Chapter 21: Whelan's

The sign went up at five in the morning, and the sign painter had spelled my name right.

WHELAN & DUNLEAVY, it said, in cream letters on dark green, over the door of the shop on Brady Street.

Agnes stood on the sidewalk in her quilted vest with her arms folded and read it three times.

"It should say Dunleavy first," she said. "I'm older."

"You're the one who made me put your name on it."

"I made you put it second, so you'd have to look at it every morning and remember I was right."

"About what?"

"Everything," said Agnes. "Get inside. We have four hundred loaves."

In the month since the gala she had signed half the shop over to me, one afternoon at her kitchen table, with a pen she borrowed from the flour man.

I had paid her nothing for it.

She had said a girl who came back to her ovens with two hundred dollars had paid enough.

Afterward she had cried into a dish towel and denied it.

My mother's cake pans hung from a rack over the front counter now.

The second deck oven had come in on a truck on Tuesday.

The counter itself was new.

Gabe had built it in his shed out of the long cedar planks from a boat that could not be saved.

It had a varnished top and a lip along the front to keep the trays from sliding.

He had carried it into the shop with two of his men and set it down without a word about it.

I had run my hand along it for ten minutes.

He had stood in the doorway with his jaw healed and his hands in his pockets.

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