Chapter 4
Load-Bearing
Albert had talked himself out of coming back three times between the office and the N, and then come back anyway, which was more or less his entire personality rendered in miniature.
The CLOSED-that-didn't-say-closed card was turned in the window, and the case lights were off, and through the fogged glass the shop had gone amber and quiet, the day's work done, just the one lamp burning over the back bench and Dave moving around under it, unhurried, wiping down.
Albert stood on the wet sidewalk in the last of the light with his tote strap cutting into his shoulder and thought about how easy it would be to keep walking.
Dave would never mention it. That was the thing about Dave — he offered you a door and then genuinely did not care whether you walked through it, which somehow made you want to walk through it more than any amount of pulling ever had.
He knocked.
Dave crossed and threw the bolt and stood in the gap, dishtowel over one shoulder, and looked at him the way he looked at everything, without hurry. "You came back."
"You said come back at close. I'm a rule follower. It's a whole — it's a documented thing about me."
"It's a documented thing." Dave stepped aside to let him in, and the heat closed over Albert again, and under it now, at the end of the day, the deeper smell, the toasted dark note of the rye still hanging in the air like the day had a bassline. "Sit. I'll get it."
Albert sat. Not on his morning stool — on the other one, the one nearer the back, which felt like a small trespass and also like being let further in.
Dave went to the rack and came back with the heel of the darkest loaf, wrapped in paper, and set it down in front of him, and Albert unwrapped it and looked at it, this dense serious ugly-beautiful thing that a man had made in the middle of the night for a dead father and then set aside a piece of for him.
"You didn't have to save me this," Albert said, and heard his own voice come out smaller than he meant it to.
"I know." Dave leaned back against the bench, arms crossed, that economy he had, no motion spent that didn't need spending. "Eat it or don't. It's just bread."
It was not just bread and they both knew it, and neither of them said so, and Albert ate the heel standing at the edge of Dave's whole guarded life with butter Dave slid him without being asked, and it was — okay, it was the best bread Albert had ever had in his mouth, dense and sour and caraway-dark, and he made a sound he was not proud of, and Dave's mouth did the settled thing at the corner.
"How are you doing?" Albert asked, around the bread, and then, because that was too big and Dave would bolt from it: "With the — it's a hard day. I could tell, this morning. You don't have to say anything. I just noticed. That's all."
Dave was quiet a moment. Outside, the fog had come all the way back in and laid its hand over the streetlight. "It's a hard day," he agreed, which from Dave was practically a monologue. "Better than most years, though. I don't usually have company for the rye."
"You have company for the rye now. Standing invitation. I'll eat all your unsellable grief bread — that's the kind of guy I am. Real giver."
Something eased a fraction in Dave's shoulders, the set of a man putting a small weight down somewhere he could pick it up later. "Grief bread," he said. "Christ."
"Too far?"
"No." The corner of his mouth. "Accurate."
***
Dave went back to closing down, and let Albert stay, which was its own kind of statement, because Dave did not let people stay.
Albert watched him move through the end-of-day ritual — the scale wiped and squared to the edge of the bench, the bannetons stacked, the flour swept and gathered, everything reset to a state of readiness for a four a.m. that was only nine hours off.
Albert had designed enough kitchens to know a well-run one when he saw it, and this was a machine run by exactly one man who trusted no one alive to run it, and watching it made his chest do something he elected not to examine on an empty stomach.
"Can I do anything?"
"No."
"I could stack the—"
"No." Not unkind. "Sit. You're a customer."
"I'm behind the counter. Again. That's twice now.
At this rate I'm staff by Thursday." But he wandered, because he couldn't not, over to the shelf where the gray crock sat under its mismatched lid, and peered in at the starter, alive and breathing its faint apple-sour breath in the dark. "You still haven't named him."
"It's a jar."
