Warm air meets Jasper halfway across the gap between the buildings. It carries yeast and woodsmoke, with burnt sugar underneath. The laugh comes again from inside, huge and wheezing, and a tin tray rattles on its hook.
Biscuit breaks into a trot. His inside-out ear flaps once, and he disappears through the doorway.
"Traitor," Jasper says.
The street behind him has woken up while he stood in Wren's door. A woman hauls a bucket from the pump at the corner, and the handle shrieks on every stroke. Two boys argue over the ownership of a stick. A shutter bangs open above the general store, and Delphine's voice rides out of it, bright and mid-sentence, greeting someone he cannot see. Nothing in the air has a hum under it. He keeps waiting for the hum.
Someone has propped the front door of the bakery open with a flatiron. The back door stands open too, so a draft runs the length of the room and tugs at his sleeve on its way out. He stops on the threshold, the notebook in his left hand, the bookplate pinned under it against his ribs. His right thumb is black to the first joint.
"Jasper Cole steps into a bakery," he murmurs. "He carries a notebook and a stain."
He shuts his mouth. Eleven years of dictating to Marlow left him with a mouth that narrates, and it picks its own moments.
The room is long and low. Heat leans on his face, and sweat prickles at his collar before he takes a second step. A brick oven fills the back wall, its iron door cracked an inch, the gap glowing orange. Tall wooden racks climb the left side, hung with boards, and every board holds loaves in rows: round ones slashed across the crust like claw marks, long ones dusted white, twists, and two flat brown discs the size of dinner plates. Crocks crowd a shelf above them with cloth tied over their mouths. Beside the door, columns of chalk tallies climb a slate under a list of names. A few of the names have been rubbed out and written over so often that the slate has gone silver at those spots.
Decades of knives have scarred the maple slab down the middle of the floor to grey, and flour drifts half an inch deep in its corners. A man stands behind it with both fists buried in a mound of dough.
He is round in the belly and round in the arm, with flour settled into the creases of his knuckles and the lines beside his eyes. His sleeves stop at the elbow and go no higher. His cheeks have the ruddy shine of a man who lives beside a fire. He folds the dough over, heels it forward, gives it a quarter turn, and folds again. Slap and push. Slap and push.
On the customer side of the table a woman stands with a basket on her hip. Her braid is grey and as thick as a bell rope. She swipes a wrist under one eye. Her laughter drops half an octave when Jasper's shadow crosses the floor.
"That's the jacket," she says.
"That's the jacket!" The baker keeps kneading, and his whole face lifts. "Agnes, move. Let the man in. He's been reading my doorframe since you started laughing."
Agnes looks Jasper over, collar to boots, her hands on her basket. "Good cloth. Wrong for the weather."
She lifts a loaf from the nearest rack and chalks a tick beside a name on the slate. At the door she bends to Biscuit, who has crept out from behind a flour sack to check her pockets. "Not today, you." Then she is gone, and the draft lifts the hem of her skirt out into the road.
The baker holds out an elbow.
Jasper stares at it.
"My hands are in the dough," the baker says. "Elbows are the custom. Bump it. Bart Quill. Bartholomew, if I owe you money, Bart, if you owe me bread."
Jasper bumps the elbow. It is solid and powdered white, and a puff of flour lifts and settles on his cuff.
"Jasper Cole."
"I know who you are. The whole town knows who you are. Delphine sent a boy round at sunrise, and an hour ago the egg man came in to tell me you laughed at the icebox." Flour cracks in the creases beside Bart's mouth. He slaps the dough over and leans his weight into it. "I told him I'd have laughed at the icebox. It hums at a pitch that makes the dogs nervous. You'll have noticed."
"I counted it last night."
"Counted the hum?"
"The cycles. It kicks on every eleven minutes."
Bart stops kneading. He studies Jasper with his head tilted and flour on his eyebrows. Then he roars, and the tin tray jumps on its hook. Biscuit's head pops up from behind the sack and drops again.
