Customers packed the sidewalk as I pushed open the front door, and the room went so quiet you could hear the proof box ticking in the back.
I was not there to make a scene. I was there because Dorothy Wexler asked me to come, and when a woman who has known you since 1999 asks you to be somewhere at nine in the morning, you go.
Dorothy is eighty-eight and she owns that bakery. Her husband opened it in 1971. She had been in the hospital in Indianapolis five weeks with her hip and then a pneumonia, which is the whole reason her grandson had the run of the place and the drawer and the ordering.
She had a folder in her lap and her walker parked by the pastry case, and she asked me to stand next to her, and then she asked her grandson to hand her the register tapes for February.
Here is what a woman who has worked a register for twenty-six years knows that a young man in a golf shirt does not.
Every clerk has a number. Mine is 04. You cannot open that drawer without one — not for a sale, not for change, not for a no-sale — and every one of them prints on the tape with the time beside it.
The four short days in February have eleven no-sales on them between 2:40 and 3:15 in the afternoon, which is the dead hour, and every single one of them is clerk 01.
I do not work afternoons. I have not worked an afternoon since my knees went in 2016. I am out of that building by one o’clock and everybody on Sycamore Street knows it.
Clerk 01 was the code he set up for himself in January.
Dorothy read the times out loud in that flat schoolteacher way she has, then folded the tape back into the folder and said the rest would be handled as family business and not as sidewalk theater, which is exactly what I’d have expected of her.
He didn’t deny it. He went out the back and he has not been in that store since. I understand there’s an arrangement about paying it back and I have not asked one question about it.
Then Dorothy did the part I wasn’t ready for. She took out an envelope her husband wrote in 2004, the year he died, and left with their lawyer, and she read the one line in it that had my name in it.
Whatever becomes of this place, Mary Collins bakes the Christmas orders. She’s the only one who does them right and she has never once let this family down.
Twenty-one years that has been sitting in a file in a lawyer’s office in Kokomo, Indiana, and nobody ever told me.
I put the apron back on right there at the counter. The reopening ran four hours long and we sold out of everything but the rye.
Dorothy signed the store over to me in the spring, on paper, on terms I can actually pay. It says Wexler’s on the glass and it is going to keep saying Wexler’s.
I mix at four in the morning. Same as always.