Original fiction · Chapter 1 of 2
The Name Under the Bread Box
The old recipe card slid out from under the bread box when I lifted it to wipe the counter. There was a butter stain over the oven temperature and a name written in pencil along the bottom.
It wasn't my grandmother's.
The bakery had belonged to my grandmother for forty years. Her bread was the reason the place had survived a supermarket opening across the street, two floods and the year a delivery van went through our front window. People called it Anna's Sunday loaf even though she made it six days a week.
I'd inherited the shop in May. By September I was late on the commercial rent, and I had begun to count how many loaves I could fit in the oven if I stopped making everything else. A local grocery store had asked about carrying the bread. I had an agreement on my desk that would have put Grandma's name on four hundred wrappers a week.
At six a woman came in through the back door. She carried a paper bag that had been folded over twice. I recognized her as the woman who bought one end loaf every Wednesday and always paid in coins.
“I think you've found my card,” she said.
She put her bag down and told me her name was Edith. It was the name on the recipe.
I asked why her card was in our bread box.
“Because your grandmother always made the dough too wet,” she said. “I wrote it out after I caught her trying to measure flour with a teacup.”
I laughed before I realized she was serious. She showed me a second card, from the bag, with the same measurements and the same stain across one corner. Underneath was a photograph of her and Grandma in the bakery kitchen. They were both young. Grandma was holding a loaf upside down. Edith had her head thrown back, laughing.
“Were you partners?”
Edith took off her coat and set it on the stool by the mixer. “That's a good question.”
She brought out one more paper. It was the bakery's first lease. Grandma's name was at the top. Edith's was at the bottom beside the address of an apartment I knew Grandma had lived in alone.
Edith waited while I read the next line.
She had signed as my grandmother's sister.