"Eleven minutes." Bart wipes his eyes with the inside of his wrist and leaves a white streak across his temple. "He counted the icebox. Oh, sit down. The stool by the window sounds. The one by the oven has a leg that'll tell you secrets."
"Wren's stool rocks."
"Wren's stool has a conscience. I heard all of it, by the way. The wall's thin on the bread side. Don't tell her. She thinks I have manners."
Jasper sits. Sun lies across his shoulders through glass as wavy as water. The oven's red seam glows at the back of the room, and the racks stand in their rows, and the slate hangs by the door. Bart turns to a board and lifts a knife.
The notebook lies open on Jasper's knee, the card in the inner pocket against his chest. His hand goes to the zipper and stops.
"Bart. May I record this? The card in my pocket takes audio and video. I'd set it on the sill with the lens on the room, and I'd delete anything you wanted gone." The offer comes out in the voice he uses on publicists, and he hears the polish on it. "I also have the notebook. Whichever you prefer."
Bart sets down the knife and turns, eyebrows climbing into the flour on his forehead.
"You're asking."
"Yes."
"Before you've done it."
"Wren was clear about the order."
"Nobody does it first." Bart slaps his palms together, and flour puffs between them. "Record it. Write it. Put the glass wherever you like, and I'll talk to the oven."
"The shelf by the crocks?"
"The crocs are shy. Try the sill."
Jasper rises and presses the amber ring. He sets the card on the sill beside a clay pot of dried lavender, leans toward the room, and props the bookplate against the pot because his ribs ache from clamping it. His thumb leaves a black print on the glass.
Bart eyes the bookplate. "That's a good heron."
"The leg's wrong."
"That's why it's good." He is kneading again before Jasper reaches the stool. "You've been to Wren's." He nods at the thumb. "She gets everybody. First morning on her step, and by breakfast you're wearing her ink. Eat. Nobody should talk about bread on an empty stomach."
He reaches under the table and comes up with the heel of a loaf, the crust dark and cracked, the crumb glistening where he has torn it. Three strides, and it lands in Jasper's free hand.
"That's from yesterday's bake. Don't look at me like that. Day-old is the honest hour. Fresh bread lies. It's all steam and butter. A day later it tells you what it is."
The heel is dense in the palm. Jasper bites, and the crust shatters against his teeth. Salt, then a sour that lingers, then smoke, and the crumb clings to the roof of his mouth until he works it loose with his tongue. He chews for a long time. Marlow would have supplied the sodium count and a pairing.
"It's good."
"It's honest. Different thing. Keep chewing."
Jasper chews. The notebook slides on his knee, and he pins it with his forearm.
"I wanted to ask about the founding," he says. "How the town started. I've been told it was deliberate. I'd like the version you know."
"Ah." Bart sets both hands flat on the table and leans on them. "The founding. People ask for the founding the way they ask for the time. They want a number and a face. I'll give you the one that comes to mind first, and then you can have the others."
"How many others?"
"Four, depending on the hour." He lifts a finger, white to the knuckle. "Version the first. Nineteen people on a bus. The bus was electric, I'm told, and the last one in the county with a human driver, my aunt Perpetua. It died at the top of the hill where the road bends past the creek. Dead battery. Nineteen people stood at the roadside looking at a valley with no screens in it, and Sylvie said, We could stay."
Jasper's pen scratches across the page. "Sylvie said that."
"So the story goes. Aunt Perpetua claimed it was her idea. She claimed it at every holiday until the day she died, and you didn't correct a woman who was carving." Bart straightens and kneads again. "In the second, it's a kitchen table and a pot of lentils. They'd rented a farmhouse, nine of them, to get away from a conference. The stove was terrible. Somebody proposed a rule: nothing that thinks for you at this table. Somebody else extended it to the house. Then the yard. Then the road. By midnight the rule covered the hill, Sylvie stood on a chair, and the lentils had gone cold."
Jasper writes, "Bus." Lentils. His pen skips on the second word, and he presses harder. "That's two."
