Bitter Loaf

I got to the market at five in the morning, which is the kind of hour that makes you question every decision that got you there. I'm Saul, thirty-seven years old, and until two weeks ago I was a line cook at the cafe attached to the Beacon Street Fish Market in Portsmouth. Then I wasn't, because Rick the manager decided that a dispute over a broken blender lid was worth my job. That's the short version. The long version involves a lot of shouting and one thrown spatula, and I don't want to get into it again, at least not until I've had coffee.

Murray was already there when I came in through the loading door. He's the copy editor for the market's weekly newsletter, thirty-four, quiet, wears glasses that he cleans about four times an hour. We met at a first aid course back in the spring and I liked him right away, in the way you like someone who laughs at your jokes even when they're bad. He was standing beside a table of raw oysters, checking a laminated sheet against a clipboard, under the fluorescent lights that make everyone look like a corpse with a job.

"You fixed the menu, right?" I said.

He looked up. "Mostly. There's a comma issue on the second page that's bothering me."

"There's always a comma issue. You're a comma issue kind of guy."

"Thank you, I think." He set the clipboard down and studied me. He has a way of studying people like he's proofreading them. "You're not on the schedule for this, Saul. I checked. Why are you here at five in the morning carrying a tote bag?"

The tote bag was the problem. It had a loaf of bread in it, and not a good loaf. I'd baked it the night before with half again the salt the recipe called for, and I'd skipped the second rise, and I'd let the starter get old and mean. What came out of my oven was a dense, gray-crusted brick with the personality of a cinder block. It looked, from a distance, like a rustic sourdough round. Up close it was a weapon.

"I'm volunteering," I said. "Community spirit. The tasting is a big deal for the market and I want to give back."

Murray did not buy it, which is one of the things I like about him. "You were fired two weeks ago. You called Rick a, and I'm quoting the incident report because I had to copy edit it, 'a small man in a large vest.'"

"The vest was large."

"So why are you here?"

I put the tote bag on the oyster table, which was rude, but the oysters were already being rude by existing at that hour. I pulled the loaf out and set it next to the ice trays. Murray looked at it the way you look at a dog that has done something terrible in the living room.

"The tasting," I said, "features the stew sandwich. The signature item. Chowder on house sourdough, open faced, the thing the buyers always remember. The bread comes from the bakery on Daniel Street, delivered at six, staged in the back by the ice bins. Except today, the bread that gets staged will be this one." I tapped the crust. It sounded like knocking on a door nobody would answer.

"You're going to swap the bread."

"I'm going to swap the bread."

"So the buyers taste salt and regret and Rick looks like an idiot."

"Rick looks like an idiot anyway. This just gives him an audience."

Murray picked up the loaf and put it down again, like holding it might count against him later. "This is a bad plan. Not morally bad, I mean badly planned. Laurel counts the delivery boxes. She counts everything. She got promoted to buyer's liaison because she counts things."

"Laurel counts boxes, not loaves."

"That is a distinction without a difference and you know it."

Here is where I should tell you he talked me out of it, and I went home and made a normal loaf and let the whole thing go. That is not what happened. What happened is that I stood there in the fluorescent light thinking about Rick, who had fired me over a blender lid worth four dollars, in front of the weekend staff, and the anger settled back into me like it lived there, which it did. Two years of cooking good food in that kitchen and I got walked out over four dollars of plastic.

"It's happening, Murray," I said. "You can help or you can be surprised later. Those are the options."

He wiped his glasses on his shirt hem, which is his version of yelling. "I edit a newsletter. I do not participate in crimes against baked goods."

"Then be surprised later."

He sighed, and the sigh had a whole paragraph in it. "Fine. But if this goes wrong I am describing it in the newsletter under 'miscellaneous.'"

I was still grinning about that when Terri came around the ice bins with a shovel and a look on her face. Terri is a fishmonger at the market, thirty-six, stronger than anyone in the building, and my ex. We dated for six months and broke up two years ago because I was married to the job and she noticed before I did. She's been civil about it ever since, in the way that a knife is civil when it stays in the drawer.

"Well, look who it is," she said, stacking ice around the halibut display with little pats of her gloved hands. "The community volunteer. Heard you got fired."

"Heard is right," I said.

