The first video lasted eleven minutes, and I watched it twice with my hand pressed to my mouth. My daughter looked into the camera in her apron, thin and tired and entirely herself. “Mom, I am going to say this fast because I get tired. Jason has been taking money from the bakery for four years. He has forged my signature on two loans. He has a girlfriend in Galena named Tiffany, and he is going to ask you to leave, and he is going to sell this place to her brother for a fraction of what it is worth.” She smiled a small tight smile. “I did not want to die and leave you with nothing but a fight. So I made a plan.”
She had gone to a lawyer in September, a quiet man named Mr. Pflug on Locust Street, and she had paid him in cinnamon rolls. In October, she had signed over the bakery to a trust for her children, with her mother as the trustee. “It is already done, Mom. The deed is in the safe under the proofing cabinet, behind the old coal door in the basement. Emma knows the combination. It is her birthday.” On the screen she held up a brass key. “Jason does not go into the basement. He thinks it floods. I let him think so.”
The second video was shorter. She said that the notebooks were not recipes. Each page held a date, an amount, and a name. They were a record of every dollar that Jason had taken, in her round clear hand, with the transfer numbers copied out. “It is all there for the sheriff,” she said. “I did not have the strength to fight him myself. But you do.” Then her face softened. “Mom, there is one more thing. Look at the last page of the green notebook. And then open the letter.” She reached forward and the picture went to black.
A mother who knows she will not be there can still arrange for the warm things of this world to find her children.
I opened the letter in the cold storeroom with the snow ticking against the glass. It said, in her round hand, Dear Mom. I am so sorry to leave you. You gave me twenty thousand dollars and a lifetime of faith, and I turned it into a little bakery that people loved. Please keep it going. Not for the money. For the Saturday morning line out the door. For the sound of the bell. Teach Emma the starter. And Mom, please be gentle with Noah. He is still a baby, whatever he tells you. I love you more than flour loves water.
We went down to the basement at midnight, the three of us. The coal door was behind a stack of old pans, a rusted iron hatch that I had not opened in thirty years. Emma turned the dial with steady hands, left, right, left, on the day of her birth. The door swung open. Inside was a steel safe the size of a bread box. In it lay a thick folder of legal papers, a bundle of cash tied with butcher string, a photograph of Megan at the opening of the bakery, and a small glass jar of bubbling starter with a label, in her hand, that read, Do not let this die.
Mr. Pflug came to the apartment on Monday morning with his briefcase and his rumpled suit. He read the papers at my kitchen table, and he smiled for the first time in my sight. He said, “Mrs. Hurley, your daughter was a remarkable woman. The bakery is not in the name of Jason. It has not been since the fourteenth of October. The sale he has proposed to Kyle would be fraud.” He tapped the green notebook. “And I believe the Dubuque County Sheriff will have a great deal to say about these.”
Jason was served with the papers at the funeral luncheon, between the ham and the pie. I did not see his face. I heard about it afterward from the chaplain, who said that Jason read the first page, folded it in half, and left without a word. A week later his lawyer called Mr. Pflug. They met at the courthouse. Jason had a choice. He could stand trial for forgery and theft, which the notebooks made very easy to prove, or he could sign away the bakery, his claim to the accounts, and his custody of the two children.
He signed. I think he was relieved. The judge granted me the guardianship of Emma and Noah in March, and the court ordered Jason to repay the bakery in full over five years. He moved to Florida with Tiffany, and I am told he sends the checks on time. I have not spoken to him. Noah asks about him sometimes, and I tell the truth, as gently as I can, and the child nods and goes back to his blocks. Children are better at this than we are.
We reopened on the first Saturday of April. The line went around the block. The mayor was in it, and the chaplain, and half the nurses from Mercy in their scrubs. I stood at the counter in my apron of my daughter with my hands shaking, and Emma stood beside me on a stool, and when the bell rang over the door, the whole street cheered. We sold out of cinnamon rolls by nine. I cried in the storeroom for ten minutes, leaning on the flour bin, and then I washed my face and went back to work.
The starter is still alive. Emma feeds it every morning at five, in the dark, before school, with a little scale and a wooden spoon. She says it has a personality. She says it is grumpy on Mondays. On the shelf above the proofing cabinet there is a picture of Megan in her headscarf, laughing, with flour on her cheek, and under it a small handwritten sign that Noah made. It says, Mom is in the bread. I have not had the heart to take it down.