"Three. The third has the suitcase. Sylvie walked out of an office downtown with her seed collection in a suitcase, the kind with a brass latch. She says she walked six hundred miles. I've done the arithmetic, and I don't believe it. She says she was a good walker."
"That's a long way to carry seeds."
"Seeds are light." Bart shrugs, and flour lifts off his shoulders and hangs in the sun. "My mother's is the last, and you can believe it or not. She said they came for the bread."
The pen stops. "The bread."
"The oven was here first. My mother's mother ran a roadside stall on this hill when it was nothing but a hill, selling loaves to people driving through to somewhere else. One day nineteen people arrived on foot, or by bus, depending on who's telling it. They were tired. My grandmother handed each of them a loaf and told them they could sleep in the barn." The grin comes back, wide and floury. "They never left. According to my mother, the council and the creed grew out of a barn full of strangers grateful for a warm loaf."
"That sounds too convenient."
"It's too convenient. It's my mother's." Bart slaps the dough. "I'm not saying it's true. She believed it, and she baked like she believed it."
Four lines in Jasper's crooked script, one founding apiece: the bus, the lentils, the suitcase, the barn. They disagree on the headcount (nineteen, nine, one) and on the place (a road, a house, a city, a stall). He draws a bracket around them.
"Which one is true?"
"All of them. At different hours." Bart's hands keep moving. "You think the story of how a thing started is a fact, like the address of a house. It's a loaf. You bake it every day and it comes out different, because the flour's different and the weather's different. I told the bus story last week to a girl who wanted a bedtime tale. I told the lentil one to Hollis yesterday. He listened to the end, said, Hm, and bought two loaves. The suitcase I save for when Sylvie's in the room, so she can glare at me."
"Doesn't anyone write it down?"
"Sylvie's started a few times." Bart winks. "She writes it down, reads it back, and says, That's not how it happened. Then the page goes in the stove. I've warmed my hands on at least four founding documents."
Jasper lowers the pen. Heat from the oven presses the back of his neck. Nobody in the city ever handed him four versions of a fact and declined to rank them. Crumbs lie in a drift on his knee.
"Then how do I write it?"
"How do you write what?"
"The story. If the town's origin changes with who tells it and when."
"Write that." Bart frowns, his brows drawn together, the dough forgotten under his hands. "Write that it changes."
"A reader wants a through-line."
"A reader wants a through-line because someone taught him to. You'll find the real one. It's in every version." He lifts the dough, a round glossy ball, and turns it in the light. "Somebody was tired. Somebody said, We could stay. Somebody fed them. That's the loaf under all the loaves."
Jasper writes it down, three short lines. It would open a feature. It would also cost Bart a line he gave away for nothing, and Bart has not looked at the card on the sill once.
The back doorway darkens.
A man in a wool cap fills it, a crate of eggs on each hip, the straw sticking out between the shells. A brown-and-white dog stands behind his knees. Biscuit's head comes up from the flour sack. The dog sits at the threshold with great dignity and does not cross it, and the two animals consider each other across ten feet of floor.
"You old liar," Bart says warmly. "Put them on the end."
The egg man sets the crates on the table's far corner and straightens with a hand pressed to the small of his back. Mud has dried grey to the knees of his trousers, and his eyes are red-rimmed. He looks at Jasper, then at the amber ring glowing on the sill, and his jaw works.
"Is that thing on?"
"It is," Jasper says. He stands. "Bart said yes. I'm asking you. If you want it off, I'll turn it off."
The egg man's gaze goes from the card to Jasper's face and stays there. "You turned around to ask."
"I did."
"Hm." He tips his cap back an inch. "Leave it on. Don't film my dog."
"I won't film your dog."
"She's shy." On the threshold, the dog yawns, showing a curl of pink tongue. "Bart, the usual."
"Sit." Bart has already left the dough. He crosses to a rack and lifts down a dark, tight loaf crusted with caraway, and tears off the heel. He does not hand it over. He eats it himself, standing with his eyes closed, his jaw working slowly.
