Chapter 5 - The Copper Bowl
The kitchen of the Orsini estate was dark at midnight, save for the green pilot lights on the eight-burner Garland range and the moonlight pouring through the tall, arched windows that overlooked the courtyard fountain.
Nell sat on a low wooden stool by the prep island, wearing her gray uniform dress, her hands resting in her lap.
On the stainless-steel table in front of her sat three items: a fifteen-pound sack of winter wheat flour, a stoneware crock of pale lard from the market, and a heavy, round-bottomed copper beating bowl that had belonged to Carmine’s grandmother.
The pantry door opened.
Carmine walked in without his shoes, wearing dark trousers and an unbuttoned white shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms. He carried a bottle of cold spring water from the icebox.
He didn't speak. He set the water on the counter, walked to the rack above the sinks, and took down a pair of heavy iron loaf pans.
"You don't bake at midnight," Nell said, her voice quiet as the draft under the door.
"You do," Carmine replied. "If you want the dough to rise before the humidity comes off the swamp at dawn."
Nell looked at the copper bowl. "Odette told me you went to St. Charles Avenue."
"Odette talks too much."
"She said three councilmen resigned by four o'clock this afternoon."
"They had health issues," Carmine said, leaning against the prep island, his arms crossed over his chest. "High blood pressure. Weak constitutions. They decided to spend more time with their grandchildren in Pass Christian."
Nell stood up.
She reached out, her fingers brushing the rim of the copper bowl. The metal was cold, heavy, polished with lemon juice and salt until it looked like a setting sun.
"I don't want his money, Carmine."
It was the first time she had used his Christian name.
Carmine’s eyes shifted toward her, dark and steady in the moonlight. "The money isn't for you. It’s for Emmett. St. Jude’s has an experimental hyperbaric facility in Houston. They think they can clear some of the smoke damage from his frontal lobe if they start within the month."
Nell’s chin trembled. She bit her lower lip, hard enough to draw blood, fighting the tear that wanted to break across her cheek.
"Why are you doing this?" she whispered. "My father never paid you tribute. We never bought protection from your father. We were just bakers on Magazine Street."
Carmine took a step closer.
He didn't touch her. He stood eighteen inches away, close enough that she could smell the tobacco on his linen and the cold, clean scent of the river that never quite left his skin.
"When I was nine years old," Carmine said, his voice low and rhythmic as a priest reciting the litany, "my father took two bullets in the shoulder outside the cotton exchange. They brought him through the back doors of this house with his shirt soaked in red. My mother locked me in the small parlor on the second floor so I wouldn't hear him screaming while the doctor pulled the lead out of his bone."
Nell looked up into his slate-gray eyes.
"I sat in that dark room for six hours," Carmine said. "I thought my father was dead. I thought the whole world was going to come through the front gates with shotguns and tear the paintings off the walls. Around three in the morning, the door opened. It wasn't my mother. It was your grandfather, Guillaume."
"My grandfather?"
"He brought a crate of hot rolls wrapped in white linen," Carmine said. "He set the basket on the floor, gave me a piece of dark chocolate with sea salt, and sat on the carpet beside me until the sun came up. He didn't ask my father for money. He didn't ask for a favor on the docks. He just said that boys who are waiting for their fathers need bread that was baked with butter instead of oil."
Carmine reached out.
His large, scarred hand closed gently around her forearm, his thumb resting over the faint white lines left by the oven racks.
"You don't belong in my basement, Eleanor Fontaine," Carmine whispered. "You belong in the morning. Where the flour is white, the sugar is toasted, and nobody has to look at the door to see who's coming through the alley."
Nell did not pull her arm away.
May you like
She looked down at his thumb, resting against her scarred skin like an anchor against a stone reef, and for the first time in three years, she did not count the minutes.
She simply breathed.
