The Will

The lawyer's office smelled like old paper and the peppermints in the bowl by the door, and Renata took three of them because nobody told her not to. "Your grandmother was very specific," Mr. Adeyemi said. He had a soft voice for a man who delivered news for a living. "The bakery on Orchard Street passes to you. The building, the equipment, the name. All of it." Renata had not cried at the funeral. She had stood in the back in a black dress that didn't fit right and watched two hundred people from the neighborhood file past a casket, and she had felt nothing but a low, distant hum, like a refrigerator in another room. She waited for that hum now. It didn't come. Instead her hands went cold. "I don't know how to run a bakery," she said. "There's a condition." Mr. Adeyemi turned a page. "The bakery has been operating at a loss for two years. Your grandmother knew that. She's given you ninety days. If, at the end of ninety days, the business is profitable — even by a dollar — it's yours free and clear. If not, the building is to be sold and the proceeds donated." "Ninety days." Renata laughed, and it came out wrong, too sharp. "She wants me to save a failing business in ninety days. I'm a substitute teacher. I grade other people's spelling tests." "She left a note." He slid a folded card across the desk. "I'm told you should read it alone." Renata didn't open it in the car. She didn't open it on the train back to the apartment she could barely afford, or in the kitchen while she stood at the counter eating cereal at four in the afternoon because cooking felt like too many decisions. She opened it that night, in bed, with the lamp on. Her grandmother's handwriting had always looked like a fence in a windstorm. *Mija. You think you don't know the bakery. You spent every summer there until you were nineteen. You know more than you let yourself remember. The recipes are not written down — I never trusted paper. They live in one person's head besides mine, and you know who. Be brave enough to ask her. The rest you will figure out. You always do. You just don't believe it yet.* Renata read it four times. She knew exactly who. She had not spoken to Dani Reyes in eleven years. The last time, they had been standing on the fire escape behind the bakery, eighteen and nineteen and certain the world was ending, and in a way it had. Dani had gotten into a culinary program three states away. Renata had asked her to stay. Dani had said the cruelest, truest thing — *you're asking me to be smaller so you don't have to be brave* — and then she had gone, and Renata had spent a decade proving her right by becoming as small as a person could get. The next morning Renata stood outside the bakery on Orchard Street. The gate was down. The sign in the window, hand-lettered in her grandmother's hand, still said BACK SOON, which had been a lie for three weeks. Through the glass she could see the long marble counter, the empty display case, the swinging door to the kitchen. She had a key. She had ninety days. She had a note telling her to be brave. She lifted the gate. It shrieked the whole way up, the way it always had, and the sound was so familiar it knocked something loose in her chest, and finally — standing alone on the sidewalk with a peppermint going soft in her pocket — Renata cried. Then she wiped her face with the back of her hand, went inside, and started looking for a phone number she had deleted eleven years ago and never actually forgotten.