, you’ll honor Tuesday’s number or I’ll call Bianchi and you’ll spend the rest of the season watching me hand him every event I touch—” She didn’t wait for the answer. She put the phone down, picked up the other one, and without one breath in between switched into French—flawless, cool, a different woman entirely—soothing some florist in Lyon about lilies versus something with a longer name, her voice gone silk where a second ago it had been a blade.
And the whole time, when the linen vendor stonewalled her on the phone she’d set down, she turned the ring on her finger. Round and round. Tella turns the ring when she’s not winning yet. She wasn’t winning yet. But, knowing her, she was going to win.
“What I don’t understand,” Katerina said, low, to me, at the bench, “is what she is to you. Exactly.”
Fair question. I’d been turning it over myself.
“My cousin Serafina,” I said, hauling a sack onto the rack, “married a man called Marco. Marco Caruso. That’s her brother.” I jerked my chin at the hurricane. “So she’s—” I stopped. There wasn’t a clean word for it. “Marco’s my cousin’s husband. That makes Donatella my cousin’s husband’s sister.”
Katerina looked at me.
“Right,” I said.
Donatella came off the French call and caught the tail of it. “I’ve decided we’re justfamily,” she announced, to the room, to nobody, dropping the phone. “It’s simpler. Marco married a Scordato, the Scordatos are running half of Chicago through this man’s brother and his brother’s brother, the whole thing’sa knot, and life is short. Family.” She pointed the pen at me. “You’re my cousin now, Toe. Congratulations. You’ll come to Easter. You’ll hate it.”