Chapter 25
EDEN
The twenty-quart mixer walks left under a stiff rye, so at five past six I folded a delivery slip into quarters and shimmed the front foot with it the way I had been shimming it since the last week of July.
The bottom shelf of the proofing cabinet runs four degrees warm.
The back door swells in wet weather and wants a hip, not a hand.
The bins are original, unlined, and the scoop in the bread flour has a crack that will open one day in the middle of a scale-up.
I had been in Brenda’s kitchen from six to eleven for three months by then, and by October I knew that building better than the house with my name on the deed.
I paid her in bread, which was her price.
The standing order had survived my marriage.
Every third Monday since July, Brenda took two hundred rolls and forty loaves at a price we had agreed on the phone while I was still on prednisone and could not manage two sentences without stopping.
In September her morning baker moved to Terre Haute for a man Brenda described in four words, and I covered eleven shifts.
In the first week of October she put me on payroll — a rate, a schedule, withholding, and my name in a system that had nothing to do with the Iron Brotherhood MC.
On the last Thursday in October she waited until the counter girl had gone, locked the front, and set a folder on the desk among the calendars and order slips.
“I want to sell you the business,” she said. “Not the building. The building is my retirement and I’m keeping it.”
I did not open the folder. “Say the rest of it.”
“Ovens, mixers, cases, walk-in, recipes, the name, vendor accounts, open orders, the staff, and a lease from me on the storefront. I had the accountant price it without the building. You’ll hate two of his assumptions and accuse him of inventing a third.”
“Does he know the small mixer leaks oil?”
“That’s one of the assumptions.”
The framed photograph behind her showed the storefront before the awning faded.
I opened the folder. One hundred ten thousand for the operating business.
Thirty-five down. Seventy-five carried by Brenda over seven years at the rate on the second page.
Due diligence before any binding contract.
Three months of her, after closing, if I wanted her.
“Wanting me doesn’t make the numbers work,” I said.
“That’s why the folder has numbers in it and not a ribbon.
” She pushed a pen toward me and took it back before it crossed onto my side of the desk.
“I could list with a broker in January and get somebody who strips the name and runs frozen dough through my ovens. I’d rather not. I don’t need an answer this week.”
Before July, thirty-five thousand dollars would have come out of money I believed belonged to both of us, discussed at my own kitchen table with Ryder turning the page around so I could read it.
Now I had forty-seven thousand back from the joint account and about thirty-two thousand from my aunt, in a separate account with her handwriting still on the envelope.
Beth put that money in my hand across her own table in March and said she would rather watch me spend it than have it read out to me after she was dead.
She is seventy-nine and drives too fast on 41.
I could make the down payment and keep a reserve, and every dollar would be mine, and I still caught myself thinking about the used oven Ryder and I had planned to go look at in July.
I took the folder to Mia. She brought in a business attorney and an accountant with no connection to Ryder, Bear, the club, or Brenda, and the three of them turned a price into a list of things to verify.
The down payment would come from accounts in my name alone.
The seller note would touch nothing of my house.
The lease needed renewal options long enough to survive Brenda selling the storefront.
Mia wrote the prohibition on Ryder into the first page before I said a word: no guarantee, no loan, no investment, no insurance, no interest acquired through marriage, now or later.
“Indiana can complicate appreciation and income even where the original funds stay separate,” the business attorney said. “An LLC owned solely by you, documented contributions, and a postnuptial agreement or a marital settlement later.”
Reconcile was the word he did not use and had clearly rehearsed not using. “Draft it as if I divorce him tomorrow.”
“That gives you the strongest position,” Mia said, and wrote it down.
Mia had one more item at the bottom of her list, in the flat voice she keeps for closed matters.
Jess’s protection payment had been released from trust in September.
She had moved out of state under the arrangement her own lawyer negotiated, and nothing in the file needed my signature.
I asked no questions. I did not want her address or her new name or a photograph.
