The shard of green glass sat right by the leg of the deep-freeze like a tooth that had fallen out of the house\u2019s mouth.<\/p>\n
I knew the count before I even bent down to pick it up. Seven years. That was the rule my grandmother kept hammering into my skull every time I dropped a salt cellar or looked at my face in a cracked dresser glass while she was greasing her cast iron. Seven years of hard grinding, of nothing going right, of bad weather and sour cream turning in the icebox before you even got halfway through the tub.<\/p>\n
I stayed on my knees for a long time on that splintered pine floor, just watching my own thumb turn white against the linoleum. My knees ached from the damp coming up through the floorboards of the rental house on Bayou Terrebonne. Wayne was out in the boat shed hammering away on an old Evinrude lower unit that had been leaking gear oil since the first freeze in November. Every three seconds you heard that flat, heavy iron-on-iron thud, and then nothing except the grackles screaming in the live oak out by the cistern.<\/p>\n
“You dropped something?” Wayne called out from the back. He didn’t even stop his hammer. He never stopped for anything I broke.<\/p>\n
“Nothing,” I said. My voice sounded thin, like dry corn husks rubbing together in a November wind.<\/p>\n
I wrapped the bigger pieces in an old grocery circular from the Thibodeaux Piggly Wiggly and shoved the whole bundle deep down at the bottom of the black plastic bin under the sink where the grease-trap smell always sat heavy and sour. But the damage was done. The math had started. Seven years from a Tuesday in March when the thermometer outside the screen door was stuck on forty-two degrees and the sky looked like an old dishcloth.<\/p>\n
By the second week, my shoulder started acting up again, right in the spot where I took that hard fall off the back of my uncle’s trailer back when George Bush was still in the White House. I took it as a sign. I started taking the long way round the parish road to the small mercantile down by the locks just so I didn’t have to walk under the old pecan tree where a limb had dropped two summers back. I watched my feet. I didn’t look up at the crows on the telephone lines. If a black cat crossed the ditch bank ahead of my truck, I pulled over and waited three minutes by the watch on my wrist. Three minutes by the sweep hand. I didn’t want to take any chances with seven years. Wayne thought I was losing my mind, but Wayne never had any patience for old ways. He just grunted and reached for another tin of sardines from the pantry shelf.<\/p>\n
The job posting didn’t look like much when I first saw it through the grease-filmed glass of the bakery on Main Street. It was printed on a half-sheet of yellow legal pad paper with a ballpoint pen that skipped on the letter e. Help wanted. Apply inside. Ask for Charlene.<\/p>\n
I didn’t need the work, not really, but I needed out of that kitchen where the floorboards were rotting under the icebox. I walked in at 9:40 on a Thursday morning with my coat buttoned all the way up to my chin because the wind off the marsh had a raw edge that got right down inside your bones. The place smelled of warm lard and burnt sugar, the kind of heavy, sweet smell that stays in your hair for three days no matter how many times you scrub it with Lava soap.<\/p>\n
Charlene was sitting behind the glass counter with a greasy ledger book open in her lap, licking the lead of her pencil before she wrote down what looked like egg prices. She didn’t look up when the bell on the door jangled.<\/p>\n
“We don’t open till ten,” she said. Her voice was like gravel sliding down a galvanized chute.<\/p>\n
“I saw the paper in the window,” I told her. I stayed right there by the door with my hands stuffed deep into my pockets so she wouldn’t see my knuckles shaking from the damp. “I can handle flour. I can keep books if you need it.”<\/p>\n
She finally looked up then. Her eyes were small and dark, like two dried plums tucked into dough, and she looked me up and down slow, taking in my boots with the salt rings around the heels and the wool scarf I’d knitted myself back when my eyes were better.<\/p>\n
“You married to one of the Landry boys?” she asked.<\/p>\n
“Wayne Landry,” I said.<\/p>\n
She made a little clicking sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth and went back to her ledger. “He’s lazy,” she said. “Hope you brought more gumption than he’s got.”<\/p>\n
That was how I started at the counter of the Main Street bakery. Sixty-four dollars a week and all the day-old buttermilk biscuits I could carry home in a grease-stained brown sack.<\/p>\n
The shop was narrow and dark, tucked right between the hardware store that smelled of creosote and the dry goods place where the old men sat on Coca-Cola crates and whittled pieces of cypress root down to nothing. The floor behind the counter had a slight dip in the middle where fifty years of bakers had stood turning out loaves of light bread, and if you weren’t paying attention, your right ankle would turn on you. I spent six hours a day wiping down white porcelain tables with a sour rag and listening to the flour-sifter rattle like an old Ford engine with a loose piston.<\/p>\n
Wayne didn’t like me going in there. He liked me home where the coffee pot stayed on the burner till it turned black and thick as tar. “You got no business standing on your feet for pennies,” he told me one night while we were sitting in the dark watching the headlights sweep across the ceiling from the trucks coming down the levee. “I’m making enough off the crawfish pots this spring.”<\/p>\n
“It’s something to do,” I said. I didn’t tell him about the mirror. I didn’t tell him how every time I passed the storefront window with its big gold letters that said *Boulangerie*, though nobody around here ever called it that, I checked my reflection in the dark glass to see if the bad luck had started showing up on my face yet like liver spots.<\/p>\n
