Chapter 2 - THE WOMAN IN THE APRON
By seven the next morning, Thalia had studied the photograph so often that she could describe each woman's shadow.
Despina stood on the left in her flowered apron, laughing with her head thrown back. Connie stood in the middle with her elbows deep in a large wooden bowl. Elena Sabatini occupied the right side of the image. Her coat was too expensive for Halsted Street, her hair too carefully arranged for an outdoor bread stall, but her smile looked as unguarded as Despina's.
Thalia knew that face from Chicago newspapers. Elena had been married to a man who controlled unions, freight contracts, and nightclubs before dying in a shooting that remained unsolved. She had died years afterward. Old articles described her as a graceful philanthropist who supported church kitchens while remaining distant from the family's business.
They had not mentioned the folding table.
Nico came into the kitchen rubbing his eyes. At eleven, he was all knees and questions, with hair that never stayed combed. He glanced at the photograph, then at his sister, and signed, WHO ARE THEY?
“Mom,” Thalia signed back. “Connie. And somebody we need to learn about.”
He looked at the white envelope beside the picture and signed, BAD NEWS?
She considered lying. She had done that too often when bills arrived, and Nico had become skilled at detecting the difference between a reassuring smile and a true one.
“I don't know yet.”
He nodded, satisfied by the honesty, and began preparing toast.
At eight thirty, Thalia dropped him at the neighbor's apartment for his school pickup and boarded a train toward Connie's neighborhood. She carried the photograph inside a cookbook sleeve to protect its edges.
Connie lived above a tailor's shop in Pilsen. Her apartment was crowded with plants, worn chairs, and the smell of coffee strong enough to make Thalia's eyes water. A small blue bowl sat on the table, containing paper slips with names written in several languages.
“People we've fed,” Connie explained when she noticed Thalia looking. “I keep the names so the good doesn't disappear just because the people do.”
Thalia placed the photograph on the table. “Tell me the truth.”
Connie did not sit immediately. She went to the stove, turned off the burner, and then lowered herself into a chair as though preparing for a difficult visit from someone she had wronged.
“Your mother, Elena, and I started making Saturday bread when the river docks shut down for eleven weeks. Men were out of work. Families had no grocery money. Despina knew the recipe. I knew how to find donated flour. Elena knew which doors opened when somebody with a Sabatini name knocked.”
“Why hide it?”
“Elena's husband didn't object to charity. But Ignazio did. He thought feeding men who refused a bad contract was choosing sides against the family.”
“Was it?”
“Yes,” Connie said. “And we chose the side that was hungry.”
Thalia stared at her.
“Elena came every Saturday without jewelry,” Connie continued. “She kneaded until her shoulders ached and washed pans afterward. Your mother made the first stretch. Elena took the other edge. I turned the board and controlled the moisture. That's why your dough breaks. You're trying to remember a recipe for three pairs of hands as if it belonged to one.”
“And the three cuts?”
“Three promises. Nobody leaves hungry. Nobody pays for their place at the table. Nobody is turned away for telling the truth.”
Thalia looked down at Despina's handwriting.
“What happened?”
“Enough people noticed the bread that the men who wanted the docks quiet began to notice us. Elena kept copies of contributions and cash withdrawals. Some were innocent. Others looked like money traveling through shell companies before arriving at the relief kitchen. She wondered whether the family was using a charity fund to hide something uglier.”
“Ignazio?”
“He handled those accounts.”
Connie opened a shallow drawer and removed a yellowed newspaper clipping. The headline concerned a deadly warehouse fire seven years earlier. A small photograph showed Despina's bakery blackened by smoke.
“After Elena died, your mother kept asking where the missing relief money went. She told me she'd found proof.”
“Then she died in a fire the investigators blamed on her wiring.”
“I didn't know whom to believe. I was frightened. I let the official story become the only story.” Tears gathered beneath Connie's eyes. “And I watched you work in the same building with people who made jokes about her.”
Thalia stood. The apartment seemed abruptly too small.
“You could have told me seven years ago.”
“I know.”
