Dropping the rolling pin, she swept out into the front room. I didn’t follow her, but I pressed myself against the doorjamb of the kitchen, peeking out until my line of sight aligned with the front door and the tables outside. From there, I could see my mother advance on Dunja, and the tremble in Dunja’s fingers as she laid them over her lips.
In the next instant, Dunja sprang out of her chair and they practically lunged into each other’s arms. I clapped my hand over my own mouth; I had never seen Mama hug anyone so ferociously, her head tucked into the smaller woman’s shoulder, Dunja stroking my mother’s crown of braids and whispering into her ear.
Then my mother wrenched herself free and began shaking her head.
“You have to go back!” I pressed my cheek against the doorjamb, straining to hear my mother’s fierce whisper. “Please. I know I promised, and I know I did it wrong, and I’m so sorry for it all. But you promised, too. So keep your end, please.”
I couldn’t hear Dunja’s low reply, but I saw her shake her head and reach slowly into the pocket of her silken white harem pants, cuffed at the ankle, and withdraw something that glinted in her grip. She offered it to my mother, who shook her head again, tucking both hands behind her back like a child about to have her palms striped with a cane.
Dunja tilted her head to the side, beseeching, hand still extended. Finally, Mama took a single, furious step forward and snatched whatever it was off Dunja’s palm, dropping it into her dress pocket. Then she spread her empty hands—are you happy now?—and whirled on her heel to march back toward the café. In between the bouts of rage and defiance strobing across her face, it was the well-deep sadness that threw me most.
Whatever had just passed between them, it had left my mother devastated.
FIVE
MAMA DIDN’T SPEAK MORE THAN TEN WORDS TO ME AFTER that. She’d disappeared deeply into herself, but it was a dangerous, time-bomb kind of stillness, like a very long lit fuse. I was full to bursting with curiosity, but it wasn’t like I could ask her what had happened between her and this odd and beautiful stranger she clearly knew.
By the time Malina arrived for her shift, Nev had mangled some half-assed excuse for leaving early, and I’d have happily molted out of my own skin just to get away from Mama. I could see Malina assess our moods in her instinctive manner, her eyes flicking back and forth between us. She began to sing quietly, as if she couldn’t help it, a skirling, eerie melody I recognized as a new variation on her theme for danger.
This one had the distinctive three-note refrain that tied it to our mother’s mood. I’d heard it hundreds of times before: when Mama smelled smoke on me as I sat down next to her for dinner; when she caught me stealing nips of the expensive brandy from her larder so Malina and I could have birthday shots when we turned sixteen; when I brought home one piebald kitten after another and begged her to let us keep it.
But this melody had a new overtone, a counterpoint that captured my own tangled reaction, my discomfort and curiosity and deep desire to get the hell out of the café. And something below it, too, a subterranean thrum like shifting tectonic plates, something ancient and feral clawing its way through widening cracks.
It sounded like our mother was trapped, somehow, and very, very much afraid.
Malina kept humming even as she plucked an apron off its rusty hook and tied it around her waist, over a floor-length skirt splashed with marigolds and peonies like a watercolor. The flowing, lacy white peasant top she wore over it bared her creamy shoulders, and a kitschy little vial hung around her neck, tiny bass and treble clefs floating in sparkling water. In my opinion, most of Lina’s outfits made her look like she spent her free time twirling in meadows and saluting the sunshine with her face, but then there were the shoes. While I wandered around in flats and flip-flops and generally didn’t dwell much on my feet, Lina gleefully lost her mind over anything strappy and high-heeled and sassy-bright.
“Stop it,” I hissed to her as she sidled up next to me and reached for a scrap of sweet dough in her usual scavenging way. I tried to eat as little as I possibly could at our mother’s café, but Lina’s fingers wandered freely into pie fillings and frosting, as if staging a silent protest against Mama meant nothing in the face of something sweet. “It’s just making things worse.”
“What things, Riss?” she whispered back. “It feels terrible in here. What’s been—”
“If you’re going to mumble like schoolchildren behind my back, at least call your sister by her proper name, Malina,” Mama snapped, slapping her spatula against a cutting board. We both flinched. “She’s not an animal, much as she does look like a cat in heat today.”
Ris meant “bobcat,” and out of all of Malina’s nicknames for me, Mama hated that one with an especially concentrated passion. Maybe it cut too close to home, reminded her of all the things that pissed her off about me. The feline temperament, the defiance, some sort of invisible dander that Mama was particularly allergic to.
Malina gave my outfit a once-over, eyebrow quirking and one shoulder rising as if to say, eh, she’s not wrong.
Traitor, I mouthed at her.
Slut, she mouthed back.
She already said that, I traced into the spill of flour in front of me, then smoothed it out again. Get new material.
Her eyes softening with sympathy, Malina dropped a little kiss on my shoulder before I twitched away from her. She frowned at me, hurt, but hers wasn’t the comfort I needed now.
“So, I’m leaving, since Lina’s here,” I announced.
“Go ahead.” Mama’s voice was so distant and dim she may as well have been miles away. Or at the bottom of a deep ditch, the hate side of my brain whispered.
I snagged my little backpack and zipped outside, taking a deep breath of sunlit stone as soon as I was out the door, the tension in my shoulders easing a notch. I hadn’t seen Luka since he’d come back from Belgrade last week to help at his father’s nargileh café for the summer, but he’d texted me earlier to let me know he’d be waiting at our spot for lunch. Seeing him was the only thing I could think of that might possibly salvage the day.