“See, now that’s branding.”
By eight, the display case looks like a small war happened inside it. By eight fifteen, I have given away three coffees, two breakfast buns, and one entire box of day-old muffins to a woman who insists she will pay me Friday and almost certainly will not. I know what Darlene will say before she says it.
She waits until the woman leaves, then appears beside me with a tray of almond twists and the expression of a prophet watching a village build homes at the foot of an active volcano.
“You adopted another one,” she says.
“I did not adopt her. I fed her.”
“You feed strays, they come back.”
“Good.”
“You cannot keep the doors open on good.”
I close the register drawer harder than necessary. The numbers inside are not bad exactly, but they are not good enough either. They are never good enough. The bakery’s profit margin is a narrow little bridge over a very deep drop, and every free muffin is one more plank I kick loose with a smile on my face.
“I know,” I say quietly.
Darlene’s expression softens in the smallest possible way, which for her is basically a tearful embrace. “I’m not saying stop caring. I’m saying care with a calculator in your hand.”
“That sounds deeply unromantic.”
“Romance is how fools end up with empty bank accounts and stolen jewelry.”
The words land harder than she probably intends. My fingers tighten around the edge of the counter before I can stop them. Darlene notices because Darlene notices everything, including things I wish had the decency to stay buried.
“Sorry,” she says gruffly.
I shrug and reach for a rag. “Don’t be. It’s not like Garrett’s name summons lightning.”
“No, but if it did, I’d stand on the roof with a copper pole and a list of suggestions.”
That gets a laugh out of me before I can swallow it. It bursts out too bright and too sudden, and a couple near the windowglances over. I wipe an imaginary spot from the counter because sometimes busy hands save you from messy feelings.
Garrett has been gone eight months. That is plenty of time to stop feeling humiliated, I think. Plenty of time to stop replaying the way he smiled at me while already planning to rob me. Plenty of time to accept that the jewelry is gone, the idiot is gone, and my heart is not a community resource to be loaned out to charming men with good hair and bad souls.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were thinking loudly.”
“At seventy-one, thinking loudly is the only cardio I respect.”
I point at the kitchen. “Go make soup.”
“Go make better choices.”
“I own a bakery. That’s clearly off the table.”
The bell over the front door rings again, and the conversation dissolves into work. That is one thing I love about the bakery. It does not let me drown in myself for long. Someone always needs coffee, change, directions, a napkin, a smile, or a reminder that no, we do not accept counterfeit ration chits from the Centuries War no matter how vintage they look.
By late morning, the fog thins outside, revealing Halo in all its battered glory. Across the street, the old holo-billboard above the pawn shop glitches between an advertisement for luxury apartments downtown and a warning about illegal dumping. The pavement is patched in seventeen colors. Pipes run along exterior walls where proper infrastructure failed years ago and got replaced by whatever the city could install cheapest. In the distance, the industrial center rises behind the neighborhood’s ring of blocks, all smokestacks, loading cranes, and silver exhaust towers stabbing into the coastal clouds.
I still love it.
That is the thing people outside Halo do not understand. They look at the cracked windows and security shutters and think the place is already dead. They do not see Mrs. Nadir leaving soup outside a sick neighbor’s door. They do not see the kids who draw chalk flowers over plasma scorch marks after police tape comes down. They do not see dock crews pooling tips for funerals, shop owners watching one another’s doors, or Darlene slipping extra bread into bags while loudly calling everyone a freeloading pain in the ass.
