Chapter 20: Pell Street

Wilda didn't box up anything.

She stood in the shop that night with her hands on her hips and looked at the long table.

"How many people does that seat?" she asked Orrin.

"Twelve."

"How many if you put it in the street?"

He looked at her for a long moment.

"As many as you've got," he said.

On Friday at five in the morning, Pell Street was full.

The long table ran across the road from curb to curb, scaffold boards on sawhorses, in front of Quenby's door.

Behind it was a second table, made of four more boards the carvers had carried down the hill at midnight.

Behind that, the laundromat man had set out his folding counter.

Behind that, somebody had dragged out a picnic table I'd never seen before.

The whole street was tables.

Every one of them had buns on it.

I'd baked from ten at night with Wilda swearing at the ovens and the three brides knotting dough, badly, and the old carver washing trays.

We'd made eleven hundred cardamom buns.

The smell went all the way to the harbor.

People came.

The dock workers came off the night shift in their boots.

The nurses came off nights in their scrubs.

The crossing guard came in her orange vest and set up a coffee urn on the hood of a parked car.

The wolf-kin bride came with half her pack, which had apparently decided it liked her now.

Orrin stood at the end of the long table, behind the boards, with his wings folded and a coffee in his hand.

"Is this legal?" I asked him.

"It's breakfast," he said.

At seven o'clock, two trucks turned into the bottom of Pell Street.

Hallam Security on the doors.

A dozen men in work gloves in the back.

They stopped at the first table.

The foreman climbed down with a clipboard and looked at the tables, and the buns, and the three hundred people sitting at them.

"I've got an order to clear this building," he said.

"Sure," Wilda said. "Have a bun first."

"Ma'am, I can't..."

"They're free," Wilda said. "Today only. Everybody gets one."

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