Ch.46 – Kneading

Maria's hands were in the dough when I came through the kitchen door.

"You're early." She didn't look up. Her arms were going, the push-fold-turn of someone who'd done this so many times the motion lived in her shoulders. The kitchen was warm. Ovens had been on since morning and the air was thick with flour and yeast and the smell of sauce simmering on the back burner. Tony was in the front working the register, talking to a customer about calamari.

"Figured I'd come in before the rush."

"There is no rush. It's Tuesday." She folded the dough over and pressed with the heels of her hands. Her hair was up, dark and thick, pinned with a clip that was losing the fight. She was in the usual black dress under the apron and the apron had flour across the front and a tomato stain near the hem that had been there since last week. "But you're here, so you're useful. Come."

She waved me over to the counter. There was a second ball of dough on the flour-dusted surface, pale and lumpy, waiting.

"You want me to knead?"

"I want you to learn. Tony won't always be here to make the dough and I won't always be here to babysit you and someday you'll need to know." She pushed the ball toward me. "Take it."

I put my hands on the dough. It was cool and slightly sticky and the flour puffed when I pressed down. I pushed the way I'd seen her push.

"No." She was next to me in one step. "Not with your arms. From your back. The weight goes through your shoulders." She put her hands over mine on the dough.

Her fingers were warm from working. Flour on her knuckles, in the creases of her palms. She pressed down on my hands and pushed forward and the dough gave under us and her hip bumped against mine. She didn't move away.

"Push. Fold. Turn. Push. Fold. Turn." She guided my hands through the cycle. Her body was close. Her chest pressed against my arm when she leaned in to adjust my angle. She smelled like the kitchen, flour and yeast and tomato and underneath it a perfume that was warm and lived on her skin, the same smell I'd caught on her fingers when she'd handed me the water glass on my first day.

"Gentler," she said. "You're punching it. Dough isn't a boxing bag."

"Tell that to my Muay Thai teacher."

She laughed. Short, warm. Her hands squeezed mine and guided them slower. The dough was changing under our fingers, going from lumpy and rough to smoother, more elastic, the surface starting to pull tight when I folded it over.

"You have to feel when it's ready," she said. She was looking at the dough, not at me, and her voice had dropped lower. "It should be smooth. Like-" She paused. Her hands stopped on mine. "Like skin."

The word sat in the kitchen. She heard herself say it. Her fingers lifted off mine and she stepped back half a step and her cheeks had a flush that wasn't from the oven heat.

"Like well-kneaded skin," she said. "Dough. I mean like dough skin. The texture when it's done."

"I got it."

"Good." She turned back to her own dough and worked it faster than before. The flush was still there. I kept kneading.

The dough was surprisingly absorbing. The repetition of push-fold-turn got into a rhythm that was close to meditative if you ignored the fact that a beautiful Italian woman had just compared dough to skin while her hands were on yours and her hip was touching your hip. I didn't ignore it. My hands kept working and my brain kept thinking about what I knew was coming down this route. The pregnancy arrangement. Tony asking me to sleep with his wife because he couldn't give her a child. The storage room scene. The deal that was required for the main story to advance.

Maria was humming. An Italian melody, something from a radio or her mother or a kitchen she'd grown up in. Her hands moved in the dough and her hips swayed with the humming and the clip in her hair was losing another pin and a strand of dark hair fell across her forehead and she blew it out of her eyes without stopping.

In the game she was a quest objective. Get Tony's trust. Wait for the conversation. Agree to the arrangement. Go to the storage room. Hit the right dialogue options. Pregnancy confirmed. Move to Part 2.

She was blowing hair out of her face and humming and her apron was covered in flour and she was teaching me to knead dough because she wanted someone in this kitchen besides herself who knew how it was supposed to feel.

Tony came through the kitchen door. He'd been in the front for twenty minutes and he had the look of a man who'd just listened to someone complain about their food for no reason. His apron was cleaner than Maria's because Tony didn't knead, he assembled and baked, and his gold chain was resting on the apron strings and his combover was intact despite the heat.

"Patterson called in. Two large pepperoni, extra cheese." He looked at the dough under my hands. Looked at Maria. Looked at the flour on the counter. "You teaching him?"

"Someone should."

"Hmm." Tony watched me knead for a few seconds. His eyes were critical. He reached over and poked the dough with one finger. The surface bounced back. He grunted. The grunt was approval.

"Patterson's is three blocks east," I said.

"You remember."

"She tips two dollars and she looks at me funny because I'm not you."

