Chapter 8 - The 3:00 AM Coffee

By 3:00 AM, the temperature outside had dropped to eighteen degrees.

Walter sat behind the large oak desk in the mezzanine office, a mug of black diner coffee resting on top of a three-inch stack of bank statements. A small electric space heater hummed near our shins, glowing dull orange.

I sat on the worn leather sofa across from him, holding a yellow legal pad covered in my own handwriting.

"It’s worse than sixty thousand," I said, rubbing the bridge of my nose where a sharp headache had settled behind my eyes. "The commercial line of credit has an adjustable rate. When the interest rates hiked in 2024, the monthly service payment jumped from eighteen hundred to forty-two hundred dollars."

"And where did Tom get the forty-two hundred?" Walter asked, not looking up from the ledgers.

"From the ground-floor bakery checking account," I said, pointing to the debit columns. "He was draining the flour and dairy escrow funds to pay the bank note. That’s why he cut the assistant baker’s hours last month. That’s why he made me work twenty extra hours on the night prep shifts without pay. He wasn't teaching me responsibility. He was using my free labor to keep the building from going to a sheriff’s auction."

Walter took a slow sip of his coffee. His face looked older in the lamplight, the lines around his mouth etched deep by forty years of family compromises.

"Your grandmother wanted you to have this place because you had her hands," Walter said softly. "She watched you roll out pie dough when you were seven years old. She told me, 'Tom will sell the bricks for scrap, but Roxanne will keep the ovens hot.'"

The sound of heavy tires crunched over the alley gravel below.

Headlights swept across the frosted glass windows of the office, casting long, moving shadows across the brick wall.

A car door slammed. Then another.

I stood up, walking cautiously to the mezzanine railing to look down through the interior window into the alley.

Dad’s black Ford Explorer was parked crookedly across the delivery bay, blocking Walter’s Buick.

Standing on the concrete landing below were Dad, Uncle Greg, and a man in a dark tan canvas jacket with a silver badge pinned to the pocket.

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