The following week, Ryan sat in a small attorney's office and signed the documents that gave him responsibility for the business. He bought Norah's remaining equipment and fixtures, assumed the lease after negotiating a limited repair period, and agreed to make modest installments to Norah while the business found its footing. The transfer did not make him wealthy or even financially comfortable. It gave him a set of keys, a stack of obligations, and the right to attempt the thing he had wanted for most of his adult life.
He drove to Fuller Street after signing and sat in the pickup until the sun began to lower. On the passenger seat were the documents that said he owned something, though what he owned seemed to consist mostly of problems. He thought of Howerin Foods, where his skill had been useful but his future had depended on the judgment of people who did not know him. Now the responsibility was his, and the fear was his, but so was the choice.
The next morning he tore the butcher paper from the windows. Pale sunlight crossed the old tile and revealed the path Norah's shoes had worn into the floor over thirty years. Ryan stood where the light fell and imagined his mother tasting bread there, Sophie finishing her homework near the window, and customers coming in because they trusted what he made. Then he rolled up his sleeves and began cleaning.
For the first four days, Ryan did not bake anything he intended to sell. He washed shelves, emptied old storage containers, documented every repair, and learned which outlets could safely support the equipment that remained. He hired a licensed electrician to inspect the circuits and a plumber to address the leak beneath the sink, even though the invoices made him wince. He knew too much about the consequences of false economies to build a food business around equipment he had not checked.
Norah came by on the second day with a broom and a paper bag of sandwiches. She did not ask permission to begin sweeping, and Ryan did not insult either of them by pretending he could do everything alone. The two worked in companionable silence until late afternoon, when the light reached the far corner of the kitchen. Norah glanced toward the repaired oven and asked what he intended to bake first.
"Bread that people can afford to eat every day," Ryan said. Norah nodded, as though the answer mattered more than a grand speech about becoming the town's best baker. She warned him that cheap and affordable were not the same thing, because flour, labor, and rent had to come from somewhere. Ryan opened his notebook and showed her his first cost estimates, and she took a pencil to several of his assumptions without sparing his feelings.
He had underestimated packaging, forgotten the time lost between batches, and made no allowance for bread that would not sell. Norah crossed out an optimistic sales target and replaced it with the number her shop had been selling just before she closed. "Start with what you can survive," she told him. "You can dream about what you might become after the next rent check clears."