Tony's mouth pulled up on one side. "She does the same to me. Thirty years I've been delivering her pizza and she still checks the bottom of the box." He hung the order slip on the clip above the oven. "You've got three runs today. Patterson, the Hendricks apartment, and a new one out near the beach."

Maria's hands were finishing her dough. She shaped it into a round, placed it in a bowl, covered it with a towel. She wiped her hands on her apron and left the kitchen without saying anything. Her footsteps went toward the back office. The humming continued from behind the door.

Tony watched her go. Then he looked at me.

"Come here."

I came around the counter. Tony leaned against the prep table with his arms crossed. The kitchen was quiet except for the sauce on the back burner and the hum of the refrigerator and Maria's muffled humming from the office.

"You're a good worker, kid."

"Thanks."

"I mean it." He unfolded his arms and put one hand flat on the counter. His hand was large, thick-fingered, the kind of hand that had done things before it learned to spread pizza dough. "You show up. You don't complain. You run in the heat and you come back sweating and you don't ask for more than what's fair. That's rare. In a kid, that's rare."

I didn't say anything. Tony wasn't joking and the room had gone quiet enough that a joke would have been wrong.

"Frank would've been proud of you."

He'd said it before. A couple weeks ago, same kitchen, after a long Saturday shift when I'd done five runs and come back with my shirt soaked through and two hundred in my pocket. He'd said it then too, quiet and offhand, and I'd let it slide past because I wasn't ready for it. I wasn't ready for it now either.

Frank wasn't my father. Frank was the father of the body I was wearing, a man I'd never met, a corpse I'd replaced. I didn't know what Frank sounded like or how he laughed or what he looked like when he was angry. I knew he'd been murdered and I knew Russians were involved and I knew his money was hidden in a boat called The Dink and I knew all of this because I'd played a game where Frank was a name on a funeral program in the opening cutscene.

Tony didn't know any of that. Tony saw a kid who showed up and worked hard and reminded him of a dead man who'd deserved better. Tony was standing in his kitchen with flour on his apron and a gold chain on his chest saying the name of a man he'd respected to a teenager who wasn't that man's son and the sauce was bubbling and my chest was tight.

"Thanks, Tony."

He nodded. Unfolded his arms. Went back to the oven. Tony said what he meant and then he moved on to pizza.

I picked up the delivery boxes Maria had prepped before I arrived. Three orders, three addresses, the boxes warm against my chest. My bike was outside. The afternoon was hot. Tony's pizzeria smelled like home in a way my actual home didn't.

The deliveries took two hours. Patterson first. She opened the door, inspected the pizza, checked the bottom of the box, said "it's not as hot as when Tony brings it," and tipped two dollars. The Hendricks apartment was Tina, who answered in a silk robe with her hair wet and said "oh, the pizza boy" and took the box and gave me a twenty and told me to keep the change and closed the door. The beach house was a new customer, a guy in swim trunks who ate the first slice standing in the doorway and gave me a thumbs up and a ten.

Four hundred and fifty dollars by the end of the run. Tips plus base. I'd been at this for weeks now and the money was adding up in a way that made the numbers in my head shift every time I pedaled home. Scooter was thirty-five hundred. I had enough for it if I didn't eat. The sports car was a dream at thirty-two thousand but the scooter was getting close to real.

I rode home with the empty bags bungee-corded to the rack and the evening cooling down and the sweat drying on my back and the taste of flour still on my tongue from the kitchen. My hands were sore from the kneading. A different sore than the gym or the drumsticks. A deeper one, in the muscles of my palms.

Maria's flour-covered fingers pressing mine into dough. Dewitt's hands adjusting my grip on drumsticks. Judith's fingers wrapped around my belt buckle. All today. None of them knew about the others.

Debbie was in the kitchen when I walked in. She was making dinner and the house smelled like onions and garlic and she smiled when she saw me and said "you smell like pizza" and I said "occupational hazard" and she laughed and I went upstairs to shower.

The water was hot and I stood under it and my palms were pink from the dough. Maria's voice saying "like skin." The flush on her cheeks. Her going to the back office and humming like she needed to be somewhere else. Tony saying Frank would've been proud. The pregnancy route that was coming and how Tony was going to sit me down in that same kitchen and ask me to do a thing that was going to change everything and he was going to ask because he loved Maria more than his pride.

The water ran. The steam filled the bathroom. My hands were clean and the flour was gone and the sore was still there underneath.

I got dressed. Went downstairs. Ate dinner. Debbie talked about the garden and Jenny talked about her follower count and I ate chicken and said "this is really good" and Debbie smiled and the evening was warm and ordinary and I had four hundred and fifty dollars and flour under my fingernails and a man who wasn't my father had told me he'd be proud.