第6章 The Room Over the Bakery

Junie Denby had been running numbers since Thanksgiving, and the numbers were not as bad as she had told the circle, which was its own kind of lie, and she had been telling it for so long that she had nearly come to believe the version where she was brave. The truth looked like this. Halberd Properties had offered enough money to clear the line of credit, put something aside, and start again in a smaller storefront three doors down, where the rent was two-thirds and the foot traffic was worse. It was not a fortune. It was an exit. Her ex-husband had taken the house in the divorce and left her the building in a settlement that she had agreed to because she had wanted it over, and she had spent eight years making the building pay for itself out of sheer spite, and spite was, if nothing else, a fuel that did not run out. But the back room. That was the problem with the offer. She could not figure out where the back room went in the arithmetic. She had started the circle in that room with Glenna and three other women and a card table, back when the hardware store had the space and let them use it for nothing and the radiator knocked like a tired man. When the store closed, the circle had drifted, and Junie had offered the room, and Glenna had begun slipping her the check with the memo line that said coffee, and the two of them had never once said the real thing out loud. The room was not a business. You could not put a room on a balance sheet and get a number back. So in February, when Romy Fraley came in at seven in the morning, before opening, and said she needed work, Junie did the arithmetic on a napkin, which was how she did everything important. "I've got two nights a week cleaning," Junie said. "The floors and the ovens. Twenty an hour, four hours a night. It's not what you were making." "It'll do," Romy said. "And there's the room upstairs. The one I use for storage. It's got a window and a radiator and a bed frame, and no bed, and the ceiling slopes, and a mouse died in the wall in 2019 and I never found it." Romy looked at her. "Here's what I'm not going to do," Junie said. "I'm not going to say the room is part of the job, because then it's charity with a timecard, and you'd hate it, and I'd hate it. I'm going to rent it to you. Two hundred a month, off the top of the cleaning. You pay nothing out of pocket until you've got day work. When you've got day work, you pay me the whole two hundred like a regular tenant, and I'll charge you a late fee if you're late, because that's what landlords do, and I've always wanted to be a landlord." Romy laughed. It was a short, cracked sound and it surprised them both. "I don't have furniture," she said. "I have a bed frame and a mattress that's older than my daughter and a dresser with a broken drawer. The drawer can be fixed. I bet you can fix it." "I can fix it." "Then it's rented," Junie said, and held out her hand, and Romy shook it, and that was the whole lease. --- Moving took forty minutes, because Romy's life fit in four grocery bags and a plastic bin, and the rest of what she had owned was in a storage unit in the county seat that she had stopped paying for in November, which meant it had probably already been auctioned, which she had decided not to think about until she was indoors. The room over the bakery had one window facing Court Street and a sloped ceiling and a radiator that worked. The floorboards spoke. The light in the afternoon came in at an angle and lay across the bare mattress like something laid out to dry. She stood in the middle of it with her hands at her sides and looked at the walls for a while. Then she opened the January book, which she had not finished, and sat on the mattress with her back against the wall, and read it to the last page in one sitting, and at the end, when the woman in the book sold her mother's house and drove away and did not look back, Romy closed it and set it on the floor and went to sleep at eight o'clock at night, in a bed, indoors, for the first time since September. She was awake by four. She was always awake by four. That was the schedule her body had learned in the car, and it did not want to unlearn it. So she got up, and she went down to the bakery, and she filled a bucket, and she cleaned the ovens, which were hers to clean on Tuesdays and Fridays and which it was not yet Tuesday or Friday, and when Junie came down at five to start the bread she found Romy on her knees in front of the ovens with the radio on low, and did not say anything, only started the dough beside her, and the two of them worked in the dark kitchen without talking until the first light came up over the Carding. --- The February meeting was the first one Romy had attended twice in a row in a year and a half. She came at half past one, as asked, and carried chairs. Glenna sat by the window with the teapot and did not comment on any of it. The February book was called *The Ordinary Dead*, and it was about a man who dug graves in a small town and knew every family's history by which plots they had bought, and it was quiet and funny and a little cruel, and it gave the circle something to fight about that had nothing to do with any of them. Romy read her passage. It was about the gravedigger measuring a man's life not in years but in the number of winters he had kept his sidewalks clear, and when she finished, Annette said, from across the room, without looking up, "That's a good one," and Romy said, "Thank you," and that was the whole apology, on both sides, and it was enough. Afterward, when the others had gone, Romy stacked the cups and wiped the two-doors table and fixed the wobble in the west chair with a folded matchbook, which was better than a sugar packet and which she had been meaning to do for years. Glenna watched her from the window chair. "You know what I like about you," Glenna said. "Tell me." "You put things back the way they were," Glenna said. "Most people don't." And she picked up her bag and her notebook and went out through the bakery and into the cold, and Romy stood in the empty room for a minute, looking at the ring of eight mismatched chairs, each one of which she had carried in that afternoon, and then she turned off the light. ---