Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The tea was the part nobody believed.
“Tea,” Joey said, for the third time, standing over the pot with the card held at reading distance. “In the loaf.”
“In the loaf.”
“Not with the loaf.” He added a line to the Post-it column running down the shelf.
“Joey, it’s written down. It’s the second line.” Stella had the dates chopped and sitting in a bowl, and the bowl was waiting on the tea, and the tea was waiting on Joey to accept the premise. “You pour it over the dates and you leave it.”
“For how long?”
She checked the card, though she knew. “Till it’s cool.”
Joey wrote something on a Post-it. He had started a Post-it for each new instruction that did not contain a number, and the Post-its were accumulating in a column down the side of the shelf like a second recipe running alongside the first.
The kitchen at that hour was the best part of the day and Stella had stopped pretending otherwise.
The grill was cold. The dining room chairs were still up.
The light came in low and long across the floor and the room had that held-breath quality it got before anybody else arrived, and it belonged to her and Joey and the oven and nobody else.
She poured the tea over the dates. The smell came up—black tea and dried fruit, sweet and dark—and Joey leaned in over it and made a note about that too.
“That’s not what I expected,” he said.
“It’s good, though.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t good.” He capped the pen. “I said it wasn’t what I expected. Those are separate findings.”
Anna came in at her usual hour, hung her bag on the hook, looked at the bowl of dates steeping in tea on her prep counter, and said nothing at all about it on her way to the grill, which from Anna was permission.
Margo arrived mid-morning with her tote and paint on the side of one hand, and she started for her stool, and then she stopped at the counter instead, because the card was still propped against the sugar canister in its sleeve where Anna had wedged it.
She read it through the plastic without picking it up.
“Who’s Ruth?”
“The woman with the gray terrier,” Stella said. “She left it.”
“Left it?”
“Brought it in and put it on the counter and told us her name and went.”
Margo read the card again. Her reading glasses were up on her head and she did not put them down. She read it at arm’s length.
“Her grandmother’s,” Margo said.
“That’s what she said.”
“Walnuts optional.” Margo’s mouth moved at one corner. “But she’d judge you.”
She went to her stool. She did not say anything else about the card, and she did not say anything about the loaf that was by then in the oven and filling the whole room with a smell nobody in the building had ever smelled in that building before, and Stella got on with it, and that was Margo.
The loaf came out late in the morning and it was wrong.
Not ruined. Wrong. The top had cracked along its whole length and sunk on one side, and it looked like something that had been through bad weather.
“It’s supposed to do that,” Stella said, before Joey could get a word out.
“Is it?”
“It’s a date loaf, Joey. It’s not a cake. It’s supposed to look like this.” She was fairly sure. The card said nothing about the top and Fiona had never made one and Nana’s box did not have one, and the only authority in the building was a woman with a terrier who was not there.
Joey looked at the crack for a while.
“I’d like to log it as within tolerance,” he said, “pending an authority.”
They sliced it warm, against every instinct Stella had, because Anna said a date loaf was better warm and Anna had never made one either but said it with total confidence. It went in thick slices with butter, and Joey wrote the price up himself and did not consult anybody.
Mrs. Feldstein had a slice with her coffee at table two and had a second slice and asked no questions.
Before noon the loaf was gone and Stella had another one in and was chopping dates for a third with her hip against the counter and flour on both forearms, and the whole thing had stopped feeling like an experiment somewhere in there without announcing itself.
Ruth came in around the middle of the day.
Stella saw her through the pass-through—the gray terrier tied at the rail outside.
Ruth did not come to the counter. She took the small table by the window, and she looked at the specials board, and the specials board said RUTH’S GRANDMOTHER’S DATE LOAF in Joey’s blue capitals, spaced correctly on the first attempt.
She looked at it for a while.
Anna brought her a slice without being asked and set it down and went away again. Stella would not have thought of that.
Ruth ate the whole slice. Then she sat with her hand flat on the table beside the empty plate for a moment, and then she looked up and found Stella through the pass-through and did not wave or nod or do anything at all except look.
