Chapter 24: Sunday Bread

On Sunday morning the parish kitchen smelled the way it always had, of flour and hot stone.

I tied on my apron at six and shaped forty loaves with the same three women who had said nothing to me for a month.

Today they talked all at once.

One of them gave me a heel of the first loaf, still too hot to hold.

"For the steps," she said. "Bring them back warm."

Nerina came in at half past seven in an old dress of mine, with her curls tied up in a dish towel.

"I can't make bread," she said.

"Nobody asked you to."

"Then what do I do?"

"You carry the basket."

She took it from me with great dignity, and dropped a loaf on her foot.

By eight, the steps of San Domenico were gold with early sun.

The square was nearly empty, apart from a few old women going in to the first Mass and a boy on a bicycle.

On the third step, against the wall, in the hollow in the stone, sat an old man.

He had a gray coat, a gray dog and a hat on the ground in front of him with three coins in it.

I had not seen him before.

"New," said Santo, behind me.

"New," I agreed.

He had come up the street with his hands in his coat, and he stopped a step below me.

He wore a plain gray coat of his own, an old one, kept in a wardrobe at the cliff house for no reason he had ever explained.