Clara's — Summary

Clara opens at 6:40 because the ovens take twenty minutes and the first man is at the door at seven. The vault of the bank she managed for nineteen years is propped open with a brick and holds flour now, rice in white buckets, jars nobody has asked for back. The coffee-and-newspapers part of the story the town already knows: Margaret on Saturdays, Dorothy at the window table. What the town does not exactly know, because it happened the way weather happens, is everything since. Clara still balances the till every night, to the penny, though nothing anywhere requires it, and spikes the slip by the vault door.

The night-deposit slot started it. One February the bin held seed packets and a penciled note: TOMATOES ARE THE STRIPED ONES. Then more seeds, pliers, a child’s coat, a broken radio labeled WORKS EXCEPT THE DIAL. What goes in is what somebody had and did not need; what comes out is whatever somebody else recognizes; no name travels between them. Wade, twenty-two years on the trailer plant’s maintenance line, fixed the espresso machine, then put a vise on a loan desk, and now Thursdays are for the toaster, the box fan, the frayed cord, opened up where the town’s mortgages used to be explained to it. Miles, fifteen, is the person you hand anything with a circuit board. He failed the practical half of his certification in the fall and took the failure apart on the loan desk like a toaster; he retests in spring, and Jo has already decided the cake.

Tuesdays became bread day because the vault held flour, the school-auction ovens needed one Thursday part, and Jo, who fed four hundred children by 11:15 for eleven years, asked whether they worked. The loaves go out at cost or at nothing, depending, and the depending is hers. The fifteenth of the month has its own weather: everyone even, the busiest morning, and on thin days the coffee goes on a page of names and hash marks, the only ledger in the building that matters and the only one that has never balanced. The county mailed a Community Activation Grant packet wanting a programming schedule, a named coordinator, quarterly metrics. Clara read it twice, put it under the till drawer, and balanced the till on top of it. It is still there. The Chamber of Commerce storefront two doors down is also empty, also cheap, and stays empty.

January was bad: the boiler quit in the coldest week, three days of space heaters and standing men in coats, Wade and Miles in the basement, the bridging part arriving through the slot in greasy newspaper, no note. The heat came back on a Sunday; Dorothy came back the Saturday after, and Margaret had kept her table. By the second spring the spare teller-counter sections were in the parking lot filled with dirt and striped tomatoes, nearly the right height for a woman of eighty to weed without kneeling, which nobody designed, in a building where nothing was designed, two years running. I have stopped arriving here with a word for what this place is. On bread nights Clara counts the till last, checks the brick, and turns off the lights on the safest room in town, full of bread that has not happened yet.