Page 86 of Savage Daddy
“I do,” I said. “I let them carry the flour. I’ve got two kids in the shop now, Despina—that’s them, the ones who did your trays, Eleni and Theo, she’s got a mouth on her and he says sorry to the bread. And there’s a man. I think you know him?” I felt the pink come up my throat. “The Sicilian. Of all things.”
“I do know him. A good man. The one you were a little . . . mean to?”
I chuckled.
“You remember.”
“I’m old, not stupid!”
More laughter.
“Well, you were right. I like him. No, I love him. He’s loud and he’s ridiculous. There’s a whole family come with him, a great roaring clan of them, and they reached out and closed around me without even asking, and I didn’t—I didn’t fight it. I let them.”
She reached up and laid her cold-warm hand against my cheek one more time, and she held it there, and she said the thing the old ones say, the only thing, the thing that has to be true because they need it to be.
“Your father,” she said, “would be proud of you, koritsi.”
And I let that be true, too. I sat in the wax and the incense and the damp, in the room I’d fled, holding the hand I’d run from, and I let it be true that he’d be proud. Of the loud full shop. Of the hands that weren’t only mine. Of the loaf given away. Of thedoor I’d stopped guarding and the family I’d let close around me and the man who’d kept the bed warm.
“Now,” she said, “let’s not talk about grief. Let’s talk about love.”
I held the old woman’s hand, and I stayed.
Chapter 20
Tonio
I’dlitthecandlestwice.
The first time I’d lit them too early, an hour out, just as a test, to see how the space would look. I looked at them for a moment, imagined them casting their light over Katerina, then I blew them out and stood in the dark of our bedroom feeling like an idiot, a grown man, a soldier, a Scordato, breathing hard over a row of guttered tealights.
Later, closer to when she was due, I’d lit them again. They made the room warm. Inviting. Perfect.
My burn made me slow.
The scar ran tight up my arm to the elbow now, shiny and pulled, and sometimes the fingers didn’t quite do what I sent them to, so I struck three matches before one took and I swore at all three in Sicilian. Olimpo, sprawled across the doorway, lifted his great grizzled head and gave me the grumble. The judgmental one.
“You don’t get a say in this, old man,” I told him. “Out. Go. This isn’t for you.”
Of course, he did not go. He resettled his bald scarred flank against the doorframe. I stepped over him, and I went to the drawer.
Time to choose.
She’d only ever worn them once. That first day, just to test me. Black, lace, the front cut clean away, the kind of thing a woman buys for a self she isn’t yet brave enough to be. I’d found them folded under the plain ones, and I’d put them back exactly as I found them and said nothing. I’d waited. Chose a different pair for her to wear each day. Now I lifted them out and held them flat across my good palm in the candlelight, the lace catching the gold, the bareness of them, and I imagined her in them and nothing else, the burn-scarred wrists, the strong shoulders, the soft she only lets me see, and I was half-hard before I’d finished the thought, breathing it out slow, ridiculous, twenty-nine years old and gone like a boy over a scrap of lace.
Why was I so nervous?
The nerves weren’t about the feather or the candle or the wax. The nerves were her. I wanted to get it right for her the way she gets so much right for me. So much right for everyone.
I heard the street door downstairs.
The boots on the bakery stair, slow, the loaf-tin set down on the counter, and then her tread coming up, tired, the long day in it. I left the lace folded on the bed where she’d see it and I went to the top of the stairs and Olimpo beat me there because of course he did.
She came up tired around the eyes.
I didn’t pounce.
I wanted to. The lace was on the bed and my blood was up. She came through the door soft and undone and beautiful and I wanted to take her against the wall before her coat was off. Ididn’t. I took the coat instead. I peeled it off her shoulders the way you peel something fragile and I hung it and I steered her by the small of her back, the easy authority, into the kitchen and the chair turned out the way I turn it.
