Slow Rise

The oven had died at four, and the wedding order died with it. By the time I was done with the phone, the trays were in the bin and I was shouting at a cold steel door.

“You had one job,” I told it. “You sit there and you stay hot. Fourteen years and you pick tonight.”

The bell over the street door went. I didn’t turn. The sign said closed. Whoever it was could read.

Footsteps came through the shop and stopped in the doorway of the back room. I knew them. Soft, even, the same time every evening for months.

“Loaf’s on the counter,” I said, still facing the oven. “End of the day. Same as always. If you want it whole, take it before I throw it at this thing.”

Imogen didn’t take it. She stood there with her coat still on, hands at her sides, and let me finish.

I finished. The last of it came out thinner than the rest. “Dead element. They cancelled. I told them I’d start again in the morning and they told me they’d found someone else. So that’s a night’s butter and a name I won’t get back.”

The racks ticked as they cooled. Flour hung in the light from the one bulb that still worked. I wiped my hands on my apron and got nowhere with it.

“Sit down, Bea.”

She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t come closer. She said it the way she said good evening, which was nearly the only thing she said.

I sat. A flour sack against the wall took me before I’d decided to move. The cloth gave under me. My knees went and stayed gone. For a second the room was only that: me on a sack, her in the doorway, both of us hearing what I’d just done.

She looked at me. Not a smile. Not pity. She looked as if she’d been waiting to see whether I would.

“Right,” she said. “Tea.”

She went past me into the little kitchen off the back, the one I used between bakes and never tidied. I heard the tap, the kettle, a cupboard. She didn’t ask where anything was. The tin came down. Two mugs. She found the good ones, not the cracked one I used when I was alone.

I stayed on the sack. My mouth was still open from the shouting, and I shut it.

She came back with both mugs and put one in my hands. The heat went through the flour on my fingers. She pulled a stool out from under the bench and sat on it, coat still buttoned, as if she had all night and none of it belonged to my ovens.

“Drink it,” she said.

I drank. It was strong, the way I made it for myself and never admitted I liked. She’d got the water right the first time.

She didn’t ask about the order. She didn’t offer to call anyone, or look at the element, or tell me the butter could be used tomorrow. She drank her own tea and watched the racks, and the quiet sat between us longer than I usually allowed anyone.

“When did you last let anyone do anything for you?” she said.

I laughed. It came out too quick. “This morning. The flour delivery. I let the man carry the sacks in. I’m forty-six, not a fool. I even said thank you. He looked frightened.”

She waited. She didn’t fill it. The kettle clicked as it cooled on the ring behind her. My joke ran out of road and sat there, stupid, between the two mugs.

“When,” she said again.

The sack shifted under me. I looked at the tea. If I kept looking at her I was going to do something I didn’t do with customers, and she wasn’t even really a customer. Four months of the end loaf. Ten words. Good evening. This one. Thank you. See you.

“I’m tired of being the one who knows,” I said.

It came out small. I hated how small it was. I hated that it was true. The wedding, the element, the fourteen years of deciding which tray went where and who got paid and when the door locked: all of it tried to climb back into the sentence, and I wouldn’t let it. That was the whole of it. I was tired of being the one who knew.

Imogen set her mug on the bench. She didn’t reach for me yet.

“I’ve come in at closing for four months,” she said. “I’ve watched you run this room down to the last crumb and still find a word for whoever needed one. I have an idea what you’d like, once the sign’s turned.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I know you shout at ovens and then you look sorry about it. I know you save the end of the loaf without writing it on a tab.” Her voice stayed low. “I bind books. I repair them. Things come apart. I hold them very still until they set. That’s the work. I’m not in a hurry with it.”

I looked at her hands around nothing, resting on her knees. Steady. No flour on them. I’d seen them on the counter when she paid, counting coins without fumbling, and I’d thought about them more than I’d said to anyone, including myself.

“I’m not a book,” I said.

“No.” She stood. The stool scraped once. “You’re Bea. And you sat when I told you to.”

She came and stood in front of the sack. I had to tip my head back. Up close she smelled of paper and the tea. The bulb put a line along her cheek. She was forty-one; I’d heard it once from the woman who rented her the shop, and I’d kept it without a reason I would admit. Tonight the reason was standing over me with her coat still on.

She took my hands. Flour came off on her palms. She didn’t wipe it. She turned my hands over, wrists up, and looked at them the way she must have looked at a spine that had split. I let her. My breath went uneven and I didn’t joke it away.

From her coat pocket she drew a length of cream ribbon, the kind she used on repaired covers. I’d seen the ends of it in her window. She looped it around my left wrist. Her fingers moved once, twice. A neat knot, flat, the sort that wouldn’t slip if I tugged and wouldn’t tighten if I didn’t. She laid the ends along the inside of my arm.

“Leave that on,” she said.

Then she kissed me.

It wasn’t a question. Her mouth met mine and stayed. One of her hands came up into my hair, flour and all, and held me there. I kissed her back. My free hand found her jaw, then her wrist, the bone of it under my thumb, and I held on as if the racks might tip. She didn’t rush it. She didn’t open it into anything else. She kissed me until I stopped trying to decide how it should go, and then she kissed me a moment longer so I’d feel that I’d stopped.

When she drew back, her hand was still in my hair. Mine was still on her wrist. Both of us were breathing like we’d carried something up the stairs.

“Eight o’clock,” she said. “Upstairs from my shop. You won’t have decided anything by then. You’ll leave that on.”

She took her coat from where it had brushed my apron, picked up the end loaf from the counter on her way through, and went. The bell sounded once. The street door shut.

I sat on the sack with the tea going cold in the other hand. The racks stood around me, empty, ticking down. I looked at the ribbon. Cream against flour, the knot sitting exact on the inside of my wrist, and I didn’t undo it.