Page 35 of Working for the Mob

“Are you sure––“

Sneeze.

“––sure? I could––“

Sneeze.

“––push through?”

Lucy handed me her grocery bags, and pushed me out the door mid-sneeze. “We’ll be fine.”

My nose had stopped running by the time Lucy exited Mrs. Jenkin’s front door.

“Good night, Mrs. Jenkins,” Lucy said. “And thank you!”

“Anytime, dear. And when you come back, I’ll have that dress for you to try on,” Mrs. Jenkins said.

“Looking forward to it.”

Mrs. Jenkins closed the door without a word to me as Lucy passed me on the steps. She held a jar in her hand, smirked at me, picked up a bag of groceries, and continued down the sidewalk towards our house.

I got up as quickly as my throbbing feet allowed. “What happened?” I demanded, catching up to her.

“I got the yeast,” Lucy said, and held up a jar of white paste with bubbles.

“How?”

“I told her what I wanted the yeast for, and she told me I could borrow some as long as I returned the jar and gave her one of the loaves I bake. She said she can’t bake bread anymore. It's too rough on her hands and she wants to save her fingers for sewing.”

“So you think you can do it? You think you can bake bread better than the substitute bakery? And can you make enough in one night?” I asked.

“We won’t know unless we try,” Lucy said. This was an unusual can-do attitude for Lucy. I hadn’t remembered her caring this much about anything in her life, and now she was downright ‘plucky.’

Chapter 10 - Genevieve

Iwanted to do nothing else at home except soak my feet in a tub of hot water. If they continued to feel bad, I might even bend over and rub one of them. However, Lucy had different plans for me.

The second we walked through the door, she had already began mixing the bread ingredients in a bowl. She asked me to mix them while she moved to the next batch.

Once they were mixed, she showed me how to knead the dough by hand, over a floured surface. Fold, press, rotate. Fold, press, rotate. I watched Lucy work with a rhythmic and rocking motion until the dough became bouncy and smooth.

My mouth fell open when Lucy cradled the dough close to her face and rocked it like a baby, gently singing it a lullaby.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Shhh! Mom said we’ve got to baby the dough, and so I am!”

“She didn’t actually …” I began, but Lucy shushed me again.

Once she kneaded the first batch, she covered the dough in another bowl and set it aside under a piece of parchment paper. She asked me to start kneading the second batch while she mixed a third. If she spied me doing something wrong, she quickly corrected me with a slap to the wrist, like our mother used to do. I remembered why I avoided baking with our mom.

I was handed the third batch after I stored the second, and Lucy mixed a fourth.

“How many loaves are you making?” I asked her. At this rate I would collapse by eight.

“I don’t know,” she said, in thought. “How many sandwiches do you think we sell in a day? About two hundred?”

“Two hundred?” I squawked. She thought we were going to bake enough loaves of bread for two hundred sandwiches? “No, we sell around sixty.”

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