Later, when Stella came out with a tray, Ruth was at the counter with her handbag over her arm.
“The top cracked,” Stella said.
“It’s meant to.”
“Right.” Stella put the tray down. “Good.”
“Hers cracked. Every one. She used to say the crack was where you knew it was hers and not a shop’s.” Ruth’s hand went to the edge of the counter and stopped short of the card in its sleeve. “I haven’t had that since I was a girl. I want you to know I didn’t expect you to make it.”
“We were always going to make it.”
Ruth looked at her in a way that was too much for a slice of date loaf.
“Well,” Ruth said. Her voice didn’t quite hold. She stopped, and her hand came the rest of the way to the card in its sleeve and rested there. “Thank you.”
Ruth had her wallet out, but Stella placed her hand flat on the cash register, shaking her head.
“No. It’s a thank you from us to you.”
Ruth smiled and nodded, and she waited while Joey put it in a pink box, and Joey tied the twine in a bow that took him two attempts and one visible internal negotiation, and Ruth watched him do the second attempt without saying anything.
At the door she stopped.
“I going to tell my group,” she said. “My ladies group. I hope that’s all right.”
“How many are in your group?”
“Eleven,” Ruth said, and went out, and unwound the terrier, and went off down the path.
Stella reached for the camera before she’d decided to.
She got it up as far as her chest, and there was nothing to point it at.
Ruth was gone down the path. The empty plate was just an empty plate.
She lowered the camera. Then she slid Ruth’s card out of its sleeve, and turned it over to the blank back, and wrote in the corner in blue pen, small, the size the notes in the boxes were, Hers cracked too.
It’s right. No changes. She put the card back facing out, and went to wipe down the table where the plate still sat.
The first two came that afternoon.
They came in together, a little apologetic, and stood inside the door looking at the specials board the way people look at a menu in a language they half know, and one of them said Ruth had told them, and the other said they’d walked down.
Stella heard walked down and thought about Bernie saying people will walk for it, and then she was cutting the last of the second loaf into slices thinner than she meant to, because there were two of them and one loaf’s end and she was not going to tell them there wasn’t any.
There was enough. Barely.
They ate it at the counter standing up, both of them, and one of them got out her phone and took a picture of the slice, badly, at the wrong angle, and Stella did not say anything about the angle.
“Ruth said her grandmother made this,” the woman said.
“That’s whose it is.”
“And you just—made it? Because she brought it in?”
Stella opened her mouth to answer that and found that the answer was yes and that it sounded, said out loud, like a much bigger thing than it had been first thing that morning with a bowl of dates and a pot of tea.
“Yeah,” she said.
The woman nodded slowly and looked at the board again, at the name of somebody’s grandmother written up in blue capitals over the counter of a restaurant.
“That’s lovely,” she said. “You should do that with all of them.”
They shut the door and Stella stayed.
She had the third loaf out and cooling and no plan for it, and Joey had gone to get his bag and had not gone home, and the sleeve marked VOL. 1 was on the counter with one card in it and the pen sitting on top.
“Ten more of them are coming,” Joey said. “Assuming all eleven come, and assuming the group is real.”
“The group is real.”
“Then it’s eleven.” He looked at the sleeve.
He looked at the card in the sleeve, single, filed under R, in a section built with room for a system that did not exist. Then he pulled the sleeve toward him and squared it against the counter’s edge, and got the pen, and did not write anything, because there was nothing yet to write.
Stella took a picture of the board before Joey wiped it. RUTH’S GRANDMOTHER’S DATE LOAF, blue capitals, correctly spaced, over a counter that had sold grilled cheese and a pickle since before anyone in the room was born.
Then she got the camera down closer, the way her father had told her, and took it again from underneath, and in that one the shells were in the frame too.
She checked it and kept it.
Somebody’s grandmother was up on the board with her name on her, over a room full of people eating lunch, and not one of them had known the woman.