Chapter 5: Four in the Morning

At four in the morning the bakery on Seventh Avenue was the only lit window on the street.

Dom held the door for me.

I walked in with my hair still damp from the shower and my father's old cardigan over my shoulders.

Neither of us had slept.

He had not said a word about the garage, and I had not asked him to.

The baker was an old man in a white apron with flour up to his elbows.

He came around the counter when he saw me.

"Mija," he said. "Mija, mija."

He took both my hands in his, and they were hot from the ovens.

"Your father stood right there," he said, pointing to the end of the glass case.

"Every Thursday, a dozen guava. He ate one in the car before he got home."

My throat closed.

"I'll have a cafecito and a tostada, please," I said.

He brought me both and would not take Dom's money.

"For forty days nothing from the Sciandra family is paid for in this shop," he said. "That is how we do it."

I sat at the little counter and drank the coffee in two swallows.

Dom stood behind my stool, and I felt his hand come to rest low on my back.

It was a light touch, over the cardigan, and it stayed.

I leaned into it.

"You were in the doorway an hour," I said quietly, so the baker would not hear. "You watched the whole thing."

"I did."

"Why?"

"Because I could not make myself go upstairs," Dom said.

His thumb moved once against my spine.

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