Page 7 of Savage Daddy
Whenthecustomersgo,the warmth goes with them. I’d never gotten used to that, and I’d stopped expecting to. A bakery at four in the afternoon, doors locked, ovens cooling, is a different animal from a bakery at noon.
I wiped the cases. Swept the gold haze of flour out from under the counters where it always drifted. Banked the ovens. Straightened the chairs the old woman never put back.
Then I got the books out.
I kept them in a tin that used to hold biscuits, which felt right. I spread them on the marble. The rent, which had gone up in the fall because the building had quietly changed hands, sold to one of those companies with the nothing names, and the new people wanted more for the same drafty rooms and the same cracked tile and the apartment upstairs nobody lived in. The flour supplier, who’d been patient but whose patience was coming to an end. The gas, which the ovens drank like they hated me. The loan—the loan I’d taken to take the lease over in the first place, when I was twenty-six and grieving and certain that love and four hours of sleep could outrun arithmetic. The loan was the one that kept me up. The loan didn’t care that I was tired.
I did the sums.
A few more months. Maybe. If nothing broke. If the gas held and the oven held and the supplier held and I held. If I gave away a little less across the counter, which I wouldn’t.
I put my elbows on the marble and my face in my floury hands and I let it come up, just for a minute. Just the once. I had a rule about it. One minute, alone, doors locked, and then it went back in the tin with the rest.
He’d wanted this so badly. He used to talk about it when I was small, after my mother died and it was just the two of us, him at the foot of my bed too tired to stand, telling me about the shop we’d have one day. The bread we’d make. The neighborhood that would come. He made it sound like a country we’d emigrate to. And he never got there. He got the diagnosis instead, and then he got the year of it, and then he got the box and the church with the candles, and the only way I had to take him there, to that country he’d described in the dark, was to go myself and stand in the window with his apron on and his word on the glass and pretend, every single day, that we’d made it.
If I folded, I wasn’t just losing a business. I was telling him no. After he was dead. I was standing at the foot of his bed and saying the country isn’t real, Baba, I couldn’t get us there, the math beat us.
I couldn’t do that.
“Ela,” I said to the photograph, to him, in the language that only ever came up when I was too tired to keep it down. Come on. “Ela, tha to vroume.” We’ll find it. We’ll figure it out. It was what he used to say to me, over a wrong loaf, over a bad week, over my mother’s empty chair. We’ll find it. I didn’t believe it. I said it anyway. That’s most of what faith is, I think—saying the thing you can’t believe to someone who can’t hear you, in a dark room, because the saying is the only part you can still do.
One minute. I gave it the minute. Then I wiped my face on the back of my wrist, and I gathered the bills off the marble and put them back in the tin, and I put the lid on, and I put the photograph back beside the coffee machine where he could watch the door. I would not call anyone. That was settled, thathad been settled a year ago, the day I signed the loan and the man across the desk asked who’d be co-signing and I said nobody and watched his face decide what kind of fool I was.
The grim truth, though was that there was no one to call.
I was reaching to turn off the last light when I heard it.
The handle of the front door. Turning. Slow. The bolt held but somebody on the other side of the dark glass had taken the handle in their hand and was trying it. Testing it. Not knocking. Not calling out. Just turning the handle, slow, the way you do when you’d rather it opened and didn’t want anyone to know you’d tried.
I wasn’t expecting anyone. Nobody comes to a bakery after dark. There was nothing left to sell.
I went very still.
I saw the shape of him through the glass. Big, soft in the middle in the way of a man who used to be hard, in a good coat. He stood under the dead streetlight with his hands in his pockets and his breath going up white, in no hurry at all, looking at me through the glass looking at him, and he smiled, and the smile was the worst part. The smile said he could stand there all night. The smile said the bolt was a courtesy I was extending to myself.
I could have left it bolted, but I’d learned the script the last two times, and the script was that the bolt didn’t decide anything. The bolt only decided whether we did this the slow way or the bad way. A man like that, you don’t make wait outside in the cold for a thing he’s already decided to come in and take. You learn that fast, alone.
I threw the bolt and opened the door six inches.
“We’re closed,” I said. “There’s no bread.”
“I didn’t come for bread.” He put his hand flat on the door and pushed it open the rest of the way, easy, the way you’d open your own front door, and walked in past me.
He took his time. He had nowhere to be. He strolled into my father’s shop like a man at an open house deciding whether the kitchen worked for him, and he looked at everything, slow, the cases, the chairs, the icon, and he let me watch him look.
“Smells good in here,” he said. “Always smells good.” He drifted toward the counter. “You bake all this yourself? All of it? Just you?”
“I have a staff of forty,” I said. “They’re in the back. Very large men.”
He smiled at that, then lifted the hinged section of the counter and came behind it, into the part that was mine, the part no one but me had stood in for a year.
He picked up a koulouraki off the rack I hadn’t cleared yet and ate it. Just ate it, looking at me, crumbs in the corner of his mouths. Then he reached up—slow, watching my face the whole time, because he knew, he knew exactly where it lived—and he took the photograph down from beside the coffee machine.
“This the old man?” He turned it in his fingers. “He’s got a nice face. Friendly. This his place?”
“Put it down.”
“I’m just looking.” He didn’t put it down. He held it a beat longer than he needed to, looking from the photo to me and back “Here’s where we are,” he said, and brushed the crumbs off his hands onto my clean floor. “This is the third time I’ve come down here being a gentleman about it. The people I work for, they own this block now. Most of it. The whole street’s come around—sensible people, they took the offer, they’re out, they’re happy. You’re the holdout.” He said it like it was a quaint thing, a charming flaw. “And a holdout’s a problem. You sell, you get a fair number and you walk away clean and you go open a nice little place somewhere it’s wanted. Or you don’t sell, and you stay, and there’s an arrangement. A weekly thing. For thetrouble of letting you stay where you’re not wanted. You follow me.”
