Chapter 18: Above the Bakery

"Paragraph six," my lawyer said on the phone. "You read paragraph six?"

"I read every single word."

"Good. Don't answer him. Don't call him. Let him put that in front of a judge on June ninth." She coughed. "He just handed me my closing argument."

So I didn't answer him.

I made a list instead, on the back of the PDF.

Money in: zero.

Money out: rent, food, Clara's parking at clinic twice a week.

Then I opened my bakery's page for the first time since March.

I'd been afraid to.

The four hundred one-star reviews were still there.

But on top of them, since the night of the news, there were five-star reviews I couldn't count.

"I've never eaten your cake. I'm ordering one. Sorry, Columbus owes you."

"Saw you on the news. My son's birthday is May 9. Do you do dinosaurs?"

"I'm the grandmother from the end of the hall. Best lemon cake I ever ate, and I ate it on a transplant floor."

My inbox had thirty-one cake requests.

I sat on the mattress and cried, and Clara patted my back.

"Are those good tears?"

"Those are good tears."

"Then stop. You have to bake."

I called the landlord.

He was an old man who'd bought a coconut cake from me every Friday for four years.

"Rent's waived through May," he said before I could ask. "June, we'll talk. Turn the oven back on."

On the first Saturday in May, I turned it back on.

The shop had been shut for four months.

Dust on every shelf. Dead flies in the window. The mixers upstairs, the floors gray, a smell like a basement.

At nine the bell over the door jingled.

The mom across the hall walked in with a bucket in each hand and her son behind her in his ball cap.

"We're at the family house till day one hundred," she said. "I'm bored out of my mind. Where's the bleach?"

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