Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Stella got in before the sun was properly up, and Joey was already there.
“The poppy seed man,” she said, somewhere in the second batch, to the dough more than to him. “I kept thinking about him never having it again. It kept me up most of the night.”
Joey took out the notebook, and put it back, because there was no category in it for that.
Bea came in before the sign was flipped to open, with the binder under one arm and a flat cardboard box under the other, and she wouldn’t let anyone talk to her until she’d set the box down and opened it.
Inside were the cards. Not THE cards—the originals were back in the binder in Joey’s alphabetizer, where he could visit them—but every one copied onto heavy cream stock in Bea’s tall loose lettering, the name across the top and the recipe under it, and down in the corner of each a small B so nobody would ever take a copy for the thing a woman had touched.
Marjorie’s cinamon was there in two Ms. The original had one. Stella decided not to bring it up.
“Don’t help,” Bea said, to the room, and she carried the stack to the wall by the specials board and got her own brass pins out of her pocket and started, because she wouldn’t use tape and she’d come in with very strong feelings about the spacing already loaded.
It took most of the morning. Bea would not be hurried, and she hung them by nothing Stella could name—not alphabetical, not by size, something only Bea’s eye was running.
“That one’s tall and that one’s wide,” Bea said, two pins in her mouth, taking them out to talk. “You put two tall ones together, the wall gets nervous.”
“Walls don’t get nervous,” Joey said, from the register.
“This one will. You’ll see it when it’s up.”
He came over with the level from the office without being asked, and Bea let him help, and they worked down the row from the board end, agreeing about nothing—Bea hanging by how the hands looked next to each other, Joey checking each one plumb after she’d committed to it.
Stella ran the case, and the wall had more on it every time she came back to the counter.
When it was done the wall was full of women. Two dozen names in two dozen hands, all of it in Bea’s cream lettering with her small honest B in the corners, and the specials board at the end of the row looked, for the first time, like the newest thing on the wall instead of the only thing.
Anna came out of the back with a stack of clean towels, stopped, looked at it a while, said it was beautiful, asked whether those were the good pens, and put the towels away.
Stella found the fig one. She found Marjorie with her extra M.
She found Ruth’s grandmother’s date loaf, third from the end, where the whole thing had started, walnuts optional, but she’d judge you in Bea’s handwriting now as well as the original’s.
She got the camera and shot the whole wall square, then close on three of them, then made herself stop.
She could have shot handwriting all day and there was a rush coming.
The rush came—Anna on the grill and the window at once, Tyler on the door and the patio, Bernie folding the crossword away for lunch.
And people read the wall the whole time.
They read it waiting for tables and waiting for change, and more than one went quiet halfway down it and had to be asked twice for their order.
Ruth came in the quiet part of the afternoon with the gray terrier tied twice to the rail, and this time she ordered.
“Three of the date loaves,” she said. “My sister wants one, and the two women in my building split everything, and I’m keeping one for myself because I’ve earned it.
” She had her wallet out already. “And can you do more for next week. The church group meets Thursday and I told them about it, which I shouldn’t have, because now they’re all coming. ”
Stella looked at Joey. Joey looked at the board, where the date loaf had a line through it well before noon most mornings now, and then at the proofing rack, full since before graduation.
“We can do you one today,” Joey said. “There’s one left. I can’t do three, and I can’t promise next week.”
Ruth put her wallet down on the counter. “One.”
“One. I’m sorry. We’re making everything twice and it’s gone by lunch either way.” He said it plainly, and he didn’t dress it up. “I don’t like telling you no. Your loaf started the whole wall.”
Ruth looked at the wall a second, and then back at Joey, and she didn’t look hurt. She looked like a woman who’d solved harder things than this.
“All right,” she said. “Then answer me something, and answer it straight. What would have to happen? For you to really do this. Not one loaf. The whole thing.”
Joey didn’t have a card for the question, but the answer came without a pause, like something he’d had ready.
“An oven that’s ours,” Joey said. “Probably two. A room that isn’t this kitchen. A refrigerator that isn’t holding the Shack’s food and ours in the same space.” He shrugged. “That’s what would have to happen.”
Ruth nodded, took her one loaf, paid for it, and left—out the door, unwinding the terrier, down the path toward town.
She was back before the trays were cool.
She set a jar on the counter, a big glass one wiped clean, with two folded bills in the bottom already so it wouldn’t sit there empty and stop the next person from being first.
“For the oven,” Ruth said. “Don’t argue with me. I’m older than this building.”
Joey looked at the jar. “There’s no—Ruth, there’s no plan. There’s nothing to fund. You’d be putting money toward something that doesn’t exist, and I’d be uncomfortable letting it sit there and imply—”
“So label it.”
He looked at her. Then he went to the office and came back with the label maker, and stood clicking the wheel under his thumb, and it came out in crisp white caps on clear tape. He pressed it to the glass and smoothed it flat with his thumbnail so there were no bubbles.
PLEASE BE AWARE THERE ARE NO PLANS TO DO THIS.
“There,” Joey said. “Now it’s honest.”
Ruth read it and laughed, and dropped her own coins in on top of the bills so they rang against the glass.
Bea, at the end of the counter, said it was the best thing she’d ever watched him make, and Joey said it was accurate, and set the jar by the register and squared it to the edge of the counter.
Letty came at the end of the afternoon.
She came in slow, with the cane she used on the bad days, and got herself onto a stool with both elbows and no help offered, because you did not offer Letty help. She set her right hand on the counter, wrist up for a second, and put it back.
“I need a favor and I’m going to be shameless about it,” Letty said.
“My granddaughter’s shower is Sunday. I always make the rugelach.
I’ve made it for every shower in this family since before your mothers were born.
” She turned the wrist over once and flattened it on the counter.
“And I can’t roll anymore. Not since the winter.
I can pipe, I can fill, I can do a great many things sitting down with my elbows in.
I cannot roll a rugelach, and I won’t put a bought one on the table at my own granddaughter’s shower. I’d sooner stay home.”
Stella came up from the case. Joey was already at the counter. Letty looked between the two of them, and past them, at the wall of names.
“Margo says you’re the ones to ask now,” Letty said. “So I’m asking.”
Stella caught Joey’s eye. They’d told Ruth no an hour ago. One loaf, no next week, we’re making everything twice and it’s gone by lunch. Ruth’s loaf, the one that started the wall, and they’d said no.
We just said no to Ruth, was the thing in Stella’s head, plain as that. And under it, just as plain, Ruth’s loaf isn’t Letty.
“When’s Sunday,” Joey said.
“Sunday’s Sunday.”
“We’ll come in early,” Stella said. “Tomorrow and Sunday both. We can do it.”
Letty pressed her hand flat on the counter. “You’re good children,” she said, and got herself down off the stool with both elbows, and went.
Joey wrote LETTY, RUGELACH, SUNDAY on a fresh card in his blue capitals, and then stood with it, because the binder had gone up on the wall, every card in it copied and pinned, and there was nowhere to file a new one.
So he propped it against the sugar canister, facing the room, next to the jar that said there were no plans to do this.
Stella looked at the two of them there, the card and the jar.
It looked like the best day they’d had. She got the camera and shot the counter in the last of the window light—the card, the jar, the flour, the wall of names going soft behind it—and it was a good frame, and she took it because it was a good frame, and set the camera down, and went to help Joey work out where the rugelach was going to fit.