The Window Over the Sink

The fourth tier is crooked.

It's 11:40 on a Thursday night, the rain is coming sideways off the harbor, and the fourth tier of the Ferraro wedding cake is leaning a quarter inch to the left like it's had a few. You've been up since three. Your forearms ache. There's buttercream in your hair and you don't care, because Malloy's Bakery does not send a crooked cake to a wedding. Not in forty-one years. Not on your watch. Nana used to stand behind you at this table with her hands on her hips and say, A cake is a promise, Ava. You don't hand a bride a crooked promise. You can still hear her. Some nights you'd swear she's still standing there.

"Come on," you tell it. "Come on, sweetheart. Stand up straight for Mama."

You slide the offset spatula under the edge and nudge. The tier settles. You let out a breath you didn't know you were holding.

Dulce left at ten with her eyeliner still perfect and a warning on her way out the door: "Lock the back, Ava. I mean it. Mrs. Feeney says somebody's been sleeping in the alley again." You said yes, Mom. You did not lock the back. The back door sticks in the rain and you need it open for the cardboard run, and anyway nothing happens on East Broadway after eleven except wind and the 9 bus.

The bakery is yours now. Two years since Nana Bridie died in the chair by the front window with her reading glasses on and a crossword half done, and you still talk to her when the ovens are cooling. The deck ovens tick. The big maple worktable is scarred with fifty years of knife marks. The gold-leaf lettering on the front window, MALLOY'S BAKERY EST. 1979, throws backwards shadows across the floor when a car goes by.

You carry the mixing bowls to the deep steel sink. Above it is the only window that looks onto Fay Alley: a narrow brick slot behind the shops, one caged light over the dumpsters, puddles shining like spilled oil. You run the water hot. Steam fogs the bottom of the glass.

That's when you hear the voices.

Not loud. Two men, under the caged light, out of the rain beneath the fire escape across the alley. You can see them over the steam line. One is small and narrow-shouldered, glasses, a brown cardigan under an open raincoat, holding a paper bag against his chest the way you'd hold a baby. The other one is tall, in a tan overcoat, his back half to you, silver at the temples.

"I'm done," the one in glasses says. His voice carries off the brick, thin and shaking. "You hear me? I'm done. I've got a meeting Monday with the state. I'm out."

The tall one says something you can't hear. Calm. Almost friendly.

"No. No, I don't care what he says. He can find another bookkeeper." Glasses laughs, a high wrong sound. "You think I didn't keep copies? Fifteen years, I kept everything. Every name. Yours first."

You turn off the water.

You shouldn't be listening. You know that the way everyone who grew up on this side of Broadway knows it: there are conversations in this neighborhood you walk past with your eyes on the sidewalk. You reach for the dish towel. You tell yourself to go back to the cake.

The tall man turns his head, and the caged light falls across his face.

He's handsome. That's the first stupid thing you think. A good face, a face for a campaign poster, a strong nose, an easy mouth. A thin pale scar cuts straight through his left eyebrow like someone drew a line there with chalk. He's smiling a little, the way a man smiles at a waiter.

He takes his right hand out of his overcoat pocket.

You don't understand what you're seeing. Your brain refuses it. It's something black, it's in his hand, and the man in glasses is backing up a step with the paper bag still clutched to his chest, saying "Burke, come on. Burke, wait."

Two sounds. Flat, loud, nothing like television. They slap off the brick and rattle the window glass in its frame.

The man in glasses sits down in a puddle. Just sits, like his legs got tired. The paper bag falls out of his arms. Then he tips over sideways and doesn't move again, one shoe turned at a strange angle in the light.

The sheet pan slides out of your wet hands.

It hits the tile floor like a cymbal. The crash fills the bakery and goes on forever, steel ringing and ringing against steel.

In the alley, the man in the tan overcoat looks up.

Straight up. Straight at the only lit window in Fay Alley, at the steam still clinging to the bottom of the glass, at you standing in the middle of it with buttercream in your hair and a dish towel in your fist.

You can't move. Every muscle you own has locked. The rain runs down the window between you in crooked lines, and through it you see his face clearly, every inch of it, the silver hair, the scar through the eyebrow, the eyes going calm and interested as they find yours.

He doesn't run. He doesn't look away.

He studies you the way you'd read an order slip. Name, date, details.

Then he lifts his gloved left hand and lays one finger across his lips.

Shh.

Your heart is slamming so hard you can feel it in your teeth. Behind you, the oven timer you forgot about starts beeping, high and stupid and cheerful.

The man in the alley lowers his hand. He steps over the body like it's a puddle he'd rather not get his shoes wet in. He bends, picks up the paper bag, tucks it under his arm.

And he starts walking, unhurried, along the wall toward the green steel back door of Malloy's Bakery.

The door you didn't lock.