I drove home noticing that I had gone weeks at a stretch without thinking of her, that she had been twenty-two on my porch with her hands full of a lie my husband bought, and that I could put her out of my mind the way I put out a burnt tray.
I have not worked out what to do with that. I only know it is mine and not Ryder’s.
Leah, June, and Tessa came the following evening. I gave them the plain summary first so nobody mistook the folder for a celebration. Leah took staffing and inspections. June took the seller financing. Tessa went straight to the equipment list and stopped where I knew she would.
“You fought Gladys for eleven years and then went looking for a commercial machine with the same personality,” she said, holding the page away from her body. “You like difficult things. You always have.”
The room stopped. Tessa looked back at me and did not take it back.
“Say the next part,” I said.
“No, because you already said it to yourself in the truck.” She set the page down flat. “I’m not apologizing for a joke about a mixer.”
I wanted the retraction. I had my hand out for it. What I got was Tessa drinking her coffee and Leah turning a page, and the anger stayed in my chest all evening with nowhere to put it, because she was right, and being right is not the same as kind.
Leah waited until the tea was poured. “This is the only thing in here that can reach your body.” She had the ventilation report open.
“Open bins, no dust collection at the mixer bay, and whatever 1974 thought was enough make-up air at the ovens. If the county looks hard at that room, does it pass, and if it doesn’t, can you pay for what it takes to make it pass? ”
“I don’t know.”
“Then that’s the question, not the insurance.”
“I’ve booked an independent hygiene assessment for the first week of December.
Dust load, air changes, the intake, the bins, and a scope of work with a number on it.
” I wrote the date on the folder cover where they could all see it.
“Results by the fifteenth, before any of this turns binding. If remediation comes in over eight thousand, I don’t buy it. ”
June had been entering wages and rent into a spreadsheet the whole time. “The numbers might work,” she said. “The route doesn’t.”
The dry-goods supplier had sent notice that the county bridge would close for repairs from November through March.
The published detour ran under a railroad bridge too low for their truck.
The alternative crossed an old culvert with a posted weight limit.
They had offered smaller, more frequent deliveries at a higher rate, enough to eat the first-year reserve, and the only other supplier who could carry the volume wanted a contract I would not sign before I owned anything.
“Jax can look at it under the club’s public-route policy,” Leah said. “He’d have to disclose any club interest.”
Jax could. So could a transport consultant out of Terre Haute, for a fee and a week.
Ryder has had every county road, seasonal closure, low bridge and turnaround inside forty miles in his head since before Bear gave him a patch, and asking him would take one morning and cost nothing.
I hated that usefulness remained after love became dangerous.
“I’m asking Ryder for one route review,” I said. “No calls, no vendor contact, no visit to Brenda, no escort, no change to the delivery. He gives me information and I decide what happens to it.”
Tessa looked toward the window that faces the bunkhouse. “You don’t have to use him just because he’s good at it.”
“He took away my right to choose him. Refusing everything he can do forever would let that keep working from the other end.”
“Put the limits in writing,” June said.
I wrote them myself and carried the page to the clubhouse the next morning.
Ryder was cleaning repair tools under Colin’s inventory, his cut with its bare patch space on the wall hook where anybody entering had to walk past it.
He put the wrench back in its drawer and stayed on his side of the room.
“A supplier truck needs legal access to the Copper Kettle during the bridge closure,” I said.
“The detour doesn’t fit the truck. The culvert can’t take the weight.
I want three options on public roads inside posted limits.
You don’t contact Brenda, the supplier, the county, the railroad, Bear, Jax, or anyone else.
You don’t go to the bakery. You don’t assign an escort.
You don’t look at my schedule. Options to me by tomorrow afternoon, and you keep no copy. ”
“May I read the notice?”
I set it on the workbench rather than putting it in his hand. He read the closure dates and the delivery address twice.
“The truck dimensions aren’t here.”
“You may write me the questions. You don’t ask them.”
“Do you want the route to avoid club territory?”
The question annoyed me because I had not thought of it and because it mattered. “Yes. Nothing that makes a delivery depend on this club opening a gate.”