“Grazie,” I manage. “Thank you.”
Marco gives me the quick cheek-to-cheek that men do when they are affectionate but busy. “Ci dispiace, Bianca,” he says, eyes kind, then flicks his chin toward his pan because the onions are exactly at that point where a breath too long turns sweet to bitter. “After we cry, we work, sì?”
“Sì.” I grin. “Sempre.”
Lorenzo lifts a hand, shy and sweet, and the kid at the sink—Ari, I learn in rapid-fire introductions—says “ciao” as if he fears me.
Chef keeps one hand at my elbow like I’ll disappear if he lets go.
“You’re in time,” he announces, already half-turning back to the line because prep won’t prep itself. “We make tortellini like God intended, with hands and with patience. You stay and help, eh? Your hands”—he grabs mine, palms up, inspects them like produce—“still good. Brava.”
I laugh because he leaves no gaps between statements for you to reject the premise. “I came to talk to you,” I say. “But I can help first.”
“Talk, schmalk,” he says with an expansive sweep. “We talk cooking. Same thing. You eat? No? You eat later. For now—” He points with his chin where Paola has draped a translucent yellow sheet over the table. “Pasta. Vieni.”
I hang my coat and slide into the space beside Paola on muscle memory. The mattarello is familiar as breathing. The dough is already rested; it gives like a well-trained animal. Paola’s eyes dance when she hands me the knife and the filling bag—the tiny, savory heart that makes a tortellino worth kneeling for.
“Show these bambini what small means,” she whispers, wicked.
“Cruel,” I whisper back, and then my hands are on their old road. Cut, pipe, fold, around the tip of my pinky, pinch, press. Small, smaller, smallest. A field of yellow moons turns to belly buttons,then to gold rings. It’s not skill; it’s repetition. A thousand hours collapsed into ten quick minutes.
Chef moves around us, in us, through us, exactly like always. He tastes a ladle of brodo, clicks his tongue, pinches another three grams of meat apart to check if the fat is moistened it right, adjusts the salt without a second thought.
He scolds Marco for trying to rush the soffritto with the same love he’d scold a nephew for running by the pool. He puts a spoon in my hand without looking. “Assaggia,” he commands. Taste.
I sip, blow, sip again. “Più osso,” I say. “Let it go another twenty minutes, low.”
He nods once: good girl.
Condolences arrive in pieces as hands pass flour and oil and cheese. “Mi dispiace per tua Nonna,” from Ari, quiet. Paola squeezes my fingers when she passes, nothing else needed.
We get a rhythm going. I forget for five full minutes that I didn’t come here to work. My body remembers too much: the angle of my wrists, the exact way to move a tray with your hip while both hands are busy, how to slide out of Chef’s way before he needs you to. Every time I’m near the stove, something in me unclenches.
Something I didn’t know was clenched.
When the first tray of tortellini is made, Chef claps once, loud. “Basta. Enough. Lunch will be a massacre if I let you stay. Everyone will want your hands, and I will get no talking.”
He wipes his hands on his apron, looks around like the general he is, and starts pointing. “Marco, you marry the ragù with the last of yesterday. Only the top, the bottom is mud, but the top is gold. Paola, you show Ari how to close with one hand; he closes like a tourist. Lorenzo, call the verdure for delivery, tell him if he gives me another tired radicchio I will retire him personally.”
Then to me, softening. “And you.” He tilts his head toward the door that separates kitchen and sala. “We talk.”
We walk out to the dining room together. The lights are still on low; the room is a stage just before the curtain goes up. He doesn’t sit us at a white-cloth table. He takes me to the corner near the bar where an old wooden table holds menus and a stubby pencil for tallying wine by the glass. He pulls out a chair for me like I’m a guest and not someone he’s worked with for years.
I sit. He doesn’t. He leans his hip on the bar and crosses his arms. He squints at me like I’m a misbehaving sauce.
“Okay,” he says. “Parla.”
I breathe in. I have thought about this on the plane, in the car, on the walk under the porticoes. I tried out sentences in my head and threw most away. I hate lying. I’m not going to.
I’m going to tell him the truth I can tell. Not the whole truth.
“I’m not coming back,” I say, straight.
He doesn’t flinch. “Why,” he says. Not a challenge, a request. “And not the polite why. The real one.”
“My Nonna left me Regalia,” I say. The word tastes bitter and sweet at once. “She left it to me, Chef.” I make myself hold his eyes. “It’s… it’s my family’s place. Her place. I can’t—” I swallow. “I can’t turn that away. It’s a thing I have to honor.”
He listens without blinking, without filling the silence with his noise. Then he nods once, slow. “Legacy,” he says softly, rolling it in his mouth like a word he respects. “La famiglia. I understand this thing.”
