Gail

Gail walked past dumpsters of spoiled vegetables and goat meat. The alley, even with its trash and rats and stink, was familiar, comfortable. Gail had first come to Greektown with her grandfather when she was just a child. He’d taught her the names of the men in the offices above the restaurants, and he’d taught her that although she could use the front door of a restaurant in the suburbs, in Greektown, professionals came in from the alley, through the kitchen. To do otherwise would show incompetence, weakness.

Chicago’s Greektown was just a handful of restaurants clustered around the corner of Halsted and Adams. But the men who owned them—and they were all men—owned hundreds of other restaurants throughout the city. Thai and Italian and Indian and Mexican—all owned by the Greeks. When Gail’s grandfather decided to go after restaurants in a big way, he went to night school to learn to speak Greek. He called himself Georgios when he came to Greektown. He told those men that his mother was Greek—said her family hailed from Naxos—even though she was really Sicilian. Scores of Greeks showed up at his funeral. They all winked at Gail’s father in the receiving line. We knew he wasn’t one of us, they said. But he tried so hard that we had to give him the knives.

Gail pushed through the screen door into the kitchen of Hera’s Greek Restaurant. It was almost three—that magic hour of prep between a late lunch and an early dinner. The only patrons in the restaurant would be a small group of old Greek men sipping ouzo at the bar and repeating stories they had worn out long ago. There was no shouting in the kitchen, like during a lunch or dinner rush. But everyone was moving, and the knives spoke. A half-dozen men, dressed in white shirts and checkered pants, stood at cutting boards throughout the kitchen, chopping, slicing, mincing. The muted clatter of a well-run kitchen in the afternoon, the tap, tap, tap of six different knives, was one of Gail’s favorite sounds, second only to steel on stone.

The man nearest to her turned, although his knife kept chopping carrots. His hooded eyes peered from either side of a beak-like nose. Costas didn’t call himself a chef, but he ran this kitchen. “Gail,” he said in greeting. When he wasn’t yelling at people during the rush, he was stingy with words.

“Costas,” Gail said. “How are my knives?”

He shrugged. “They go dull.”

“Good. I’m counting on it,” Gail said. She started walking toward the stairs. “I’m here to see Stavros.” Her grandfather taught her to never ask to see the owner or the chef. That would earn her a spot at a table or at the bar, waiting until someone came to tell her that the boss just can’t make the time today.

Best to just walk in as if the boss had demanded your presence, he always said.

She threaded her way through the kitchen, saying hello to each man by name. She kept a notebook in her glovebox devoted to lists of the staff in the kitchens she visited most often. The narrow stairs creaked as she climbed them. When she reached the top, she knocked on the first door to the right and heard something like a grunt. She pushed the door open and found Stavros bent over his big oak desk.

The mounds of paper stacked across its surface made him look smaller than he really was. The crown of his head gleamed bald, but the gray tufts of hair everywhere else—his eyebrows, his forearms, his knuckles—made up the difference. Just like every other time she had visited Stavros, his fingers clattered the keys of the adding machine. His eyes scanned an invoice. His lips moved as his finger traced the column of numbers. Gail sat in the only chair and waited. Stavros looked old that first time that Gail visited with her grandfather, but he hadn’t seemed to age in the years since. The walls were lined with waist-high shelves, every shelf stacked with invoices. Stavros now owned seventeen restaurants across Chicago, but two decades later, his filing system hadn’t changed a bit.

He finally reached the bottom of the invoice and looked up. His eyebrows twitched, but the rest of his face registered nothing. “Ms. Tomassi,” he growled.

Long ago, Gail had stopped reminding him that her name was no longer Tomassi, because to Stavros, she would always be a Tomassi.

“You come here to raise my prices again?”

“Not this time, Stavros,” Gail said. “My grandfather told me to stick it to you at Christmas. Those were his dying words, in fact. He said you’re a soft touch around the holidays.”

He leaned back in his chair. “How’s your father?”

“Stubborn,” Gail said. “Just like all you old men. He’ll be calling you over the next few months, by the way. To check in. That’s why I stopped by. To tell you that.”

“What? I get the ugly Tomassi?”

“You won’t have to look at him. He’ll just call.”

Stavros nodded. “I see. You got better things to do than visit an old Greek?”

“Actually, I do,” Gail said, and she couldn’t help but smile just a little. “I’m becoming a mother.”

Stavros’s eyes darted to her stomach and then back up to her face. Gail let him squirm with confusion and discomfort for a moment before putting him out of his misery.

“We’re adopting,” she finally said. “The birth mother is due any day now.”

Stavros’s face settled back to its familiar mask. “This baby. It’s Italian?”

Gail felt a flash of heat and wanted to say something sharp about the fact that ethnicity didn’t matter, that they would forge a family from the baby they were given, that they would remain ever grateful for that gift. But Stavros was old, so she said it in a way that he might understand. “It will be,” she said. “Just like my grandfather was Greek.”

This finally pried a smile from Stavros. “I’m happy for you,” he said. “I was beginning to worry.”

Gail’s phone vibrated in her pocket, but she let it roll to voice mail. She knew that checking her phone would send Stavros back to his invoices and Gail back into the alley. Before that happened, she wanted to know what he knew. “How are your cousins?” she asked.

By this she meant the tight-knit community of Greeks who owned so many of Chicago’s restaurants. Some of them were cousins, most of them weren’t, but Stavros knew what she meant. He shrugged. “Some are good. Some, not so much. Diakos is buying those burrito places from his brother-in-law.” Diakos was Gail’s customer. His brother-in-law was not. Gail made a mental note to add Diakos to her call list. “And I hear that Karras has some new Italian friends.” Which meant that Karras was talking to another knife-grinding company for his two dozen restaurants. Another item for her list.

Gail’s pocket vibrated again, and all at once she realized who it might be. She yanked the phone from her pocket. Sure enough. Paige. Her hand shook as she answered. “This is Gail,” she managed.

“Carli’s going into labor.”

Gail squeezed the phone and peered over the old man’s shoulder at the sun filtering through the blinds. It was happening. After everything they had been through, it was finally happening. She felt weightless yet unable to move. Warmth flooded her stomach, and she couldn’t speak.

“Gail? You there?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I’m here. Mercy?”

“Yep. Go through the doors on the north side of the building. Maternity is right past orthopedics. I’ll see you there soon.”

Gail hung up the phone and stared at it. When Stavros spoke, he startled her.

“Was that what I think it was?”

Gail looked up at the old man, and his face had creased into the first full-on smile that she had ever seen from him. She stood and tried to steady herself. “It was,” she said, her voice crackling with everything. “Seems the bambino is coming today.”