"He's thriving, he's nameless, and honestly it's a little sad." Albert tapped the lid, gently, like knocking on a door. "Hi. Sorry about your dad. He'll come around on the name thing, give him time."
"Don't apologize to the bacteria."
"Too late. We're bonded now. You saw."
"So what's in the tube."
Albert had set the tote down by the stool and a cardboard tube had slid half out of it, the kind you carried rolled drawings in, and Dave was looking at it the way he looked at things he'd already decided about.
"Work. Boring. The project I — work stuff." Albert nudged it back with his foot. "You don't want to see it. It's plan sheets. It's the least romantic thing a human can carry."
"Not that." Dave nodded at the tote itself, at the softcover sketchbook wedged in beside the tube, its corners furred with handling, a rubber band around it holding loose pages in.
"That. You carry it everywhere. You've had it every morning for two months.
You draw in it after you draw on my napkins. "
Albert's face did something warm and undignified.
So Dave knew about the napkins. Of course Dave knew about the napkins.
Albert had spent two months leaving drawings of the man's hands on the man's own counter like some kind of Victorian creep and had told himself, with the specific genius of a person avoiding a feeling, that Dave probably just threw them out without looking.
Dave did not throw things out without looking.
Dave was the most looking person Albert had ever met.
"That's just—" Albert put his hand on the sketchbook and didn't pick it up. "That's not for showing. It's not real work. It's the stuff I do when I can't sleep, it's not — it's nothing."
"You do a lot of things when you can't sleep.
" Dave didn't reach for it. He never reached.
He just left the space open and stood in his own quiet and waited, and the waiting was the thing, the waiting was somehow more disarming than any question anyone had ever hammered at him, because it asked for nothing and left the whole decision with Albert.
"You don't have to. But I'd look at it. If you wanted to show somebody. "
If you wanted. There it was again, the impossible little phrase, the one nobody in Albert's life ever bothered with because they already knew what he'd say yes to.
He picked up the sketchbook. Peeled off the rubber band.
And before he could think better of it he opened it to the middle and turned it around on the bench so it faced Dave, and stepped back, and put his hands in his pockets, and tried to look like a person who did not have his whole unguarded chest sitting open on a bakery counter.
Dave looked.
It was the corners. That was what Albert called them, privately, the way you name the thing you love so nobody can take it seriously enough to hurt you about it.
Corners. Real San Francisco intersections — this one Judah and 45th, this one a lot in the Mission, this one a dead gas station out in the Excelsior — redrawn the way Albert wished somebody would build them.
Not glass. Not six stories of balconies stacked like a spreadsheet turned on its side.
Small. Human. Housing over shops, yes, because the city needed the housing and Albert wasn't a child about it — but housing that kept the shop.
That kept the bakery and the launderette and the corner store and put the apartments up and behind and around them instead of on their graves.
Sketch after sketch of a version of the future where the thing that was already there and already loved got to stay, and the new got woven into it instead of poured over it.
Dave turned a page. Turned another. He didn't say any of the things people said about drawings, this is great, you're so talented, wow. He read them the way he read a letter he already knew the shape of, slow, taking the actual information in.
He stopped on one. Held it a beat longer than the others.
It was Judah and 45th — this corner, their corner — the brick row drawn low and warm, three careful floors of housing folded in above and behind it, and the bakery still sitting on the ground floor where it had always sat, its ugly tile and bad signage lovingly rendered.
A version of this exact place that had grown without swallowing itself.
"That's here," Dave said.
"That's here." Albert had drawn it in the spring, weeks before Corinne ever said the word Sutro, on a night he couldn't sleep, because it was his favorite corner in the whole city and he'd wanted — uselessly, privately — to imagine it getting to keep being itself.
He hadn't let himself look at that drawing in a month.
"It's my favorite one. I did it a while back. Before—" He didn't finish it.
Dave looked at his own shop, drawn by a man who'd loved it enough to leave it standing, and didn't say anything, and turned the page.
"This is what you want to build," he said.