Chapter 1 #2
Albert grinned. He did it with his whole face, the way a kid does before somebody teaches him not to, and it creased his eyes half shut, and Dave looked back down at the case and rearranged two rolls that did not need rearranging.
"A croissant," Albert said, "and a large, and —" He craned to see the bench behind the counter. "Are those the little ones? The morning buns? Okay, three of those."
"They're four dollars each."
"I'm aware of the pricing. I've been coming here for two months. I could recite the pricing."
"You're buying twelve dollars of morning bun."
"They're not all for me." Albert said it fast, the way he said everything, but there was a flick of something under it, a hand batting a moth.
"Two are for the guys at the office. One's for the woman at the parking garage who's been really nice about my key card situation, which is a whole thing, don't ask.
And one's for me, which is — okay, that's four, math, I can't do math before coffee either, we have that in common. "
"We don't have anything in common." Dave bagged the buns. "You're buying breakfast for a parking attendant."
"She has a hard job and a great attitude and I don't understand how those two things coexist in one person, so I'm investigating it with pastry.
" Albert set his card on the counter and then, because Mabel was ringing him up, turned the full wattage on her instead.
"Mabel. That scarf. Is that new? That's a good color on you, that's like a — that's a fog color but the nice version of the fog. "
"It's old," Mabel said, visibly pleased, disloyal as a cat. "My daughter knit it."
"She should sell those. I'd buy four."
"You'd buy four of anything," Dave said.
"That's not —" Albert stopped. Considered it. "That might be true, actually. Huh."
"Long day already?" Dave asked, which was more than he usually offered, and regretted before it was all the way out.
"Every day's long. That's the job." Albert waved it off, but the tiredness was right there under the bright, in the smudges below his glasses, in the fact that he'd said since yesterday about a croissant like the croissant was the restful part of his week.
"We've got a big one coming in. Career big.
Everyone's very excited." He said excited the way you'd say contagious. "It's good. It's a good problem."
"You don't sound like it's a good problem."
"No, it's — it's great." The wattage came back up, the seams pulled tight over it. "Sorry. Pre-coffee Albert has opinions. Ignore him."
Dave slid the coffee across. The lid, the cardboard sleeve, the little wooden stirrer the guy never used because he drank it black, which Dave knew because he'd watched, which was its own separate problem Dave was choosing not to open before seven either.
Here was the thing about Albert, the thing Dave had worked out somewhere around week three and had been carefully not looking at directly since: the wattage was real, but it was also a job.
You could see him do it — walk in cold and gray and rain-flecked and then decide, in the doorway, to be the brightest thing in the room.
He knew everyone's name. He asked the parking attendant about her weekend.
He remembered that Mabel's daughter knit.
It was the most generous performance Dave had ever watched, and it was a performance, and the fact that Dave could see the seams in it did not make it any easier to look away from.
He had spent two decades in rooms full of people performing.
He'd gotten very good at spotting the tell.
Albert's tell was that he never once, in two months, bought only for himself.
"You're staring," Albert said, not unkindly, wrapping both hands around the cup. "Is there flour on me. There's flour on me."
"There's flour on everything. It's a bakery."
"That's very zen. Okay." Albert didn't leave.
He never quite left when he was supposed to.
He drifted to the end of the counter, to the stool by the window that had somehow, over eight weeks, become his stool, and set the cup down and pulled a fresh napkin from the dispenser and dug a mechanical pencil out of the tote.
This was also the routine. He'd sit for eleven, twelve minutes, and draw on the napkin, and drink half the coffee, and then look at his watch and swear cheerfully and gather himself up and go be an architect somewhere Dave couldn't picture.
Dave should have gone back to the ovens. There were loaves. There were always loaves.
"Can I ask you something," Albert said, to the napkin, not to Dave, which was new. "The jar. The gray crock, back on the shelf, with the — it's got a lid that doesn't match. You feed it. I've watched you feed it. What is that?"
"Starter."
"I know it's starter. I mean —" The pencil moved. "How old is it."
"Going on two years."
"Two years." Albert looked up, and there was nothing performed in it now, just a plain, startled interest, like Dave had said something remarkable when he hadn't. "You've kept a thing alive for two years. On purpose. Every day."
"It's not a golden retriever. You feed it flour and water. It's the lowest-maintenance dependent on earth."
"Does it have a name?"
"It's a jar of bacteria."
"So no." Albert went back to the napkin, but he was smiling again, the private version this time, aimed down. "You should name it. Everything you keep alive that long, you name. That's just true. That's a rule."
"It's a jar."
"You're gonna name it. I can feel it." He drank his coffee.
The pencil kept going. Outside, the fog was starting to thin the way it did around seven, going from wall to gauze, and the gray light came up off the wet street and did something to the shop's ugly old tile that Dave had stopped seeing years ago — turned it soft, turned it almost worth looking at.
Albert had noticed the tile once, out loud, at length.
Dave had told him it was tile. Albert had said I know what tile is, Dave, in a tone Dave had thought about for the rest of the day.
He went back to the ovens because he had to, and pulled the next bake, and let the good roar of the heat and the crackle of cooling crust fill the space where the conversation had been.
When he looked up again the stool was empty and the bell was still swinging and the coffee cup was gone and Albert was a smear of dark coat crossing at the light, tote banging his hip, already on the phone, already bright for somebody else.
Twelve dollars of morning bun. One for himself. Dave shook his head and went to clear the stool.
The napkin was still there.
He almost balled it up with the rest — there was always paper, always crumbs, the guy left a small polite mess like a very considerate raccoon. But the pencil marks caught the gray light and Dave stopped with it half crushed in his hand and flattened it back out against the counter.
Hands. Albert had drawn hands. Two of them, cupped, mid-motion, the fingers loose and the wrists thick and one thumb pressed into the heel of the other palm the exact way you did it when you were rounding a boule and settling the seam.
There was flour indicated with the side of the pencil, and a burn scar, short, at the base of one thumb, in the exact place Dave had one, from a sheet pan in his second month when he still hadn't learned to respect the oven.
They were his hands. The man had been sitting there for two months drawing his hands.
Dave stood in his empty shop with the fog going gold in the windows and the letter face-down on the back bench and the starter rising in its jar that did not have a name, and held a napkin very carefully by its two dry corners, like it might prove to be load-bearing.
He should throw it away. It was a napkin.
Men who drew your hands for two months and never mentioned it were a category of complication he had moved to the literal edge of the continent to avoid, and there was a letter face-down on the back bench that spelled out, in a friendly focus-grouped font, exactly what this whole fragile arrangement was worth to the people who actually decided these things. Which was: a fern.
Subtle, he thought, and did not throw it away.