Chapter 22
Sleep hadn't come easy, and Maria felt the lack of it behind her eyes all morning, a dull ache that made the store's ordinary sounds, the bell, the till, the scrape of crates, land harder than they should have.
The first customer of the day, an older woman Maria hadn't met yet, stopped dead in the doorway at the sight of Ella behind the counter.
"Livvy?" the woman said, then caught herself, laughing a little at her own mistake. "Forgive me, for a moment there you gave me quite a turn. You must be her sister. The resemblance is remarkable."
"Ella Canning," Ella said, warm, extending a hand. "You knew Livvy well, then?"
"Knew her? There isn't a soul in Mason's Clear who didn't love that woman." The customer held onto Ella's hand a moment longer than the introduction required. "It does my heart good, seeing something of her again."
Maria, forgotten behind the counter, busied herself with an order she didn't need to fill yet, and told herself the small ache in her chest was only tiredness.
It happened again within the hour. And again after that.
Each time, a customer's face would catch on Ella, some flicker of recognition or surprise, and each time it led to warm words about Livvy, about how dearly she'd been loved, about how good it was to see her sister's face in the store again.
Nobody was unkind to Maria in any of it.
Nobody said a word against her. But she began to understand, watching it happen a fourth time and then a fifth, that Ella arrived in every room already loved, on the strength of a face she hadn't chosen and a sister she hadn't earned, and Maria had none of that to stand on, only herself, tired and fumbling through a day that refused to go smoothly.
She got an order wrong before noon, sending Mr. Higgins home with the wrong size of nail, and had to send Billy running after him to fix it. She dropped a jar of preserves an hour later, and stood over the mess of glass and syrup feeling close to tears over something that didn't deserve them.
"Did you tell me the buttons were on the second shelf?" she asked Ella, after searching the wrong shelf entirely for a customer who was waiting, not unkindly, but with a patience that was beginning to wear thin.
"Third shelf, I thought I said," Ella replied, easy, already reaching past her to find them herself. "You must have misheard me. It's an easy thing to do, when you're tired."
Maria wasn't certain she'd misheard anything. But she was tired, tired enough that she couldn't trust her own memory of five minutes before, and the not-knowing sat worse than the mistake itself.
By mid-afternoon, Ella drew her aside near the back room, her voice low and kind.
"You look done in," she said. "Why don't you let me handle supper tonight? I could bake bread. Livvy had a recipe Billy always loved, sweeter than the loaf you made yesterday. I haven't made it in years, but I remember it well enough."
Maria wanted, badly, to say she'd manage her own bread again, that she didn't need the help.
But her hands still ached faintly from yesterday's kneading, and her eyes were heavy, and somewhere underneath the tiredness sat the thought that if she refused, she'd be refusing Billy a thing he loved, over nothing more than her own pride.
"That would be kind of you," Maria said. "Thank you."
"It's no trouble at all," Ella said, already moving toward the back room. "I'm glad to help, truly."
Maria told herself, watching her go, that this was Ella being generous. That was all it was. She held onto that thought through the rest of the afternoon, through two more mixed-up orders and a customer who asked, kindly enough, whether she was quite well, because she seemed a bit lost today.
Supper came, and the bread Ella carried out to the table was golden and fragrant. Billy's face lit up the moment he smelled it.
"Mama's bread," he said, delighted, before he'd even tasted it. "You made Mama's bread."
"I remembered how she used to do it," Ella said, modest, pleased. "I hope I've done it justice."
They ate, and Billy declared it exactly right, exactly like he remembered.
Meg went quiet in a way that Maria understood was its own kind of grief, tasting something that brought her mother back to the table for a moment.
Samson ate two pieces and said, more than once, that he hadn't had that particular loaf since Livvy passed.
The smell of it alone had near stopped him in the doorway.
Maria ate her own portion in silence, and told herself it was a lovely thing, Ella doing this for the children, for Samson, giving them back some small piece of what they'd lost. She told herself that, and mostly believed it.
But some smaller, more suspicious part of her held a different thought.
It was the part that had noticed the wrong shelf, the wrong size of nail, the dozen small confusions of the day.
She couldn't say it aloud. She had nothing to point to, no proof of anything.
Only the shape of a day that had left her exhausted and second-guessed at every turn.
Only an evening where Ella's bread had outshone her own so completely that nobody at the table seemed to remember Maria had baked anything at all.
She couldn't prove it. She wasn't even certain, in her tired and doubting heart, that there was anything to prove. But she went to bed that night with the quiet, uneasy feeling that she'd been outmaneuvered by someone who had never once raised her voice or said an unkind word.