This time, she laughs with her whole face, some light in her eyes, finally. For a moment, she hardly looks tired at all.

‘It’s the name of the Polish national anthem,’ she says. ‘“Poland is Not Yet Lost”. Some guy wrote it at a time when Poland kind of was lost. When it was divided up. It’s a mazurka. The only mazurka anthem.’ She prods me in the chest with her finger. ‘I have all the anthem facts.’

I catch her hand, and hold it there on my chest for a second.

The oven pings. It’s reached pizza temperature.

‘Me first,’ Cedar says, though there’s room for all three, and I haven’t started making mine yet.

There’s a rush of heat when I open the door. ‘Okay, careful,’ I tell him. ‘You can slide it in, bottom shelf, just be really careful not to touch the metal.’

He advances the edge of his tray onto the rack and scrapes it slowly forward, releasing it and jumping back with an inch or two still to go.

‘Good.’ I nudge it the rest of the way. ‘Good and careful.’

With the door shut, Cedar stands close and watches through the glass, as if pizzas happen instantly. After a few seconds of nothing, he goes to the fridge.

Back on the production line, Lacy has smeared her pizza base with tomato sauce and is conceding to one or two ingredients beyond her Polish flag. I would ask her an anthem question right now, if I had one, if anthem questions were a thing.

I have wine open and breathing, a Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon. The label reads ‘Bure Family Majesty’, with an embossed crest featuring a crowned double-headed eagle. Even the texture of the paper lets me know the wine’s not cheap. Wade was given it by a client but wine has never been his drink.

‘I hear it’s a good one,’ he told me as he spun it around in his hand to study the label one last time before handing it over. ‘You could look it up on the computer to check, but it should be okay.’

I googled it later that day. It’s the 2012, currently selling for around eighty bucks a bottle if you can find it at all. I suspect I’d discover that info in Wade’s browser history too. While the beverage itself might remain a mystery to him, he understands the gift of wine as a gesture, and the regift of it. He grew up in hard times, when there was no wine, coming or going. He likes nothing more than to enter a room bearing gifts.

As Lacy finishes making her pizza, I start to pour a glass. I’ve put two on the counter.

‘Maybe later,’ she says, holding her hand up flat to signal stop.

Her move makes me jerk the bottle, and I almost spill some wine. It’s the first glass. It can be mine. There is no need to stop pouring.