Chapter 2
Site Plan
Albert had answered eleven texts before he reached the corner of Judah, which was probably a personal record and definitely, some wiser and better-rested version of him would say, a problem.
hey stranger, the first one said.
random q, said the second, which meant it would not be random and it would not be a question so much as a favor with a question mark stapled to it, and Albert already knew he was going to say yes to whatever it was, and he already, faintly, hated that about himself, in the abstract, in the way you hate a knee that's been bad for years.
You didn't do anything about it. You just walked funny and called it your personality.
The rain came down harder off Ocean Beach, that fine sideways Sunset rain that wasn't really falling so much as loitering with intent, and Albert put his phone away and put his head down and ran the last half block to the one warm bright place at the foggy end of the world.
The bell went. The heat hit him like a held hand.
"Okay, don't laugh," he announced, dripping, pushing his glasses up into his soaked hair where they immediately stopped being useful in a new way. "It's genuinely biblical out there, I think I saw two of every kind of tech bro getting on a shuttle."
"I never laugh," Dave said, not looking up. "It's in my lease."
***
Here was the thing Albert had figured out about Dave Nowak, and he'd figured it out fast, because reading a room was the one skill Albert had that nobody had assigned him: the man was funny, and the man did not want credit for it.
He dropped these things flat and dry into the middle of the morning and then went back to his loaves like he hadn't, and if you laughed — and Albert always laughed — he didn't acknowledge it, but something at the corner of his mouth got a little more settled.
That was the whole reward. You had to want it to see it. Albert wanted it.
It was restful, was the thing. Everyone Albert knew performed — that was the water they all swam in, the firm, the family parties, the apps, the whole bright exhausting economy of being likable at people.
Dave didn't. Dave had apparently looked at the entire enterprise of being charming, run the numbers, and decided the overhead wasn't worth it, and the effect up close was of standing next to a man who'd switched all his lights off and was somehow, against physics, easier to see by.
He was maybe fifteen years older than Albert and about a thousand years calmer, and he wanted nothing from Albert at all — which Albert had no idea what to do with, a person who didn't want anything from him except that he keep turning up at 6:15 to find out.
He wanted a lot of things at 6:15 a.m. that he was not going to examine.
"You're soaked," Dave said. "Sit by the vent."
"I'm fine, I'll drip on your — is that new tile?
That's not new tile, you'd never." Albert peeled off his coat and hung it on the hook that was technically for staff and that Dave had never once told him wasn't for him.
He clocked the shop the way he clocked every space, without meaning to, the way other people clocked whether a room had exits: the low warm light, the gray tile going soft in it, the case half-full, the proofer humming its one note.
Good bones. Terrible signage. A room that had decided not to try, run by a man who tried harder than anyone Albert knew and would deny it under oath.
Mabel slid a coffee across before he asked. "You look like a wet cat."
"I love you, and that's fair." He wrapped both hands around it. "Okay. A croissant. Two of the country loaves — one's for my mom, she's coming to the office to bring me a rice cooker I don't need, long story, love her. Six of the morning buns —"
"Six." Dave finally looked up. Pale gray eyes, that flat unhurried attention that always made Albert feel like a spreadsheet being audited by someone who'd already found the error and was being polite about it. "Who's the six for."
"Denny, the intern, the two guys in structural, the front desk, and Corinne, who is my boss and who does not eat morning buns but who I am buttering up, pun regrettably intended, because —" He stopped.
Because he was doing the thing. He could feel himself doing the thing, the list, the everyone, the accounting of other people's mouths.
"That's five names and a boss," Dave said. "None of them are you."
"One of the country loaves is basically for me."
"It's for your mom. You said."
"I'll have some of it."
Dave didn't say anything. He just stood there with a morning bun in the tongs, held over the bag, waiting, and the not-saying-anything went on a beat too long, long enough that the shop noise came up around it — the rain, the proofer, the N rattling somewhere past — and then he said, in the exact same flat tone he'd used about his lease:
"What do you want?"
