Chapter 8
The hearing was short.
Nine minutes, in a paneled room with fluorescent light and a vent that made a low humming noise. Delaney sat with her hands folded, in the same chair she had rehearsed in front of the mirror, and answered four questions and gave two documents: a letter of enrollment and a lease.
The judge asked the child how school was going. Owen said there was a frog involved, and the judge wrote something down and did not smile, and then he signed the paper and said the case was closed.
Camille Ashford died in a hotel in Palm Beach five years later. Delaney read two lines about it in the back of the paper and turned the page without finishing them.
Her father’s recipe book stayed in the drawer.
·
Owen is eleven in the fall of the year the bakery opens, which is also the year Delaney stops sleeping on the sofa.
The opening took eleven months of paperwork and a small business loan cosigned by a man named Raphael Bandi who never once set foot in the shop while the contractors were there. She hung one thing on the wall behind the counter: a photograph of her and Owen at the park, with a torn corner where the tape had been, the same photograph that used to be taped to the inside of a locker door at the Ashford Hotel.
The bakery is called Hart’s. It sells apple cake, which is on the menu because an eight-year-old once said there was nothing to discuss.
·
Some things did not get fixed, and she made peace with that on her own terms.
Her father was dead; the recipe book was all of him that was left, and she had stopped trying to guess the bad handwriting and started inventing, which is what he would have wanted anyway. The catering company never got an apology she considered adequate and she never went back for one. She lost eleven months of her life to a woman with nothing better to do than make the smallest person in the room even smaller, and she never got those months back.
And she did not tell Raphael Bandi that she loved him, for a long time, and he did not tell her either, because neither of them was built for the sentence.
What she said, one night in the little kitchen under the yellow light, over the rim of a cup with a dinosaur on it, was: “You should eat here more.”
“All right,” he said.
“You should come on Sundays.”
“All right.”
“You have to actually eat. Not sit there.”
“I’ll eat.”
“With us.”
A beat.
“Yes,” he said. “With you.”
·
On a Sunday in spring, two years after the bakery opened, it rained — the steady, lingering kind, neither heavy nor light, the kind that comes near the end of the season.
They drove out to North Chicago Cemetery in the afternoon, the three of them, and stood in front of a headstone that read TOBIAS BANDI, 19, and the marker was good granite now, and there was a bench beside it, and there were flowers.
Owen, who had been told the story twice and had asked a third time because he liked the part where his sister hands over a fold of ones, laid the bouquet down himself. He did it the way she had done it that first morning — not arranged, not placed carefully, just set down the way you set down something you’ve been carrying a long way.
Raphael stood with his arms at his sides. He didn’t say anything. He had never once managed to say anything at that grave in seven years, and Delaney had stopped expecting him to.
On the way back she drove, because he’d asked her to.
And that evening, in the little kitchen, Owen beat the eggs with the fork with the bent tine, and got egg into one side of his hair, and Delaney laughed until she had to put the knife down.
She counted anyway. She always counted. There was a particular kind of arithmetic that people like her learned early, the kind that told you two eggs today meant two eggs tomorrow, and that meant you were still all right, you still hadn’t lost.
She cracked three eggs into the pan.
May you like
She set the table for three, switched on the small light above the sink, and called them in to eat.
THE END