Jasper opens his mouth. Biscuit, under the sack, thumps his tail once. Jasper closes his mouth.
Bart swallows. His eyes stay shut for another breath.
"Sheep," he says. "A ewe. You sat up with her."
"The fourth one," the egg man says. "I told you the third."
"You told me the third last week. It's the fourth." Bart opens his eyes. "She didn't make it. You buried her before breakfast, and you came here and didn't want to say, so you picked the caraway because it's the one you hate. You like to be hurt a little on days like this."
The egg man says nothing. He takes his cap off, turns it in his hands, and puts it back on.
"Mud on your knees," Jasper says, before he can stop it.
Bart's laugh booms against the rafters. "He caught me!" He thumps the table, and a crate of eggs shivers. "The mud was half of it. The other half is that nobody orders the caraway on a good day. But the mud was half."
"Half?" The egg man's voice is rough. "It was all mud. You've been wrong about my moods for thirty years."
"I've been right about nineteen of them. That's enough to keep the legend going." Bart hands over the whole loaf, and the egg man tucks it under his arm. Bart steps to the slate by the door and lifts the chalk from its string. "Two dozen eggs. That's nine ticks on your side. A loaf, one tick off. And I'm writing off the caraway."
"Write off the caraway," the egg man mutters.
Bart rubs out a mark with the heel of his hand, chalks a new one, and blows the dust away. The slate holds his thumbprints in a ghostly grey around every name.
The egg man nods to Jasper, touches his cap, and goes. The dog rises from the threshold and trots after him without a glance at Biscuit.
"No ledger?" Jasper asks. He looks at the slate. "No receipts? How do you know who owes what?"
"I know." Bart returns to the table and plunges his hands back in the dough. "The slate's for show. It reminds me when my head is wrong. Credit's a memory with chalk on it. I give a man bread, I remember he owes bread, and he remembers he got it. If we both forget, we start fresh." He leans into the push. "In the city, I'd guess every loaf has its own paper trail."
"Every loaf has a score." Jasper stares at the silver smears on the slate. "Where it was made, how it was priced against forty others, who bought it twice. If you buy a loaf, you get a loaf, and three more are recommended."
"Three more." Bart whistles. "What if you'd like to be left with the one you've got?"
"It tells you what you'd like instead."
"And is it right?"
"Usually." The word sits on Jasper's tongue like a coin. "It's right about what I'd choose. I've never checked whether it's right about what I'd want."
Bart slows the dough with a long, thoughtful push, and for the first time in the conversation he does not answer.
He sets the ball in a wooden trough and covers it with a cloth. He drags over a heavier lump, grey and sticky, and plunges both hands in.
"This one's rye. It fights." He leans forward, and the dough drags at his wrists. "Everybody wants to know why we bother with the slow kind. Ask me."
"Why do you bother with the slow kind?"
"Because the slow kind is the only kind that's finished when it's finished." He heels the rye away from him and pulls it back. "Wren told you about the hair on the e. I've heard her tell it to four people, and it gets better each time. Mine's a different hair. I can't hurry a loaf. You can try. You'll get something that looks like bread and tastes like a damp mitten. A sourdough takes two days if I do it right. The starter has to wake. The dough rests, rises, rests, rises, and sits in the cold overnight and thinks about itself."
"The dough thinks?"
"The dough sits. I think, and the bread waits for me. A machine thinks, and you wait for it. Here it runs the other way. It's restful for the bread."
Jasper snorts.
"The starter's older than the town," Bart goes on. "That's the story I tell the children. It came in a jam jar on the lap of a woman on that bus, and she kept it inside her coat against her ribs for warmth. She hated that bus. She said it smelled of other people's nerves. She named the starter Mabel because she wanted something in her coat she didn't have to be afraid of. Mabel's in the crock by the oven. Hold still and you can hear her."
Jasper holds still.
