Casanova's Secret Wife

  “Signor?” she asked the young man again. Other customers were becoming impatient and beginning to push their way to the front of the line.

  “Is there any honey cake left?” he asked Margherita.

  “Mi dispiace,” she answered, shaking her head. “Wait!” She remembered, seeing the disappointment on his face. “There was one that got stuck in the pan—I left it by the oven—but I can sell it to you if you do not mind it will not be well-shaped.”

  He put his hand to his heart and bowed to accept her offer, and Margherita was surprised to see various colors—blue, red-brown, and green—embedded under his nails. His hands were rough, not what she expected from this slightly built, almost delicate-looking man. She guessed he was one of the painters working to decorate that awful Chigi house nearby—the banker was the richest man in Europe, it was said. Didn’t he have anything else to spend his money on, Margherita had wondered, than banquets and paintings?

  “Un’ attimo,” Margherita raised a finger to reassure her other customers, patted the money purse tied around her waist, and ran out to the courtyard to the nearby forno. Her father had left—he usually walked home earlier than she did, to begin cooking for them, some soup, maybe some pasta, nothing fancy. On the large pine table, Margherita spied the honey cake she had given up on a few hours earlier. She quickly cut off the worst of its broken edges to make an awkward triangle shape, and ran back through the courtyard to sell it to the painter. She’d decided she would ask half-price. Probably, it had not been worth angering her other customers to fetch it—sometimes, you make shortsighted decisions, she chided herself.

  Returning breathless in the doorway to the bakery, Margherita stopped suddenly. There was the painter—behind now, not in front of the counter, selling to her customers, reaching for the loaves of crusty bread, the last pieces of rosemary focaccia topped with fat green olives. His fingertips were oily from fragrant olive oil, and the pigments under his nails now shone vibrantly. He looked over and opened his palm to her with the coins inside, as if to say, Where do you want me to keep these for you? Margherita’s mouth hung open.

  “Signorina?” A customer near the doorway startled Margherita back into action, asking for a dozen pistachio biscotti. Side by side, for ten, fifteen minutes, Margherita and the painter sold the rest of the baked goods. Margherita looked over to him occasionally, smiling to tell him her gratitude, but he mostly avoided her gaze, as if entirely wrapped up in the fascinating business of selling to hungry, irritable people. Once or twice their arms touched as they reached for items, and they both laughed and blushed. Margherita noticed she didn’t feel compelled to pull her chemise to cover herself as she worked. Instead, she let herself simply be herself.

  Finally, the last customer was gone and the baked items all gone, too. Margherita’s father was a genius—a frugal genius—at calculating just how much to bake so nothing was ever wasted. And just how many people to hire—that is, none—to help his only daughter run the shop.

  “Grazie, Signor . . . ?” Margherita said to the stranger as she locked the front door and he handed her the money he had collected.

  “Rafaello.” He smiled, bowing slightly.

  “Margherita,” she introduced herself. She hoped this was not the last time she would see this dreamer-painter, whose eyes—deep, dark, and seeming to take everything in—met hers.