“You could have told the police.”
“I know.”
“Instead you let me think the fire was her mistake.”
Connie reached for her hand, then thought better of it. “I'm sorry.”
Thalia wanted to throw the photograph across the room. She wanted to thank Connie for finally speaking. Both impulses felt disloyal to her mother. She did neither.
Connie slid a small tin toward her. Inside were recipe notes and three worn copper tokens stamped with the image of a loaf.
“Elena had these made. She said someday the kitchen would be a real place where nobody needed permission to eat.”
On the underside of one token, barely visible, a row of numbers had been scratched.
Thalia copied them into her phone. “What are these?”
“I don't know. Your mother used to carry them on a ring of keys.”
A knock sounded at the door.
Connie glanced at the clock. “I told him ten. He's early.”
Thalia stiffened. “Told whom?”
Emmett entered alone, carrying no bodyguards and wearing an ordinary dark sweater beneath his coat. He stopped in the doorway when he saw Thalia.
“I should have called first,” he said.
Connie motioned for him to sit. “If you plan to ask why I sent for you, look at that photograph.”
He picked it up by the corners. His expression changed so completely that Thalia saw the young man beneath the polished stranger.
“My mother,” he said.
“Do you remember her coming here?” Connie asked.
“No. She told us she volunteered at a parish downtown. My uncle said she was sentimental and shouldn't get involved with workers.” He looked at the older woman. “I didn't know she came with you.”
Connie repeated the history. Emmett listened without interruption. When she reached the missing relief money, his hand tightened on the table edge.
“Ignazio kept the family records before I took over,” he said. “I asked for the older ledgers when we began preparing the transition. He told me a flood ruined them.”
“Your mother knew that wasn't true,” Connie replied.
Thalia looked between them. “You came here because she invited you?”
“Yes,” Emmett said. “Not because I knew about the photograph.”
“And the hospital deposit?”
He frowned. “What deposit?”
“Someone offered to pay for my brother's operation. An anonymous donor. I assumed it was you.”
His face went cold. “I didn't authorize that.”
“I told the hospital not to accept it.”
“Good. Don't sign anything yet.”
Her voice sharpened. “I didn't ask you to make decisions for my family.”
“I'm not making one. I'm asking you to slow down because I know what people in my world do with generosity.”
Connie took a slow breath. “You believe the offer came from Ignazio.”
“I believe it came from someone who wants to know whether Thalia can be bought.”
Thalia felt suddenly aware of the coins in the tin. She had believed the money was the worst of her problems, but now someone knew exactly how much she needed and when.
Emmett laid the photograph down. “I can have my lawyer examine the offer without contacting the hospital. Only if you want that.”
She thought of Nico asking whether she had bad news. “Give me the lawyer's number.”
“That's all?”
“That's all.”
He wrote a number on the back of a receipt. “She works outside my organization. You can tell her not to share anything with me.”
The respect in that simple provision unsettled Thalia more than a grand speech would have.
After he left, Connie brought out a wooden bread board with a dark burn mark along one edge. Thalia remembered it immediately. Despina had used it on Saturdays. She had thought it destroyed in the fire.
“Your mother gave it to me two weeks before she died,” Connie said. “She said if she disappeared, I should hold it for you.”
Thalia stroked the warped wood. Along the side were three small carved grooves.
“We'll practice the proper way tonight,” Connie promised. “You and I, with the board. Your hand can't take much more of this.”
“How do you know?”
“I see you flex your fingers after every batch.”
The honesty made Thalia's eyes sting. She packed the tin and photograph into her canvas bag.
On the train back to River North, a message arrived from an unknown number. It contained a picture of Nico entering his school building that morning.
Below the photograph were eleven words.
STOP ASKING ABOUT OLD FIRES. LET YOUR BROTHER HAVE HIS SURGERY.
Thalia read it twice, then looked up at every face in the car.
May you like
A man standing by the doors folded his newspaper and turned his head away.
She had come to Chicago that morning looking for the missing part of a recipe. By noon, she understood the truth was going to cost far more than flour.
