A Door Left Ajar at Marlow’s Bakery

The bell above the door had a way of announcing the morning with a tiny, apologetic clink, as though it were aware that the world outside moved hurriedly while Marlow’s Bakery preferred the slow, insistently patient business of rising dough. Etta Marlow liked the clink. It measured the margin of tolerance she allowed herself before the day insisted upon company. She turned it into a ritual: one quick sweep of the wooden paddle across a battered oak counter, a long, slow breath, and then the careful counting of the large brown sacks stacked like quiet sentries behind the oven.

She checked Mabel first. The sourdough starter lived in a squat glass jar with a faded ribbon tied askew around its neck; Etta spoke to it as she fed it, not because she believed it answered back but because naming things made them less liable to sudden disappearance. Mabel was a person in practice—warm, bellied, bright at the edges—she promised rise and tang, a steady constancy Etta liked to touch in mornings that felt uncertain elsewhere. Mabel burbled obligingly. Etta measured out flour with hands that had long since learned how to read the little hills and valleys on a kitchen scale without looking down. She cracked eggs with the deft flick of a seamstress, whisked with elbows, folded like someone folding a letter one time too many.

Outside, the town was settling itself awake. A gull called from the harbor as the first tram rattled toward the market square. The municipal clock chimed in an odd pattern—the old keeper who wound it had lost the topmost tooth of the gear wheel last spring and patched it with a sliver of bone from an old oar; it chimed an extra quaver at six every morning now, and everyone pretended not to notice. There were other stranger customs: on Thursdays the fishmonger set out saucers of citrus peel for the bakers because citrus grease, as local lore insisted, made pastry flake politely. Etta kept a saucer beside the sink and never said no to an Oaken Wharf lemon peel when it arrived.

The oven warmed to its accustomed temper, a patient, slow glow that required coaxing and attention. Etta coaxed. She wiped the counter with a cloth and felt the small, exact pleasure of a surface returned to order. Flour dusted the air like a shy snowfall. From the back alleyway came Sam’s boots, thudding in a rhythm he thought was jaunty, and the bell gave its clink again.