A Cease-Fire of Croissants

It rained for nine days straight in April, and on the worst of them the patisserie's coffee machine died. Nora knew because Theo came across the street holding the broken part of it like a small dead bird. Rain ran off his hair. The good coat was gone for good, it seemed; he wore a jumper now, the sleeves stretched, and looked less like a magazine and more like a person. "Your machine," he said. "The one that doesn't do ferns. Does it work?" "It works." "Can I —" He stopped. Started again, and the asking visibly pained him. "I have a line of people and nothing to give them but cold things. Can I buy coffee from you. To resell. I'll mark it up, I'm not a charity." Nora should have enjoyed this more than she did. She had wanted, four weeks ago, exactly this — Theo Marchetti brought low, standing in her shop needing something. But the man dripping on her floor wasn't a rival from a story. He was just tired, and his machine was broken, and he had a line of cold people, and she understood both of those things in her bones. "Don't be stupid," she said. "Bring your cups. I'll make the coffee. You don't mark anything up — you just don't poison anyone with day-old espresso." He looked at her. "Why?" "Because the town will buy from whichever of us is open," said Nora, "and if you close for a week they'll get out of the habit of Marrow Lane entirely, and then they'll drive to the retail park, and then we both lose. You're not my problem, Theo. The retail park is my problem. You're just — you're the devil I can see." It was the longest either of them had spoken without insult, and it left a strange quiet in the shop, broken only by the rain. So that was how it started, the cease-fire of croissants. Theo brought his cups and his customers across the road, and for three rainy days Hartley's and Marchetti shared a counter. Nora pulled the coffee. Theo, unable to simply stand still, started fixing things — the door that didn't lock unless you lifted it, the wonky third shelf, the till drawer that stuck. He did it without asking, the way some people can't watch a crooked picture without straightening it. On the third afternoon Nora caught him behind her counter with his head tipped, looking up at the shelf above the proofing cupboard. At the tin. The roses, the brittle rubber band. "Don't," she said. He took his hand back at once. "I wasn't going to open it. I was looking at it." He came down off his toes. "It's recipes?" "Hers. Forty years of them. I haven't —" Nora wiped the steam wand harder than it needed. "I can't open it yet. I know that sounds —" "It doesn't sound like anything," said Theo. "My father had a knife. A boning knife, nothing special, plastic handle. When he died I couldn't use it for two years. I cooked around it. Then one day I used it to do something stupid, slice a lemon, and I cried like an idiot in the kitchen and after that it was just a knife again." He shrugged, awkward with the truth of it. "It opens when it opens. You don't pick the day." The rain came down. The coffee machine hissed. Across the street his gold window said MARCHETTI and hers, behind her, said HARTLEY'S, and for the first time the four blocks of Marrow Lane did not feel like a battlefield to Nora. They felt like a street with two bakers on it, both of them missing somebody, both of them up before the light. "You over-prove your dough," Theo said gently, watching her hands. "Still." "You've never been hungry," Nora said back, but it had become, somewhere in the last nine rainy days, a thing closer to a joke than a wound — and when he smiled at it, she found, to her considerable alarm, that she was smiling too.