I stood in the alley behind the bakehouse with the white envelope open in my hands and the smell of rising dough all around me, and I read the typed letter on the old letterhead of the mill by the light of the back door. It was dated the third of March, 1998, and it was addressed to my husband. It said that the company, in recognition of his thirty years of service, had converted his profit share into twelve hundred shares of its common stock. Buford had signed. So had Pressley.
“Mama,” Garrett said, and his voice was soft in the dark, “the Mr. Pressley who signed that is the Mr. Pressley I work for. He was twenty six then, the plant accountant. Now he is the regional president.” He rubbed his forehead with his wrist. “He found it last month. When the mill went under in 2011, the stock was bought out by the receiver, and the payment was held in an unclaimed account. For thirteen years. It was in the name of Daddy. Nobody knew.”
I leaned against the stack of bread racks. The ovens ticked behind me, and the sky over the alley was beginning to gray. I thought of the hand of Buford on the wheel of the old truck, in the parking lot of the mill, at six in the morning, as we passed each other for twenty years with a nod and a lunch pail. He had never said a word about stock. He had been a man who did not mention a thing until it could be put on the table. It seemed the table had taken thirteen years to arrive.
“How much?” I said. I did not want to know. Garrett took a long breath. “Forty one thousand, three hundred and fifty dollars,” he said. “With interest.” He sat down on an upturned flour crate, with the new car seat in his lap, the tags still hanging off the handle. “Mr. Pressley wants to hand it to you himself, Mama. He called me into his office on Friday and told me the whole thing. And then he said, in front of the secretary, that if I ever asked a woman like you to work for nothing again, he would fire me.”
The work of a lifetime does not vanish when the worker is gone, but waits patiently in a drawer for an honest hand to open it.
I sat down on the next crate. It is a poor thing, I suppose, to cry in an alley with flour on your apron, but I did it anyway. I thought of the late nights, the double shifts, the girls on my line with their children asleep in the cars. I thought of Buford winding the little brass clock in 1984. When I could speak, I asked about the car seat. Garrett turned bright red. “Tessa is expecting, Mama,” he whispered. “In March. We were afraid to say so. I did not know how we would manage.”
“So you tried to hire me for nothing,” I said, gently. “Because you were afraid.” He nodded, ashamed. I put out my hand, floury and cracked, and took his chin as I did when he was five. “Son, you should have told me about the baby, and you should have asked, not told. But you were not wrong that I love your child already. I would rest my back for it any day of the week.” He took my hand in both of his and kissed it. I did not remember when he last did that.
Mr. Pressley came to the bakehouse himself the next Saturday, at six in the morning, in a cardigan, and bought a dozen cinnamon rolls. He was a thin man of fifty with kind eyes, and he waited his turn in line. At the counter he laid a check in front of me, and a copy of the letter, and a printed statement. “Mrs. Honeycutt,” he said, “I should have found this thirteen years ago. I am sorry.” His voice was unsteady. “Your husband once talked me out of laying off forty women at that mill. I was a young fool. He was the only man who ever spoke to me plainly.”
I thanked him. I did not know what else to say. After he left, I stood at the register with the check in my hand and looked at Junie Holt, who had gone completely still behind the oven. “Junie,” I said, “I would like to buy a share of this bakehouse.” She laughed, and then she saw I was serious. We shook on it that afternoon. Twenty percent for ten thousand dollars, and the key to the front door, which I already had. The sign now says Holt and Honeycutt.
I kept the rest. I put thirty thousand into a savings account in the name of Buford for the grandchild, to be spent on whatever the child needs, and I bought myself a second wind up alarm clock for the bakehouse, exactly like the first. I still rise at a quarter to four. I take a rest in the afternoon, from one o clock until two thirty, with my feet up in the recliner, and I do not apologize for it to a living soul. Thirty three years earns a woman her rest.
In March, a boy was born. Garrett called me from the hospital at four in the morning, as I was pulling the first rolls from the oven. His voice broke when he said it. Buford, he said. They had named him Buford Junior. I put down the tray, and Junie caught me by the elbow, and the two of us stood in the warm kitchen in the dark with the radio humming, and I cried into a dish towel.
I watch him on Saturdays now, the baby, with the ears of his father, in a basket under the bread rack. He sleeps like a log. Garrett comes at noon to pick him up, and always brings coffee, and always asks, before he leaves, if there is anything he can do. I tell him yes. He can put Buford in the car seat with the tags cut off. He does so, very carefully, and I watch them drive out of the alley into the white morning.