"Rick's an idiot, no argument. But Saul, come on. It's been two weeks. You're standing in my fish market at dawn with a bag. What's in the bag?"

"Bread."

"Why do you have bread?"

"For the tasting."

She stopped patting the ice and stood up straight. Terri has a nose for trouble the way other people have a nose for gas leaks. "The tasting bread comes from Daniel Street."

"Supply chain issues," I said.

Murray made a small noise into his clipboard.

Terri looked at him, then at me, then at the loaf, which was sitting there being incriminating. "Oh my God. You're going to poison the buyers with a salt brick because of a blender lid."

"Not poison. Disappoint."

"Saul." She said my name the way she used to when I left the burner on. "You were good at that job. You loved that job. This is the dumbest way to love it."

"Thank you for your feedback."

"I'm serious." She came around the display and pulled her gloves off finger by finger, and being near her again did what it always did, which was nothing I needed at five in the morning. "You want to get back at Rick, quit glowing about it and go get a better job somewhere he has to read about. Don't do this sad little loaf thing in front of Murray, who is a nice person and did not sign up for your vendetta."

Murray cleared his throat. "I mean, it's a little signed up for."

"It's not too late to un-sign," she told him, and then to me, "and you. Tell me you're not actually going to do this."

I looked at the loaf. I looked at her. The old tension was doing its familiar thing, sitting between us as a third person who never pays for parking.

"I'm doing it," I said.

"Unbelievable." But she was smiling a little as she said it, which was the problem with Terri, she could never fully commit to disapproval. "Fine. Then you're going to need somebody on the staging crew who doesn't count things, and that's not Laurel, so it's me, and if I get fired too you owe me six months of dinners and an apology."

"That seems fair," I said.

Murray raised his hand like we were in school. "I have a question. Does anyone else find it strange that the two of you broke up two years ago and still argue like the breakup was last Tuesday?"

Neither of us answered, which was an answer. Terri went back to her halibut, shoveling ice with a little more force than the fish required, and I put the loaf back in the tote and went to find coffee, with Murray trailing behind me asking whether the words 'miscellaneous incident' would be too strong for the newsletter.

The boats were bobbing out in the harbor and the sun was coming up over the pier like the start of a nice normal day, and I had a brick of bread in my bag and my ex on my crew and a copy editor who couldn't stop helping. It was going to be a long morning.

Laurel showed up at ten past five, moving fast enough that her lanyard was still swinging when she stopped. Laurel is the buyer's liaison, thirty-three, and she counts delivery boxes the way some people count stairs, automatically and with quiet judgment. She had her phone in one hand and a printout in the other and she looked at the three of us like we were a problem on her schedule.

"They're early," she said. "The buyers. The van from Boston is ten minutes out and the menu still says 'chowder sandwhich' on page two because somebody typed it at midnight and nobody caught it."

"That somebody typed at midnight," Murray said, "was me, and I did catch it, I fixed it, there's a corrected file."

"Then print me the corrected file and proof it with your own eyes, because the printer in the office is printing page three upside down and I don't have time for mystery." She held the paper out. "Murray. Please. Ten minutes!"

Murray took the sheet and his clipboard and his glasses came off his shirt hem inside of four seconds, which for him is basically adrenaline. "Okay. Sandwhich. Anything else?"

"Everything. Read it like someone who hates us."

And here was the peculiarity of Murray, he could not refuse a direct request for editing, it was like watching a dog walk into water. Laurel steered him toward the office at the back and he went, already reading, and I want it noted that I did not push him. He went because a misspelled menu is, to Murray, an emergency of the same rank as a fire.

Which left me alone by the ice bins with the tote bag and about four minutes of nobody counting anything.

The Daniel Street delivery was due at six, but the driver had come early too, everyone early, the whole morning running hot. The bread was staged in its boxes by the ice bins, plain white flats, lids on, and Laurel normally counts them. Laurel was walking Murray to the printer. I slid my loaf out of the tote, tucked it into the second box from the end, under two good loaves where nobody looking down from above would see it, and put the lid back. It took eight seconds. My heart was not pounding, exactly, but it was working harder than a heart should work over bread.

Then Terri was there, because of course she was, she had been counting the boxes herself out of habit and I watched her watch me do it.

"I saw nothing," she said.

"You saw everything."

"I saw nothing," she said again, "because I'm an