"I — a croissant, I said, and the —"
"No." Dave set the tongs down. Not sharp. Just done with the bit. "For you. One thing. What do you want."
And the weirdest thing happened, which was that Albert's brain, which had produced eleven text replies before Judah and a client-ready deck before dawn and a running total of everyone in a two-mile radius's blood sugar, just — stopped.
Went white and quiet, like a screen between slides.
Because nobody asked him that. His mom asked if he'd eaten, which was different, that was a task.
Marcus asked for things, which was the opposite.
His whole life ran on the current of what other people wanted and needed and were owed, and it ran well, he was good at it, it was the thing that made him lovable, and here was this grumpy man in a flour-dusted apron holding the current still with one hand and asking him to look at what was underneath, and there was nothing underneath, or there was too much, and Albert genuinely did not have the answer.
"Nobody's ever asked me that," he said. Which was not the answer. It was the truer thing that fell out where the answer should've been.
Something moved across Dave's face and then didn't. He picked the tongs back up. "One's on the house, then," he said. "Whatever you actually want. Point."
Albert pointed at the one in the back, the ugly one, over-proofed at the edge, that no customer would pick and Dave would've thrown out at noon. "That one."
"Course you did." Dave bagged it separately, and Albert was almost sure — almost — that the corner of his mouth did the settled thing.
"He never does that," Mabel said conversationally, to the register, to no one, ringing up the rest. "Free anything. Two years I've worked here. You should frame it."
"Mabel."
"I'm just noting it's historic. I'm a witness." She winked at Albert, who felt, absurdly, like he'd won a small prize in a contest he hadn't entered and wasn't sure he was allowed to keep.
He should've left. It was 6:31, he had a deck at ten, his mom was driving from Daly City with a rice cooker, the day was a machine and he was late feeding it.
Instead he sat on the stool that had become his stool and pulled a napkin out of the dispenser and started drawing, because his hands did that when the rest of him was overloaded, they always had, ever since he was a kid at the table full of aunties and had learned that a boy who was quietly drawing was a boy nobody had to worry about.
He got three lines in before he saw what he was drawing. Dave's hands. Again. The wide flat backs of them, the thick wrists, that little burn scar at the base of the thumb, working a boule in and around with a pressure Albert could feel in his own palms.
Oh no.
He'd done this before. He'd done this a lot. And he did not, in a sudden cold plunge of memory, ever remember taking the napkins with him.
Albert folded this one in half, then in quarters, and shoved it deep in his coat pocket like it was evidence, which it was.
Across the shop Dave was sliding a tray into the oven, apron strings crossed at the small of his back, sleeves shoved up over those forearms, entirely unaware, and Albert stood up too fast and knocked the stool and said, "I gotta go, I'm so late, thank you, Mabel you're a queen, Dave the — everything, the everything's great," and fled into the rain with twelve dollars of pastry that wasn't for him and one ugly bun that was.
***
The N was packed and steaming, everyone's wet coats making the car smell like a dog that had given up.
Albert stood in the crush and ate the ugly bun out of its separate bag, and it was — of course it was — the best thing in the box, the over-proofed edge gone chewy and caramel-dark, and he understood suddenly and completely why Dave would rather bin it than sell it.
It wasn't up to standard. It was just better. Those were different problems.
What do you want. The question kept bobbing up the whole ride downtown, surfacing between the group chat and Marcus's portfolio and the ten o'clock deck, refusing to sink.
He put his hand in his coat pocket and felt the folded napkin there, damp at the crease, and left it where it was, and got off two stops early so he could walk the last part in the rain and not have to be bright at anyone for six more minutes.
The office was on the fourth floor of a glass box in SOMA, and the whole east wall was window, and on a clear day you could watch the Bay do impossible silver things with the light, and on a day like today you watched the rain sheet down the glass and blur the city into a watercolor somebody hadn't let dry.
Albert loved the light in that office. He'd said so, once, out loud, and a senior partner had looked at him like he'd complimented the drywall.