She took her koulouraki and her seat by the window, the same seat, and held court over an empty room, and I let her.
After her it was the rush, such as it was these days. The man who drove the early bus, who took two loaves and a bag of the sesame rings and never said more than three words and tipped like he was ashamed of having money. The two nurses coming off nights, gray-faced, who I loaded down with whatever was warm because nobody should go home off a night shift to cold bread. A boy in a coat too thin for the weather who came in counting change out of his palm, coins, actual coins, going red as he did the math and came up short, and I rang him for a koulouraki and slid two loaves and the bag of yesterday’s bread across the counter before he could open his mouth.
“That’s—” he started.
“That’s the day-old,” I said. “I have to move it or the mice unionize. You’re doing me a favor.” I gave him the wrapped failed loaf too, the mastic one, the one that wasn’t my father’s. “And take that. Tell me if it’s any good. I’m experimenting and I trust nobody’s palate but a hungry man’s.”
He didn’t have words for it. They never do, the ones who need it most. He just nodded and ducked out fast.
That’s the part I was good at. The outward part. Warmth, I had to spare, as long as it was pointed at somebody else.
Mid-morning the grocer came in. The one from down the block, the one I’d watched all winter go a little flatter in the shoulders. We were the only two left awake on this street some mornings. There’s a thing between people in a slow disaster together, a kind of unspoken roll-call—you still here? still here. We did it with our eyes every day.
He bought bread he didn’t need. I knew his wife baked. He bought it to put money on my counter, and I took it, because I’d have done the same for him.
But today he set the bread down and didn’t go. He stood there turning his hat in his hands.
“Katerina,” he said. “My nephew. He’s good with the heavy work. The flour, the deliveries, the early load-in. He could come mornings. You wouldn’t pay him—I’d—”
“No,” I said. Warm. I made it warm. I made it the warmest no I had, because I loved this man and he was offering me his own short money out of a pocket that had less in it than mine. “No, but God love you. I’ve got it.”
“You’re doing the work of three people.”
“I’m a very efficient person.”
“You’re going to fall down one of these days and nobody’ll find you till the bread burns.”
“Then at least I’ll go out smelling good.” I put my hand over his on the counter, just for a second. “I’ve got it. I have. Tell your sister I said her son’s a good boy for offering, and then tell him to go find a job that pays, because I can’t, and that’s the truth of it, and we both know it.”
He looked at me a long moment. Then he picked up his bread he didn’t need and put his hat back on and went. I watched him go, and I’ll tell you it cost me. It always cost me, the no. It went down like a stone and sat there. Because he was right. I was doing the work of three people and I was losing anyway, and the kindest thing on the block had just offered me a hand and I’d held it warmly and pushed it away, the way I pushed all of them away, because the day I let somebody else carry the flour was the day it stopped being mine and his, mine and my father’s, and started being something we all did together, and then it wasn’t the dream anymore. It was just a job. I couldn’t. I’d rather fall down and burn the bread.
I was still chewing on that when the bell over the door went and the worst part of my day walked in.
I’ll be fair to him. He was beautiful. I’m not blind and I might not get much sleep, but I do get some. He was dark and broad and grinning, with a nose that had been broken at least twiceand a face that somehow made the broken nose an argument for breakingyournose, for breakingeverynose, and every single morning he came in here and bought enough bread to feed a christening and looked at me like I was the best thing he’d seen all week.
Trouble. Capital T, neon sign, do-not-touch trouble.
Behind him, at the end of a leash, came the dog. And the dog was magnificent. Some enormous gray wire-haired beast with a beard and eyebrows and the disposition of a depressed bishop, who came in, sighed at the whole enterprise of being a dog, and lay down across my doorway like he’d been hired to.
“He can’t be in here,” I said. “Health code.”
“He’s emotional support,” the man said. His accent did things to the vowels I refused to find charming. “For me. I am very fragile.”
“You look it.”
He grinned wider, like I’d handed him a present. That was the maddening thing. Everything I threw at him, he caught and grinned at, like the throwing was the point. “Six of the sesame,” he said, leaning on my counter with his forearms, settling in like a man at a bar, “and the braided one, and—what’s that, the one with the honey—two of those. And whatever he likes.” He nodded at the dog. “He has a sweet tooth. We’re very alike.”
“That’s eleven dollars of bread for two people, one of whom is a dog.”
“I’m a growing boy.”
He overpaid, the way he always overpaid, dropping a bill in the jar like he hadn’t noticed, which he had, which was the whole performance. “You can’t fix loneliness with bread, you know,” I said, before I could stop myself. “I’ve tried.”
Something went across his face—fast, there and gone, not the grin, something underneath the grin—and for half a second I thought I’d hit a real thing, and then it was gone and the shutterwas back up and he was all teeth again. “Sure you can,” he said. “You just need more bread.”
“Goodbye,” I said.
“Tomorrow,” he agreed, like it was a date, and gathered up his absurd dog and his absurd amount of bread and went.
