Terms

For a second you think you might actually sit down on the floor.

You don't. You put one hand on the glass case, very casually, like you meant to, and the case is warm from the lights and solid and you hold on.

"You're the buyer," you say.

"I'm the buyer."

"You."

"Me." Sofia leans against the doorframe to the kitchen and crosses her arms. The flour on her shoulder catches the light. "You want to keep saying it, or you want coffee?"

"I don't want coffee."

"You want coffee." She's already moving. The old Bunn machine behind the counter, the one that sounds like a small plane taking off, roars to life under her hand. She doesn't look at the cups when she reaches for them. She knows where they are. She knows where everything is.

You watch her pour. You watch her add a splash of cream and then, without asking, two sugars and a pinch of cinnamon from the shaker by the register, which is how you took your coffee from age nineteen to twenty-three and how you have not taken it since. In Chicago you drink it black because black is faster and nobody asks questions.

She sets it on the counter in front of you. One of Birdie's chipped blue mugs.

"Still a crime scene?" she asks.

"I drink it black now."

"Okay." She doesn't take it back. She just waits.

You hold out for maybe four seconds. Then you pick it up, because your hands are cold and it's right there, and it tastes like being twenty-two and stupid and happy, and you set it down a little too hard.

Sofia doesn't smile. She just looks satisfied, which is worse.

The offer is real. That's the first thing that knocks you off balance.

She has it in a manila folder on one of the window tables, and she lays it out for you like a menu. The title company's paperwork. A letter from a bank in Newport confirming funds. A number that is not a lowball, not a favor, not a joke. It's fair. It's actually a little more than fair, for a hundred-year-old shingled building on Front Street with a leaky skylight and a deck oven and a business that has never made more than enough.

"Where did you get this kind of money?" you ask, before you can stop yourself.

"Rude," Sofia says mildly. "I own a restaurant."

"I know you own a restaurant."

Her eyebrow goes up. "You know?"

"Everyone knows." You make yourself meet her eyes. "Marea. Best Chef Northwest semifinalist. The magazine cover."

"Ugh." She actually closes her eyes for a second. "Don't."

"Most beautiful chef on the—"

"I will throw you into the harbor, Ava."

There it is. The ghost of it. The way she used to threaten you with bodies of water when you teased her. You both hear it, and you both look away at the same time.

You turn a page of the contract. "Why do you want a bakery?"

"Marea needs bread. I'm tired of driving to Newport for it, and I'm tired of it being worse than Birdie's." She taps a line on the second page. "And somebody should keep this place open. It's been here since 1971. The town would riot."

"You're keeping it open?"

"I'm keeping it open." Something hard comes into her voice. "As a bakery. Same name. Same sign."

"The sign's crooked."

"The sign has character."

You stare at her. She stares back. It's Birdie's line, word for word, and she knows it.

"There's a condition," Sofia says.

Of course there is.

She turns to the last page and slides it across the table. A single typed paragraph, added as a rider. You read it twice.

Seller agrees to provide in-person training in the bakery's recipes and methods, including but not limited to the cardamom knot, fog bread and seasonal pies, for a period of thirty (30) days prior to closing, during regular production hours.

"Regular production hours," you repeat.

"Four a.m."

"Sofia."

"Birdie never wrote anything down." She says it flatly, like she's said it to herself a hundred times. "Not one recipe. It's all in her hands and her hands don't work anymore. The fog bread I've mostly got. The pies are easy. The knots." She glances at the platter in the case, at the wrong tails, and her jaw tightens. "I've been trying for two months. I can't get the fold. She says she can't show me with the cast on, and she says you're the only other person alive who knows it."

You think about Birdie's kitchen when you were eleven. A rainy Saturday. Her hand over yours on the dough. Twist, then tuck, then twist again the other way, like you're changing your mind.

"I have a job," you say.

"I know."

"In Chicago. I'm up for partner in six weeks. I can't just—"

"You can work your Chicago job after we're done in the kitchen. We finish at ten. Your Chicago is two hours ahead. You'd be done by dinner." She has thought about this. She has thought about all of this. "Thirty days. You teach me the knots. You sign. You go back. Nobody has to make it weird."

"It's already weird."

"Then nobody has to make it weirder."

You look at her across Birdie's little window table, with the rain running down the glass behind her and the fishing boats rocking in the gray, and you think: six years. Six years since you stood at Kittiwake Point at dawn with a bag at your feet, watching the road, watching the road, watching the road. Six years since the voicemail.

If you can leave like that, don't come back.

And here she is, asking you to come back at four in the morning. For bread.

"I need to talk to my grandmother," you say.

Birdie answers on the first ring, which is suspicious, because Birdie hates phones.

"Did you see her, Ava?" she says. Not hello.

You're standing out on the bakery's back step, under the little overhang, looking at the dumpster and the gulls. Inside, through the window, you can see Sofia boxing hand pies with fast, careless precision.

"Grandma."

"She's very good, isn't she. She's been very good to me."

"Grandma, did you know Sofia was the buyer?"

A pause. Gulls. Somewhere a boat horn.

"Is that a trick question?" Birdie asks.

"Did you set this up?"

"I set up a sale. To a reliable local buyer with cash and good intentions. You said, and I quote, find someone fast. I found someone fast."

"You found my ex."

"I found the best cook on this coast," Birdie says, "who happens to have dated you. That's hardly my fault. You dated very well. I'll give you that."

You press the heel of your hand into your eye. "And the thirty days? The four a.m.?"

"That was my condition, sweetheart. Not hers." Her voice softens, just slightly. "Those knots are fifty years of my life. I'm not handing them to anyone through a lawyer. You'll show her. Properly. In my kitchen."

"I have a whole life in Chicago."

"Yes," Birdie says. "I've seen pictures. It looks very clean."

You breathe out through your nose. Inside, Sofia glances up through the window and catches you looking. She doesn't look away. Neither do you, for a second too long.

"Fine," you say. "Thirty days."

"Good girl, Ava."

"One more question." You lower your voice, though nobody's listening but the gulls. "When did you tell her I was coming? Because she wasn't surprised. She had coffee ready, Grandma. She had my coffee ready."

The silence on the other end goes on long enough that you check the screen to see if the call dropped.

"Grandma."

"Two weeks before I told you," Birdie says. "Give or take."