Chapter 4: Courtship Log

The courtship log was a green cloth book with numbered pages and a line at the bottom of each one for a witness.

Wilda signed the first page so hard she tore it.

"Witnessed," she wrote. "God help us all."

We worked out the rules on the bakery bench that first night.

Weeknights he'd come to Quenby's at midnight and sit with me while I baked.

Sundays, when the shop was closed, I'd go up the hill to the stoneyard.

He'd teach me something. I'd feed him. That was the deal.

"What are you going to teach me?" I asked.

"Stone."

"What am I supposed to do with stone?"

"Hit it," he said. "Carefully."

It turned out a seven-foot man takes up the whole back of a bakery.

He sat on Wilda's upturned crate with his knees at his chin and his wings folded tight so he wouldn't knock the sheet pans.

On the third night I made him knot buns.

His hands were huge and gray-veined and perfectly steady with a chisel.

With dough they were a disaster.

"It's a knot," I said. "You tie your boots, don't you?"

"My boots don't stick to me."

He held up a bun that looked like a drowned octopus.

"That's going in the case," I said.

"It is not."

"It's going in the case with a sign that says MADE BY A GARGOYLE, and somebody's going to pay double for it."

A nurse bought it at six fifteen for four dollars.

He didn't say anything when he saw the empty spot on the tray.

But his ears went faintly pink, and I didn't know gargoyle ears could do that.

Sundays were his.

He gave me a scrap of limestone the size of a loaf and a chisel with a handle worn smooth by somebody else's palm.

"My grandfather's," he said. "Don't drop it on your foot."

I dropped it on my foot.

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