Chapter 4 — WHAT NORA SAID

Nora Colquitt was five and she talked the way five-year-olds talk, which is to say constantly and in a code she assumed you already had.

She liked me because I let her hold the timer.

She had opinions about the ovens, which she divided into the good oven and the one that is mean.

On the Saturday before, she came out to the bench at about half past five in the morning and stood at my elbow while I was scaling and she said, "The cold room is awake now."

I said, "Mm."

She said, "It's awake."

I said, "Is it."

She said, "It's making the sound."

And I said, without turning around, because I had eleven dozen to scale and thirty-one minutes to do it in, "Everything in here makes a sound, kid."

That is the sentence.

That is the one I would take back if I were allowed to take back one, and I have had a considerable amount of time to consider the alternatives.

She said it again on the Sunday.

She said it to her mother on the Sunday, and I heard her say it, and Ren said, "Mm-hm," in the flat way you answer a child when your hands are in dough.

She said it on the Monday to Gus.

Gus said, "That's the cooler, sweetheart."

And on the Monday night, at three minutes past eleven, I came back to the shop because I had left my phone in my apron.

The building was dark and the alley door was on the latch and I went in and I stood in the back room for maybe forty seconds looking for the apron on the hook.

And the walk-in was running.

I want to be accurate about what I heard, because a defence attorney asked me about it eleven months later in a room with a flag in the corner.

I heard a low sound, a hum with a rattle underneath it, coming off the condenser unit on top of the box.

I could feel it in the floor.

I remember thinking, in a completely flat and untroubled way, three things, in this order.

Somebody plugged that in.

Good — it'll pull down overnight and the log will be true for once.

Where is my apron.

I found the apron.

I went home.

I did not knock on the walk-in door, I did not look through the window, I did not call Ren, I did not call Gus, I did not remove the yellow wedge or check that it was still there, and I did not think one single thought about a five-year-old telling me for three days that the cold room was awake.

I was twenty-two, I had been up since two in the morning, and I wanted to go to bed.

That is the entire defence I have ever been able to construct for myself and I do not offer it as one.