Lacey's Arc

Chapter 5 of 8

The rolls sat under cloth by dawn, and Lacey touched one. Cold. The glossy buns had gone hard overnight. Market day was still days off. By Saturday these would be stale bricks, and no one buys a cold roll off a shelf. She had the inventory and no way to keep it good. She found the bakery owner firing the big oven. "Bake them Saturday morning," the woman said, not looking up. "Dough keeps raw. Meat keeps raw. Hot bread sells itself." She tossed Lacey a scraper. "Prep now. Finish fresh." So Lacey did. She wrapped raw sausage in raw dough and laid the pale rolls in trays. She stacked the trays cold. The baked batch she gave to the farmhands, who ate them grinning. The spotted piglet got the burnt end of one through the pen rail and squealed for more. For two days she prepped and waited. Saturday came loud. People crowded the porch before Lacey had the oven hot. She baked in waves, pulling trays of browned rolls, loading them while they steamed. The smell did the work. A line formed down the planks. She wrapped rolls in paper and made change until her hands shook. By noon the first batches were gone and she was baking faster than she could sell. Someone asked about the flowers. Lacey had cut a mess of blooms that morning, reds and yellows and purple, and bunched them in a milk can for color. A woman bought the whole bunch. Then another wanted one. So Lacey tore the bunch apart and sold stems one by one beside the rolls. The crafts on the shelf moved too, a wreath, two pendants. But the rolls and the flowers emptied her stock by late afternoon. She counted the cash twice. Hundreds of rolls sold. Every flower gone. Enough to pay the farmer his split, enough to keep the corner, enough to start a real pile toward the cafe she wanted. She sat on the step and laughed at nothing. Billy came up the planks as the crowd thinned. He had helped her from the day the flood took her car, quiet, always showing up. Now he held a bunch of flowers behind his back, fingers tight on the stems. His ears were red before he said a word. "You sold out," he said. "We sold out." He pulled the flowers around front and pushed them at her, fast, like he might lose his nerve. "These aren't for selling." He turned his cap in his free hand. "Go somewhere with me. Not work. A day that's just ours." Lacey took the flowers. She looked at the empty trays, the full cash box, this quiet man who'd bet his family's wheat on her. "Yes," she said. He grinned, the shy gone for a second. But his thumb worried the brim of his cap. The wheat was still a debt he owed his family, and payday had just made it real.