Flour and Other Inheritances

The lawyer used the word inheritance like it was a gift, and Nora wanted to tell him that it wasn't. Inheritance was a building with a leaky proof box and a mortgage two months behind. It was a recipe box she couldn't open without crying. It was the smell of her grandmother's hands, which was cinnamon and bleach and something underneath that no one had ever been able to name. She signed where he pointed. The pen was cheap and skipped. "The keys," he said, sliding a ring across the desk. There were four of them, and Nora knew all four without being told — front door, back door, the cellar, the till. She had been locking and unlocking that building since she was nine years old, standing on a milk crate to reach the bolt. "Thank you," she said, because her grandmother had raised her to say it, and walked out into a March morning that hadn't decided yet whether it was going to be kind. Marrow Lane ran four blocks from the war memorial to the river, and Hartley's Bakery sat dead in the middle of it, the way it had for sixty-one years. The sign still said HARTLEY'S in the original gold leaf, flaking now at the curl of the H. Nora stood across the street and looked at it the way you look at a face in a casket — recognizable, and wrong. Then she made herself cross the road and put the key in the lock. Inside, the air was cold and floury and held its breath. Dust had settled on the glass of the display case in the three weeks since the funeral, a soft grey film over the empty trays. Her grandmother had still been baking the week she died. Eighty-three years old, up at four, scoring the tops of loaves with a razor she'd had longer than Nora had been alive. Nora set her bag on the counter and didn't cry, which felt like an accomplishment. The kitchen was worse and better. Worse because everything in it was a small ambush — the apron on the hook, the radio tuned to the station that played songs from before Nora was born, the wall calendar still flipped to February with appointments written in a hand that shook more at the end than it used to. Better because the kitchen was where her grandmother had been most herself, and standing in it Nora could almost hear her: stop hovering, child, the dough won't proof itself. She found the recipe box on the shelf above the proofing cupboard. Tin, painted with faded roses, the lid held shut with a rubber band that had gone brittle. She did not open it. She put her hand flat on the lid and left it there a while, the way you'd rest a hand on a sleeping animal, and then she put it back on the shelf. There was a sound at the front of the shop. The bell over the door — she'd forgotten the door didn't lock properly unless you lifted it. "We're closed," she called, and went out to the front, and that was the first time she saw the man who would ruin her year. He was standing in the middle of her shop in a charcoal coat that had not come from anywhere in this town, holding a small white box tied with twine. Tall. Dark hair pushed back like he'd done it with one impatient hand. He had the particular ease of someone who had never once worried about a building. "You must be the granddaughter," he said. "I must be," said Nora. "We're closed. We've been closed for three weeks." "I know." He set the white box on her dusty counter as though it belonged there. "Theo Marchetti. I'm opening across the street. The patisserie." He said patisserie the correct way, the French way, and Nora felt her jaw set. "I brought you something. A — what's the word. A neighborly thing." Nora looked at the box. Through the gap in the lid she could see something glossy and architectural, a dome of chocolate with a single gold leaf laid on top like a coin on a dead man's eye. "You're opening a bakery," she said slowly, "across the street. From this bakery." "A patisserie," Theo corrected, and smiled like he'd done her a favor. "It's different." "It's the same street." "It's a big street." It was not a big street. It was four blocks long and most of the third block was a tax office. Nora looked at this man, with his good coat and his correct French and his little gold coin of a dessert, and she felt something wake up in her chest that she hadn't felt since the funeral. It was not grief. It was, she realized with something close to relief, pure uncomplicated dislike. "Take your box," she said, "and get out of my shop." Theo's smile didn't move, but something behind it sharpened with interest, the way a card player's does when the game finally gets good. "You haven't tried it," he said. "I don't have to." Nora picked up the box and held it out to him. "I know what it tastes like. It tastes like a man who's never been hungry." For just a second — half a second — the smile slipped, and underneath it she saw something younger and less sure. Then it was gone, and he took the box, and he tipped his head to her in a way that was almost a bow and entirely infuriating. "Welcome home, Miss Hartley," he said, and the bell rang behind him. Nora stood alone in the cold floury dark and discovered she was, for the first time in three weeks, not thinking about her grandmother at all. She was thinking about how very much she was going to enjoy putting him out of business.