The Godfather's Heartbroken Lover novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Five A.M.

At five the back door opened, and the cold blue morning came in with him.

He had a sack of flour on his shoulder.

"Your delivery was on the step," he said. "The driver left it in a puddle."

"Put it by the oven."

He put it by the oven.

He took off his jacket and hung it on my coat hook, on the same hook, and rolled up his sleeves.

The first trays were in.

The kitchen smelled of butter and yeast and burnt sugar from the honey I was cooking down for the almond crust.

Outside on Court Street it was still dark, and the streetlights were still on.

He stood across the steel bench from me.

He didn't come around it.

"Can I help?" he asked.

"You can stir the honey. Don't let it catch."

He took the wooden spoon from me and stirred, frowning at the pot.

I watched him.

Five years ago this man had a driver and a house on Shore Road and eighty people who stood when he stood.

Now he had a bruise on his arm and a room over a hardware store in Red Hook.

And he was stirring my mother's honey in my bakery at five in the morning.

"It's catching," I said.

"It's not."

"It's catching on the left side."

He swore and stirred faster.

I laughed at him.

He looked up at me laughing, and he stopped stirring.

"Klara."

"Stir."

"I'm going to stir in a minute."

He moved the pot off the flame.

"I have to do this now or I'll lose my nerve. You're the only thing I've ever been scared of."

My heart started going hard.

I put down my knife.

He came around the bench.

He stood in front of me in the light from the open oven door, and he took a small box out of his trouser pocket.

It wasn't velvet.

It was a little cardboard box from a jeweler on Atlantic Avenue.

He opened it.

Inside was a plain gold band.

No stone. No ruby. Nothing old, nothing anybody's grandmother had worn.

"I paid for it myself," he said. "Thirty-one pianos. And one very bad harp."

I couldn't speak.

"I'm not going to kneel," he said. "Everybody kneels. I knelt on a rug with three kids on my back and it nearly killed me."

That made me laugh, and the laugh came out wet.

"I'm going to ask you standing up, in your kitchen, where you're happiest," he said. "And you're going to decide."

He swallowed.

"Whatever you say, I'll still carry your flour."

He held the box out between us.

His hand was shaking.

His ears were red to the tips.

"Will you marry me, Klara?"

The honey ticked in the pot as it cooled.

The first trays hissed in the oven.

Out on Court Street a garbage truck went by and someone shouted at it in Italian.

I looked at the plain ring.

I looked at him.

Five years of waiting for a ring in a drawer.

Three months in Berlin learning I could live without one.

And now this one, in a cardboard box, from a man who had asked.

"Yes," I said.

He didn't move.

"Yes," I said again, louder, because his face hadn't caught up. "Yes, Luca. I decided. Yes."

He took the ring out of the box with fingers that wouldn't work properly.

He dropped it on the floor.

We both went down on our knees after it at the same time and cracked our heads together.

"Ow."

"I said I wasn't going to kneel."

"You're kneeling."

"It's an accident."

He found it under the bench.

He put it on my finger right there on the floor of my bakery, both of us kneeling in flour.

It fit.

I looked at it on my hand.

Plain gold, a little dusty.

Mine.

"Nobody's ever asked me anything the way you just did," I said.

"I'll ask you every day."

"Don't push it."

He laughed and pulled my face to his and kissed me.

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