Slow Rise (City Hearts #3)

Chapter 1

Opening

The starter was the only thing in Dave's life that had never once let him down, which told you most of what you needed to know about the life.

He lifted the lid off the crock and checked it the way other men checked their phones — first thing, in the dark, before coffee, before he'd committed to the day being worth having.

Domed. Webbed all the way through with bubbles, smelling of green apple and something older underneath, like wet stone.

Alive and rising and utterly indifferent to him, which was, in Dave's professional opinion, the correct way for a thing to love you back.

"Morning," he told it, because there was no one else in the building to tell, and no one to hear a forty-five-year-old man say something that stupid to a jar.

Four-oh-two. The ovens were already ticking up to temperature, radiating a dry heat that fought the cold coming off the front windows in a losing war.

Outside, the fog sat on the Sunset the way it always did at this hour — not weather so much as a decision the neighborhood had made about itself.

He could smell the ocean two blocks west, salt and kelp and something mineral, and under that, closer, the sour breath of the shop.

Flour. Old wood. Yeast doing the one honest day's work being done for a mile in any direction.

He tipped the starter onto the scale, watched the numbers climb, and stopped his thumb at exactly the gram he wanted. Twenty years of watching numbers climb to a target and this was the only version that had ever calmed him down.

Don't, he told himself, and got on with the day.

By five he had the levain built and the first doughs autolysing under damp cloths, and the espresso machine bullied into producing something he could drink.

He took it standing at the bench, one hip against the steel, and did the math he did every morning whether he wanted to or not.

Flour order Thursday. Gas bill worse than last month because the fog meant longer proofs meant more oven time.

Forty-some loaves to sell before noon or they became croutons, and croutons were what you called it when you'd guessed wrong about how many people loved you that day.

The margins were the margins. He'd built a business you could run on your own two hands and a stubbornness bordering on a personality disorder, and most days it cleared just enough that he got to do it again tomorrow. Most days that was the whole deal, and the whole deal was fine.

The back door banged.

"It's freezing." Mabel came in backward, shouldering the door, a canvas bag of Lord-knew-what hanging off one arm and her reading glasses already swinging on their chain.

Sixty-three years in this district and she still announced the temperature every morning like the fog was a personal affront that had specifically wronged her.

"You'd think a man with two ovens going could throw some of that heat toward the front. "

"The front's for customers. You're staff."

"I'm the reason you have customers." She dumped the bag by the register and started pulling the chairs down off the two-tops, and Dave let her, because she'd fire him from his own bakery if he tried to help.

"There's mail. It was jammed in the slot.

Somebody's been feeding that poor slot for a week and you haven't looked once. "

He hadn't. Mail was a category of bad news that could wait, and most of it did.

He wiped his hands and took the stack she flapped at him — a linen delivery invoice, something from the city about a permit renewal, a flyer for a taquería opening on Noriega, and a heavier envelope with a return address that read like a law firm that had recently promoted itself to being a firm.

Sutro Capital Partners. Below it, in a font that had been focus-grouped to seem friendly: Community Information Session.

He read it standing up, the way you read the thing you already know the shape of.

The block — his block, the whole worn brick row of it — had been "identified for a proposed mixed-use development.

" There would be a "conversation." There would be "an opportunity for local stakeholders to learn more.

" The date was three weeks out. There was a rendering, small, in the corner: a glass thing, six stories, balconies stacked like a spreadsheet somebody had turned on its side.

Where the rendering said Proof used to be, there was a cheerful ground-floor retail box with a fern in the window.

A fern, Dave thought. They gave the fern a rendering.

"Well?" Mabel had stopped with a chair half-down. She missed nothing. It was the single most exhausting thing about her and the reason he'd kept her.

"Somebody wants to build condos." He set the letter on the back bench, face-down, the way you'd lay a card you weren't going to play. "There's a meeting. There's always a meeting."

"On our block?"