"She's bubbling. It's a small sound. Like a pot with an idea in it."
The oven ticks. A fly crosses the sunlit pane and lands on the lavender. Under the room's noise, so faint it could be his own pulse, a pop and a hiss rise from the covered crock on the shelf. A bubble breaks, then another.
"She doesn't do anything for me," Bart says. "She does her work, I do mine, and we meet in the middle about four in the morning. Forty years I've been up at that hour. People ask if I mind. I'd mind more if somebody told me it wasn't necessary."
"You could automate it. A machine could feed her and hold her at temperature."
Bart turns a loaf on its board and taps the crust with a knuckle. "It could. Amara said the same to me when she first arrived. A thermostat would save my back, she said. I told her, Fine, and who'd know when Mabel's sulking?"
"Sulking?"
"Flat and slow, smelling of nail polish. You put your nose to the crock and you know. I know every day she's had since my mother handed her over." He lifts his hands from the dough and shows Jasper the palms, white and shining. "I've got a nose and a head that holds onto people. You want to know what Agnes ordered the spring her husband died? Seeded rye, nothing else, every day for a month. She never said a word, and I never asked. I kept the rye warm."
He goes quiet for a second or two. The crock pops on its shelf.
"I can tell you what every person in this town orders," he says. "What they ordered when they were happy. What they ordered after the funeral. It's all in here." He taps his temple and leaves a white thumbprint. "Nobody needs a record of it, because I'm the record."
The page in front of Jasper holds almost nothing. In the margin he has drawn a loaf, a round with four slashes, and the slashes have bled into the paper.
"That's a lot to carry."
"It's a lot of bread." Bart winks.
The rye yields. He rolls it into a ball, drops it into a second trough, and brushes his hands down his apron, leaving prints like moth wings across the cloth.
"You can't look away from dough," he says. "That's another one for you. Try it. Turn your back for a minute with a slab in your hand. When you turn around, the thing's collapsed or burned. I've watched it. Delphine's nephew came for a week when he was fourteen. He had a slab. I told him, Put it down while you work. He said he could multitask. By the fifth day he'd lost six loaves and half a thumbnail."
Jasper winces at the thumbnail.
"He left at the end of the week and never came back. Good boy. His eyes kept sliding to his pocket." Bart looks at the rafters. "I think about him sometimes. The dough wants your whole attention and waits patiently for it. Give it everything and it gives you a loaf. It's the only bargain I've found that holds."
Jasper flexes his right hand around the pen. He has attended to things for a living. He has attended to six at a time, with Marlow flagging the one that mattered. The sentence he formed about it sits behind his teeth, and the dough in front of him offers nothing to push against.
Jasper turns a page. The pen lies in the crease, and he has filled half a line. On the sill, the card's amber ring still glows. By tonight it will hold every word Bart has said, ready for an editor who has never smelled this room.
"Bart. A different question."
"I like those."
"What do people do here for entertainment? In the evenings, on a day off."
Bart rubs his hands together, and a mist of flour drifts down into the light.
"Oh, now you're asking." He counts on floury fingers. "Tuesday's the swap, down at the green, where you trade a pair of boots for a goat's worth of cheese and everyone lies about the boots. Thursday is grange night. You've heard about it, Wren's printing the notice, and it's mostly arguments about drainage. Cassius plays wherever the mood takes him: the grange porch, the school steps, a stranger's kitchen. You'll hear him from anywhere in town, so you'll know when. Friday is Argument Night, at the back of this shop. Nobody planned it. Put a dozen people in a room with a stove and it happens."
"What do they argue about?"
"Whether a lie told kindly is still a lie. Whether the creek has moved. Whether the egg man's telling the truth about his sheep. He isn't." He wipes his eyes again. "Saturday, the children do plays. They write them in about an hour, and the plays are all about us, and they're cruel and accurate. You'll be in one. You'll be played by Pim's brother, I imagine, in a jacket stuffed with a pillow."
