Chapter 10 - Christmas Eve Above the Bakery
On Christmas Eve, the bakery downstairs closed early at 4:00 PM.
The heavy scent of melted butter, caramelized sugar, and roasted almonds drifted up through our floorboards like a warm, edible blanket. Theo and I sat at the deal table with a board game—Scrabble—playing with homemade wooden tiles I’d carved myself during slow afternoons between tax returns.
My phone remained silent. No angry texts. No last-minute guilt trips from Flatbush.
For the first time in forty-one years, Christmas Eve was quiet.
"Mom?" Theo asked, spelling out the word SNOW with two double-letter tiles.
"Yes, buddy?"
"Are we going to Grandma’s tomorrow?"
I looked at him, his small cowlick catching the warm light of our single string of blue holiday bulbs.
"No, Theo," I said, reaching across the table to straighten his tiles. "We’re staying right here. Tomorrow we’re going to make pancakes with real maple syrup, and then we’re going to walk down to the pier and watch the container ships go out to the Atlantic."
Theo grinned, his eyes bright. "Can we put chocolate chips in the pancakes?"
"A mountain of them," I said.
Later that evening, after he had fallen asleep in his cot with his sneakers lined up neatly beside the bed, I walked over to the narrow window overlooking 86th Street.
Across the avenue, the snow was falling in thick, silent flakes, muffling the roar of the crosstown buses and turning the jagged concrete of Brooklyn into a soft, white landscape.
I reached into my cardigan pocket and pulled out my phone.
I opened the Chase banking app.
Checking: $1,842.10.Savings Certificate: $25,114.88 (including quarterly interest).Scheduled Transfers: Zero.
May you like
I locked the screen, tossed the phone onto the wooden tabletop, and took a deep breath of the air—warm, smelling of sugar and woodsmoke, entirely my own.
The ledger was closed for the year. And for the first time in my life, every line on the page added up to freedom.
