Pump was stuck. Should work now. The oven runs hotter on the right side. Might help. — JM
I read it approximately seventeen times.
He fixed something he didn't have to fix. He gave me information I needed. He did both without fanfare or expectation of gratitude, and somehow that's the part that makes my chest tight in an entirely different way..
And now I owe him.
Not the normal kind of owing. Not the “I’ll bake you a loaf of bread someday” kind of owing. The kind of owing that makes me want to create a ledger. A mental one, at least. A careful list of what he’s done so that I can balance it out, so that I’m not just… taking. So that I can make this transactional in a way that doesn’t feel like I’m accepting something I don’t deserve.
Entry - Jace: Water pump repair (labor + parts unknown)
I add it to my growing list of debts and inadequacies and reasons why I’m probably going to fail at this. But I also—and this is where I lose the thread of my own logic—something shifts. Slightly. Like someone quietly moved one card in a house of cards and the whole structure is still standing.
I read the note again.The oven runs hotter on the right side.
Then I go back into the bakery, and I open the oven door, and I start thinking about what I can do with that information.
Chapter 4
Jace
The bakery lights are still on.
It’s past nine. I drove past earlier after Dotty’s. The lights were off then. Now they’re on. Which means she’s in there doing something.
Piper had thoughts. Piper always has thoughts. She tilted her chair back and said “That's commitment to poor planning.”
Dotty answered, “It's commitment to not knowing where she was going.”
I drank my coffee and said nothing because I'd already met the woman in question, I already knew her name, and my dog had surrendered his dignity on her porch before eight a.m.
Some things don't need adding to.
Piper told her own story after that — Morris eating her rental car's side mirror her first week, standing in the parking lot staring at the damage, and that being the moment she realized she was going to stay. She said it like it was simple, like the decision had been obvious once she stopped pretending it wasn't.
It's a good story. The kind that makes sense in Ashwood Falls, where everything is slightly absurd and people stay anyway.
I wonder if Gabby stays. I wonder if she understands what staying means here.
And then I think about Edna’s will, about the 60-day clause, about the fact that I volunteered to maintain that cabin and that bakery just because my grandfather asked me to before he died, and the truth lands: I’m making this into something it’s not.
She’s not staying. She’s trying the clause. She’ll either make it or she won’t, and neither of those outcomes is my business.
Except I know what Edna wanted. I know because Hank told me, six months before the heart attack that killed him. He said, “Edna’s worried about the place. Worried nobody good will take it. Worried she’ll leave it and nobody’ll care.”
And I said, “It’s a building, Hank.”
And he said, “No. It’s a place that changes things. She wants it to change something for someone.”
I didn’t think much about it at the time. I was thinking about Hank’s heart, about the fact that he’d been tired for a year. I wasn’t thinking about Edna or her building or any of the responsibilities that were about to land on me.
But then Hank died. And then Edna did too. And somehow I became the person who maintains a cabin that doesn’t belong to me, for a clause that probably doesn’t matter to anyone but the woman who showed up in burgundy stilettos.
Piper asked how she was doing. They were still talking about her, the conversation drifting the way it does in Dotty's, everyone orbiting the same topic without quite admitting it.
"She's scared," Dotty said. "Trying not to show it. Making lists."
"The oven's going to wreck her," Piper said.