This passage is an original short story written for this guide. Della works the early shift at her grandmother's small seaside bakery during the last summer before she moves away.
Della could tell the fog by its smell before she ever saw it — that flat, mineral coolness that rolled in off the water and leaned against the shop window while the ovens were still cold. At half past five she let herself in the back, working the key that always stuck, and stood a moment in the dark breathing yeast and scorched flour and the sweetish gas of the pilot light. Her grandmother was already at the bench. She was always already there.
"You're late," Gran said, though Della was not late.
Della tied the apron twice around her waist, because it had been cut for a larger woman, and began setting out the trays. Outside, the harbour was doing its slow disappearing act, the trawlers going grey, then vague, then gone. She liked the hour when the town belonged to no one. By seven it would belong to the tourists, or what few the season had brought this year, and by nine to the gulls that worked the bins along the front.
The dough had been proving overnight in the tall drawer, and when she pulled it out the smell came up warm and living, faintly sour. This was the part she would miss. She had decided, weeks ago, not to think about what she would miss, and she thought about it constantly, the way a tongue finds a loose tooth.
In September she was going to her aunt's, inland, to a city she had visited once and could not now picture except as a great deal of traffic and a river the colour of tea. There was a college place waiting, and a bedroom that smelled of somebody else's life. Everyone said it was a wonderful opportunity. Della agreed with them. She agreed so readily that no one had noticed she never said she wanted to go.
Gran shaped the loaves without looking at her hands. Her hands knew the work the way Della's feet knew the three uneven flagstones by the door. But there were fewer loaves now. Della had counted, though counting felt like a betrayal. Two years ago they had baked forty. This morning it was eighteen, and six of those were for the shelf, and the shelf-loaves, she had noticed, were often still there at closing, going stale under their paper, carried home at last for the birds.
The Grand Hotel had cancelled its standing order in the spring. Mr. Pryce, who had bought a small white bloomer every day for as long as Della had been alive, had died in February, and no one had taken his place at the counter, or his loaf. The chalkboard still listed cakes to order for occasions no one seemed to be having. Gran had not rubbed them out.
At six Della counted the float into the brass till, the coins cold and slightly greasy, and the drawer slid shut with the same soft chime it had made when she was small enough to need the stool. She used to think the sound meant money. Now she understood it meant almost nothing — that the till could chime all day and the sum at the bottom of the book would still be written in her grandmother's careful, failing figures, and would still not be enough.
She wanted, suddenly and fiercely, to say something. To ask how bad it was. To offer to stay — to defer the place, to keep the ovens lit another year, as if a year were a thing she could hand across the counter like change. The words rose and she held them behind her teeth, because she knew what her grandmother would do. She would look up, and she would be gently, immovably offended, and she would say that Della was going to that city if she had to be posted there in a box.
So Della said nothing. She unlocked the front door and turned the sign, and the fog came in around her ankles like something with opinions of its own. The first customer was a stranger, a walker with a rucksack, wanting only directions and, out of politeness, a bun. Della gave him both. When he had gone she stood in the doorway and looked at the water she had never once, in seventeen years, thought of as anything but the edge of the world.
It occurred to her that her grandmother had spent a life at that edge on purpose — that staying could be a choice and not only a failure to leave. She did not know yet what to do with the thought. She set it on the shelf, beside the loaves, and went back in to the warm.
