Chapter 5: The Corner on Archer

I told Babcia I had sold a few things.

"What things?" she said.

"Some things I didn't need."

There was a silence on the line that was longer than the lie.

"Eat something," she said, and hung up.

By the first week of November I had a lawyer, a retainer paid in full, and nowhere to bake.

Marta found the corner.

It was on Archer Avenue, two blocks past the Polish deli.

The storefront was brick, with a faded green awning and a window so dirty the light came through brown.

The sign over the door said NOWACKI BAKERY in letters that had lost their gold.

"Closed since 2011," Marta said, working the key she had borrowed. "The landlord's supposed to meet us."

"I don't need the whole building."

"You need ovens."

She pushed the door open, and a smell came out of the dark that stopped me in the doorway.

It was old flour and cold brick.

Under it was something sweet that had burned into the walls forty years ago and never left.

I stepped in.

A deck oven stood against the back wall under a plastic tarp, big as a car.

The floor was a black-and-white tile checkerboard, cracked at the center.

I put my palm flat on the long wooden counter and a line of dust came off in my hand.

"Somebody was good here," I said.

"My father," said a man behind me.

I turned.

He stood in the doorway with the gray daylight at his back.

He was a big man in a canvas work jacket, with a coil of wire over one shoulder.

He was maybe thirty-seven, broad through the chest, with a buzzed head going gray at the temples.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Humiliated Me in Public, So His Regret Pays by the Tear from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.