Jasper laughs, a short bark that surprises the room. He writes: Argument Night. The egg man's sheep. He underlines the second line twice.
"And the rest of the time?" he asks. "On a night with nothing scheduled."
"We sit." Bart spreads his floury hands. "On porches. We drink something. Somebody mends a sock. Somebody tells a story we've all heard, and we all say, That's not how it went, and the teller says, Sit down, I'm getting to it." His hands stop on a lump of white dough. His head turns, and he gives Jasper the attention he gives a loaf to find out whether it's ready. "And you?"
"Me?"
"What do you do? For fun. When you're home."
Jasper starts to answer. A smooth line is ready: I'm a news person, so I read widely, I follow a few series. Halfway out, it is Marlow's phrasing, from the dinner party prompt she drafted for him in March. He stops.
"I watch things," he says.
"Good. What things?"
"Series. Documentaries. There's a drama everyone's watching about a family in a lighthouse."
"What happens in it?"
"There's a secret." The plot comes out as a blurb. "In the second season they open a door. It's well reviewed."
"What's it called?"
The title is gone. Three syllables, a long vowel in the middle, a poster with a blue lamp on it. Marlow always said it before he queued the episode, the way a friend names a thing you both already know. Months of watching, and he has never once needed to remember.
"Jasper Cole watches a lighthouse and cannot name it," he mutters. Then, louder: "I can't recall the title."
"Do you like it?"
"I watch it."
"That's not what I asked."
A tray cools on a rack with a small metal clink. Jasper looks at the slate by the door, at the columns of tallies. "I don't know," he says. "I think I do. It was recommended."
"By who?"
"By." The word catches. "By a system I use. It knows what I like."
"Does it?" Bart rests his forearms on the table. "What do you like?"
"It lists them. I could pull up the list."
"Pull it up, then."
Jasper's hand rises to the dent in his left ear before he can stop it. The cartilage is tender under his fingertip. He waits for the voice. A faint hot pulse beats in the hollow where the earpiece sat for eleven years, and under it, silence.
"I can't." His voice comes out thin. He lowers his hand to the notebook. "It's out of range."
"Then tell me one thing." Bart's hands rest on the dough. "What's the last thing you chose that nobody suggested? A meal. A street you took home."
"I chose the jacket."
"Did you?"
The jacket hangs on Jasper's shoulders, wrinkled and expensive. A clerk held up two of them. A voice in his ear said, The charcoal photographs better on camera. He said, Then the charcoal.
"No," Jasper says.
Bart folds the white dough once, twice, and sets it in its trough. "That's all right. Come here."
"Where?"
"Around the table. Bring the notebook if it's a comfort."
Jasper rises and crosses the floor, and his boots leave a line of small dark prints in the flour. Bart waves him to the near end of the long table, where the racks run from floor to ceiling. Nine kinds of bread lie on the boards in front of him, still warm, scored in spirals or slashed with a single blade.
"Pick one."
"Which?"
"Whichever."
Jasper stands with his hand half raised and the notebook against his hip. A question stalls behind his teeth: which one has the lowest glycemic load, which one pairs with the day's sleep. His hand rises toward his ear and drops.
Heat ripples off the loaves. The smell wraps him: scorched crust, sour dough, a thread of honey from somewhere on the lower rack. A fat bead of sweat slides from his hairline to his jaw. He wipes it with his knuckle, and the knuckle comes away grey with flour and ink.
"Take your time," Bart says from the oven. He stands with his back to the room, peering through the crack in the iron door. "The bread doesn't mind."
Jasper scans the long loaf, then the round one, the way he scans a headline, for the angle. His hand stays at his hip. The long one is handsome. The round one is handsomer. He cannot say what either would taste like to the man standing here, only what each would look like in a photograph. He lifts his hand toward the seeded loaf and stops. It looks like the one a person would choose. A person who photographs well.
He lowers his hand.
