Chapter 1 — THE COLD ROOM IS AWAKE

The first thing you learn about a bakery is that it is a night job pretending to be a morning job.

I started at half past two.

Gus Praeger started at one, and had started at one every day since 1989, and by the time I came through the alley door there were already four hundred pounds of dough in the trough and the ovens were at temperature and the whole back of the building smelled like the inside of a warm animal.

Gus was sixty-one.

He had a beard that had gone grey in two stripes and a way of standing with his weight on his heels that made him look like he was about to say no to something.

He said maybe nine sentences to me in my first week and three of them were about scaling flour.

The back room ran the length of the building.

Mixers on the left, the proofing cabinet in the middle with its glass front and its blue interior light, racks everywhere, and at the far end, against the north wall, the walk-in.

Eight feet by ten.

Brushed steel, streaked with old frost that had never fully come off the skin of the door, a small square window at head height, and a long horizontal lever handle on the outside.

It was off.

It had been off for four years, since before I was hired, and the reason it was off was that the compressor was thirty-one years old and cost something like four hundred dollars a month to run and Praeger's had not had four hundred dollars a month to spare since the Kroger on Route 9 started baking its own.

So the walk-in was a room.

A dark, insulated, soundproof room with a door that closed, in a building where every other room was full of machines.

The second week I opened it looking for a spare sheet pan.

There was a folding cot against the back wall.

A blue moving blanket, folded in a square.

A flashlight standing on end with the beam pointed at the ceiling so the whole box glowed a soft brown.

And a plastic dinosaur, a green one, the kind that comes four to a bag at a dollar store, standing upright on the floor by the cot as though it had been placed there on purpose.

I stood in that doorway for about six seconds.

Then Gus said, from behind me, "Shut it."

I shut it.

He did not explain and I did not ask, because I was twenty-two and I needed the job and because there is a particular silence a man that age can produce that closes a subject the way a hand closes a book.

I found out three days later, at ten past four in the morning, when I came out of the walk-in cooler with a hotel pan of butter and a five-year-old girl was standing in the middle of the floor in a nightgown holding a plastic cup of water.

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

She said, "You're the new one."

Her name was Nora.

Her brother's name was Sam and he was four and he was asleep on the cot behind the steel door, and their mother was on the other side of the wall running the divider, and this had been going on since April.