"On everybody's block. That's the business.

" He'd sat on the other side of enough of these tables in his old life to know exactly how little the meeting was for.

The meeting was a hallway you walked people down so that when the doors closed at the end, they felt they'd been consulted.

"Landlord probably got an offer he's already said yes to.

This is the part where they let us feel involved. "

Mabel looked at him a beat too long. He turned back to the doughs.

"You could fight it," she said.

"I could also try to teach the fog to pay rent." He divided the first batch, hands moving on their own, the scale barely a suggestion at this point. "It's a room in three weeks. I've got forty loaves in the next six hours. Guess which one keeps the lights on."

"You should still go," she said. "To the meeting. Sit up front. Ask a mean question. You used to be good at those."

"I'm retired from mean questions."

"You're not retired. You're hiding, at four in the morning, where nobody can find you to disappoint.

" She said it lightly, squaring a stack of parchment, not looking at him — which was how Mabel delivered the things she actually meant.

"Two years I've watched you. You know how many times you've left this block? "

"I leave the block."

"You go to the flour place and the fish place and back. That's a triangle. It's not a life."

"It's a very efficient triangle."

"Efficient," Mabel repeated, like it was a diagnosis. She wasn't wrong, and Dave declined to reward being right with a response.

She let it go, mostly, which for Mabel meant she went back to the chairs while making a small disapproving sound in the back of her throat every ninety seconds like a smoke detector with a low battery.

He didn't mind. The doughs came together under his palms, tacky then satiny, and the ovens hit temperature, and for a while there was nothing in his head but the work, which was the entire reason he'd bought a bankrupt bakery at the foggy end of the earth in the first place.

You could not think about your father while you were shaping a boule.

There wasn't room. That had turned out to be the most expensive thing money had ever bought him and the only one that had ever held its value.

At six he flipped the deadbolt and turned the little hand-lettered card in the window from the side that said nothing to the side that also said nothing, because he'd never gotten around to making one that said Open, and the regulars knew, and the regulars were the only ones who came this far out anyway.

The first loaves went into the case. The smell changed — from raw dough to crust, that toasted, nutty top note that got into your clothes and never fully left.

Mabel started the second pot. Somewhere down the line the N-Judah rattled awake and began hauling the first commuters toward a downtown Dave never intended to see again.

The early ones trickled in the way they did.

A runner in reflective gear who bought a single roll and ate it standing by the door like it was contraband.

A nurse coming off a night shift up the hill who never spoke, just pointed at the country loaf and paid in exact change and nodded once, like they'd concluded a difficult negotiation.

Dave liked the silent ones. They wanted bread, not a relationship. Bread he could do.

He did not watch the clock. He'd have said so, if you'd asked, and it would have been a lie, because his body had learned the hour the way it had learned the ovens — and somewhere under the flour and the arithmetic, a small traitor part of him had started keeping time by a door.

He knew it was six-fifteen without looking, because the bell over the door went, and his whole stupid morning tilted a degree toward the light.

***

"Okay, so." Albert came in the way he always came in — mid-thought, mid-sentence, like the conversation had started outside and Dave had simply failed to attend the first half.

"I need you to be honest with me, because I've been thinking about it since yesterday and it's actually keeping me up.

Is the sourdough one better than the country loaf, or is the sourdough one just harder to get, so my brain has decided it's better?

Because those are different problems and I need to know which problem I have. "

"They're the same loaf." Dave didn't look up from the case.

He didn't need to. He had the exact geometry of Albert Ocampo memorized against his will — five foot eight and change, compact, the good glasses fogged half over from the walk, a beanie shoved down over black hair that would spring back the second he pulled it off, a tote bag with the corners of rolled drawings poking out the top like he was smuggling asparagus.

"The sourdough's just the country loaf after two days. Same dough. Older."

"So it's better."

"It's more sour. Better is a value judgment and I don't make those before seven."