Page 37 of Savage Daddy
And underneath all of it was the loaf.
The mastic loaf. Her father’s. I’d never seen anything take her the way that loaf took her. The mastic came in little tears of resin she ground by hand, and the dough wanted a thing from her she couldn’t quite give it, and she’d told me once, flat, not looking up, that he made it every Sunday and she’d never once got it right, not once in a year of trying, and she said it the way you say a thing that costs you, and I’d kept my mouth shut and greased the trays.
She wanted it on the Caruso table. That was the whole of it. She said the table needs something with weight to it, a bread, not a sweet, and went back to the bench.
She could not make it work at scale.
One was hard. Twelve was impossible. The crumb went dense, or the mastic went bitter, or the crust came out wrong, and she’d pull a tray and look at it and not say anything, just set it on the day-old shelf and start again, and the days got short and the wedding got close and the loaf would not come, and she stopped sleeping at all.
It broke on a Tuesday, in the dark before the dark.
I came in earlier than four, and the ovens were already going, which meant probably she’d never gone home. She was at the bench with mastic dust to the wrist working a dough that was already lost—I could see it was lost, the gluten gone, the thing slack and gray under her hands—and she was working it anyway, in tight hard circles, the way she’d scrubbed the scorch off the wall a lifetime ago, like enough pressure could unmake the failure.
Her hands were shaking.
Worse than I’d ever seen them. Not the end-of-day tremor. A deep shake, the shake of a body that has spent everything and gone into the walls for more, and her face had a grayness on it under the flour that put a stone in my chest, and as I watched she reached for the next thing and the room tilted on her—I saw it tilt, saw her catch the bench edge with one fist, saw her sway and lock her knees and tell the room to hold still by force of will.
“Sit down,” I said.
She didn’t.
“Katerina.” I was across the kitchen before I’d decided to be. “I’m telling you to sit down. Now.”
“I have to—the loaf—I have to get the loaf, the wedding’s in—”
“The loaf can wait. You can’t.” I took the dough out of her hands. Just took it. Set it aside. Took her by the shoulders, careful, the way you steady the dog, and the shoulders under my hands were shaking so hard it scared me, and I turned the chair with my foot the way I’d turned it that first time and I put her in it. “Sit. Eat. I’ve got the counter.”
And here is where it went different.
This time she sat down before I finished the sentence. Folded into the chair the way the body folds when it’s been waiting all day to be told it can stop—but it wasn’t just the body this time. She looked up at me while she did it. She held my eyes. Andthere was a thing in the look I had never seen and couldn’t read, a knowing, a softness with something deliberate underneath it, a woman not surrendering by accident but choosing, watching me do the thing and choosing to let it land, and it went through me like a current.
I didn’t understand it, but I accepted.
I got her food. Bread split warm, cheese, tomatoes, the herbs by the stove, a coffee. I set it at her elbow. And then I started to step back, to give her the room, to turn to the lost dough and the counter and be the not-there.
“Stay,” she said.
Quiet. Not the boss. Not deadpan. Something underneath both.
I stopped.
“You don’t have to go,” she said, and she picked up the bread and took a bite, watching me over it, and there was that thing again in her eyes, that knowing, that choosing, and my own pulse went up into my throat because I’d been keeping eighteen inches of air between us for three weeks by main strength and she’d just told me to spend it.
“Eat,” I said. It came out lower than I meant. The voice. The one I’d sworn off. It got away from me.
She didn’t flinch.
She ate, watching me. She did not bristle at the voice, did not go cold, did not tell me to get out—she leaned into it the smallest fraction.
“Thank you,” she said.
I couldn’t hold it anymore.
I put the charm down. I set it on the bench like a tool I was done with, and I crouched down in front of the chair so I wasn’t standing over her, so we were eye to eye. I felt my pulse going in my throat.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” I said.
Her eating slowed. The bread came down to her lap. She’d gone still and watchful, the working part of her clicking on, and I made myself keep going before the still could turn into a door.