The middle years blurred together like grease on a greasy apron. My mother passed in the back bedroom of the house on the bayou, and we spent four hundred dollars on flowers that wilted before the preacher even finished the twenty-third psalm. Wayne\u2019s boat motor finally blew a rod clean through the oil pan out near Turtle Bayou, and he spent three months sitting on the front porch with a bottle of bourbon between his boots, cussing the state of the country and everyone in it.<\/p>\n
I stayed at the bakery. Charlene died right there behind the counter with a pencil in her hand, her head tipped back against the calendar page for August, and her nephew sold the whole kit and caboodle to a man from New Orleans who wore white shirts with the sleeves rolled up and talked too fast about franchising out to Houma.<\/p>\n
His name was Eli. He was forty-two years old, with hair that was already going the color of a wet tin roof and hands that were too soft for a man who claimed he knew how to knead brioche dough. He walked into the shop on a Tuesday morning in October carrying a leather briefcase that looked like it cost more than our truck.<\/p>\n
“You’re the one who keeps the books straight,” he said, setting his briefcase down on the flour-dusted counter with a dry thud.<\/p>\n
“I keep what’s on the paper matching what’s in the tin,” I told him. I didn’t stop wiping down the glass. “If you’re looking to change the brand of shortening, don’t bother. The regular folks won’t touch the vegetable kind. They want lard or nothing.”<\/p>\n
He stood there for a minute, looking out the front window at the grey mist hanging over the shrimp docks across the street, and then he let out a short, dry breath that sounded almost like a laugh. “Good,” he said. “My name’s Eli.”<\/p>\n
We didn’t talk much for the first three years. He stayed in his office behind the flour room doing paperwork on a small folding table while I ran the front and dealt with the women coming in for the six-cent rolls and the old men who wanted to argue about the price of diesel. But sometimes, when the rain was coming down hard on the corrugated tin roof so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think, he’d come out and stand by the counter with a cup of black coffee in his hand, just watching the water run down the windowpane in fat, crooked lines.<\/p>\n
“You ever think about leaving this parish?” he asked me one afternoon when the power had gone out and we were sitting in the dim yellow light of a battery lantern, waiting for the line crews to clear a cypress branch off the wires.<\/p>\n
“Leave where?” I asked. I was sixty-one years old then. My hair was mostly grey, pulled back into a knot that never quite stayed pinned right, and my fingers felt stiff every time the humidity went over ninety. “This is where my people are buried. Out behind the Methodist church where the ground stays wet even in July.”<\/p>\n
“My wife left three years ago,” he said. He didn’t look at me when he said it. He just stared down at the black coffee in his paper cup. “Packed up a U-Haul while I was down in Houma buying flour. Left the kitchen light on and the back door wide open so the dogs got in and chewed up the dining room chairs.”<\/p>\n
I didn’t say anything to that for a long time. The lantern hummed in the quiet between us, that low, steady hiss that sounds like a hive of bees behind a wall.<\/p>\n
“You still got the house?” I asked finally.<\/p>\n
“Sold it,” he said. “Sold it to a man who keeps hogs. Now I live above the hardware store in two rooms that smell permanently of kerosene.”<\/p>\n
That was how it happened. Not all at once like in the picture shows, but slow and greasy like fat melting in a skillet. By the time Wayne had his second stroke out by the woodpile, the one that left him sitting in a wheelchair with his mouth hanging crooked to the left, Eli was already keeping his spare boots by my back door.<\/p>\n
Wayne didn’t care much by then. He’d lost the use of his right hand and spent most of his days staring out the screen door at the same patch of weeds where the old iron kettle used to sit. When Eli came by to help me get Wayne up the ramp into the Ford, Wayne just looked at him with those dull, watery eyes and spat a stream of tobacco juice into the dust.<\/p>\n
“You got a fool for a partner,” Wayne muttered to me once while I was spooning broth into him. “That man doesn’t even know how to set a trotline.”<\/p>\n
“He knows how to keep the books,” I said.<\/p>\n
The seven years were up on a Tuesday. I remember because it was the day the parish finally paved the shell road out by our place, and the big diesel rollers were out there grinding the oyster shells down into white powder that got into everything, our hair, our teeth, the corners of the kitchen table.<\/p>\n
I walked into the bakery at 6:00 AM, just like I’d done every morning since the year the glass broke. The shop was empty. Eli hadn’t come down from the rooms upstairs yet, and the ovens weren’t fired up. The room was cold, the kind of damp winter cold that smells of old flour sacks and rusted iron.<\/p>\n
I walked back to the small washroom behind the flour bins where the old cracked looking-glass hung on a bent copper wire from the days when Charlene was running the place. The crack still ran right down through the middle like a river on a county map, splitting my nose in two and cutting my left eye right out of the picture.<\/p>\n
I stood there for a long time, holding a wet rag in my hand, looking at that old split face in the glass. My skin looked like dry parchment, all lines and creases where the sun and the salt had beaten on it for sixty-four years.<\/p>\n
“Well,” I whispered to the glass.<\/p>\n
Eli came around the corner then, carrying his coat over his arm because the heater in the back had finally kicked on with a loud metallic bang. He stopped in the doorway when he saw me standing there staring at the split reflection.<\/p>\n
“You looking for something?” he asked. His voice was soft, the way it got when the weather was bad.<\/p>\n
I reached out with the corner of the rag and wiped a circle of dust off the glass right where my forehead met the crack.<\/p>\n
“No,” I said. I didn’t look back at him. “Just checking the math.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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