Chapter 17: The Boss Learns to Cook
The summons came at eleven forty at night, delivered by Mrs. Ricci in her dressing gown, with the air of a woman carrying a message she intended to forget by morning.
"The signore wishes to see you in the kitchen," she said. "Now. And, Mia β I saw nothing, I heard nothing, and if anyone asks, I was asleep and dreaming of a better employer."
Luca Moretti was standing in the middle of Mia's kitchen in a black sweater, sleeves pushed up, looking at the marble counter the way a general looks at a map of a country he intends to invade and is not entirely sure he can pronounce.
"Giulia's birthday is Saturday," he said.
"I know. I'm making the cake. It's in the plan β pink, strawberries, too many candles, Mrs. Ricci has opinions."
"You are not making the cake." He straightened, and she understood that the boss of Chicago was nervous. "I am making the cake. You are going to teach me. Tonight, and tomorrow night, and however many nights it takes, and no one β no one, Mia, not Marco, not my grandmother, certainly not the child β knows until Saturday. Those are the terms."
"Those are demands, Mr. Moretti."
"Then I demand." A beat. "Please."
She tied an apron on him herself because he was holding it like a piece of evidence, and something about Luca Moretti in a flour-dusted apron at midnight rearranged the furniture of her chest.
"Rule one," she said. "A cake is not a negotiation. You don't intimidate it into rising. Rule two: everything at room temperature. Rule three: you measure like a pharmacist, not like a poet."
"How many rules are there?"
"In my grandmother's kitchen there were forty. You're getting the children's edition."
He weighed flour on the scale with the focus of a man defusing something. He cracked eggs one-handed, perfectly, because of course he did, and then β reaching for the pan she had set to warm in butter β he took hold of it with his bare hand by the wrong end and hissed and dropped it, and the half-mixed batter went across the marble in a pale yellow tide, and the pan hit the floor and rang like a bell in the sleeping house.
Silence. Butter dripping off the counter's edge. The most feared man in Chicago standing in a puddle of his niece's birthday, with a red welt rising across his palm.
"Don't move," Mia said. "You'll cut your feet."
She ran cold water over his hand and held it there, his pulse doing something undisciplined under her fingers. She got the mop. She worked. And behind her, quietly at first, and then entirely, Luca Moretti began to laugh.
It was not a polite sound. It was rusty, startled, helpless β a laugh that had been in a drawer for five years. He laughed with his burned hand under the water, laughed at the batter on his socks, at himself, and Mia turned around with the mop in her hands and just looked at him, knowing exactly what Mrs. Ricci had told her: that Elena had been gone five years, and in five years no one in that house had heard that sound.
"You'll wake Giulia," she said, which was a stupid thing to say, and it made him laugh harder.
"Let her wake up," he managed. "Let the whole house wake up. I am making a cake."
They started over. Room-temperature eggs. The pharmacist's scale. He folded the batter the way she showed him β under, up, over, patient as a tide β and when the layers came out of the oven golden and level, he looked at them the way other men look at territory.
"They need to cool before any frosting touches them," Mia said. "A warm cake melts buttercream into soup. Tomorrow night we finish."
"Tomorrow night," he agreed, "we finish." He untied the apron slowly, like a man leaving a church. At the door he stopped. "Mia. When you burned your first pan β how old were you?"
"Seven. My grandmother's soda bread. I cried for an hour."
"And she let you try again the same day?"
"She said a cook is just someone who burned something and stayed in the kitchen." She wiped the last of the batter off the marble. "You're staying in the kitchen, Mr. Moretti."
The second night he arrived with his sleeves already rolled and a small notebook in his back pocket, in which, she discovered when he thought she wasn't looking, he had written down her rules in a hand like cut wire. He did not touch a single pan without checking it first, the way a man checks a room.
Buttercream was worse than batter. Buttercream required faith.
"You're beating it to death," Mia said. "It's not an enemy. It's sugar, Mr. Moretti. It wants to be smooth."
"Everything in my life that wanted something from me got it by being beaten smooth," he said, and then heard himself, and went quiet, and worked the spoon slower, until the frosting stood up in soft white peaks. He stared at it. "That's obscene."
"It's perfect is what it is."
He crumb-coated the layers with the concentration of a surgeon, and when he set the last strawberry on top β dead center, chosen after a deliberation that took four full minutes β he stepped back and looked at the cake for a long time.
"Elena made cakes," he said at last, very quietly, to the cake and not to her. "Every birthday in this house. Marco's. Mine. She'd write your name in chocolate. Badly. She said a name you could read perfectly wasn't made by anyone who loved you." His hand hovered over the strawberries and did not touch them. "Five birthdays Giulia has had since. Mrs. Ricci orders from a bakery on Taylor Street. Good cake. Nobody's cake." He drew a breath. "Now it's somebody's cake."
Mia said nothing, because some silences are a kind of cooking too β you do not lift the lid.
"Again tomorrow," he said finally. "The frosting. And Miaβ" He stopped at the door with his apron still on, flour on one cheek like war paint. "If the child cries, I will deny everything. If she likes it, I will take full credit and you will say nothing."
"I'll say nothing," Mia promised, "if you survive the frosting."
On Saturday the dining room was full of balloons and Morettis, and Giulia, nine years old, in a dress with strawberries on it, stood on a chair in front of a pink cake with too many candles and demanded to know who had made it, because it was the best cake, and Nonna's was second now, Nonna, sorry, but it was true.
Every adult at the table looked at Mia.