His breath comes shallow. He has made ten thousand choices a week for eleven years, and each one arrived already chosen, the way a coat arrives on a hanger. The loaves lie in their rows. Nobody tells him what he wants. He turns his head, and the room goes on being a room: a stove, a slate, a dog's dark flank under the table.
At the end of the last board, tucked behind the others, lies a roll. The split across its top runs wider on one side, and one corner has charred black, a few seeds clinging to the char. It is the ugliest thing in the room. It looks like something that happened to the oven.
"That one."
He lifts it from the board. Bart turns from the oven.
"Which?"
"The burnt one."
Bart goes still. His hand drops from the iron door and hangs at his side.
"Why that one?"
"I don't know." The roll is hot and greasy in Jasper's palm. "I like how it came out."
"I made that one in a mood." Bart crosses the floor and stops at his elbow. "After a rough night a man makes a roll like that, sets it at the end where nobody will notice, and doesn't throw it out. That one's mine. Nobody ever picks it."
"Should I give it back?"
"Eat it. Go on."
Jasper bites. The charred corner is bitter and tastes of coal. Under it the crumb is soft and sweet, the color of candle wax, with a tang of long fermenting. The seeds crack between his molars. The flavors keep trading places as he chews, and he swallows and bites again.
His thumb has left a black whorl on the gold crust. He studies it.
"Ink on bread," Bart says. "You'll fit in by Friday."
Jasper laughs, and it comes out wet and cracked. He lifts the back of his wrist to his mouth, and crumbs fall to the floor. Weight settles on his left boot.
Biscuit lies stretched beneath the worktable with his chin on Jasper's boot, his inside-out ear flopped across the flour. His eyes are half closed. His tail thumps the table leg once.
"When did you get there?"
Biscuit thumps again without opening his eyes.
"He does that." Bart lowers himself onto a stool with a grunt. "Goes under, turns up. I stopped asking about the arrangements long ago. He knows when a person needs a warm foot."
Jasper stands with the roll hanging at his side. The floor is warm through his soles. The dog's chin presses on his boot, and the smell of bread has worked into his collar. In the road, a hen announces something, and a child shouts back at it.
He crosses to the sill and presses the amber ring. The glow dies. He picks up the bookplate and tucks it into the back of the notebook against Wren's crooked-e proof. Biscuit's chin slides off his boot and finds it again when he returns.
"Done?" Bart asks.
"Done."
"You don't need it?"
"I'll write it down." Jasper flexes his hand and takes the stool across from Bart. It does not rock. "What's left of it."
"Good." Bart tears a second roll from the rack behind him, a plain round one, and sets it on the table between them. "Eat that too. You'll want it."
"Is this a test?"
"It's breakfast."
Jasper tears the roll in half, and steam climbs from the crumb. For a while neither of them speaks. In the road a cart creaks past, loaded with something that clinks. A woman calls a name, and a child answers, and nobody hurries. The sun has crept off his shoulders and onto the table, and it warms the back of his hand where the ink has dried.
Bart watches him eat, hands folded on his belly, with the steady look he gives a rising loaf.
"I'd say you're having a day where somebody hands you a chair and you check it for tacks."
Jasper stops chewing.
"No tacks," Bart says. "I'm telling you what the bread says. You came in braced. You've got the shoulders of a man who's been told for years where to sit. A good many people come in like that. They leave an hour later and they've stopped checking the chairs." He leans back. "You can tell me I'm wrong."
Jasper swallows. The bread sits warm in his chest.
"You're not wrong."
"No." Bart rubs his belly. "I usually am, about half the time. I still get a good look at the faces."
Jasper opens the notebook. The page holds his founding stories in their bracket, the loaf with its claw marks, and Bart's three short lines. Below them lie two inches of empty paper.
He sets the pen to the line beneath and writes the date, because it is something to write. Then: Bart. Bakery. On the next line: What I like:
The ink pools after the colon.
Across the table, Bart hums a few bars with no tune. Biscuit's flank lifts against Jasper's boot and falls. The brick ticks as it cools.
The pen hovers above the empty line, and Jasper holds it there.