Small Changes: Build Good Habits, Break Bad Ones, Become Who You Mean to Be

Part One, Chapter 1: Small Hinges, Big Doors

Closing Time on Tolliver Street

At six minutes past seven on a Tuesday in January, Imani Castellanos flipped the sign on the door of Second Rise from Open to Closed, and the whole building seemed to exhale.

The bakery had been a laundromat once. You could still see it if you knew where to look: the row of capped pipes along the back wall where the washers used to stand, the faint rectangle on the tile where a change machine had been bolted down for thirty years, the old ceiling fans that turned too slowly to do anything but remind you they were there. Imani had painted the walls the color of butter, hung a chalkboard menu where the detergent vending machine used to be, and put three small round tables by the front window so people could sit with a coffee and a cardamom knot and watch Tolliver Street go by. On weekday mornings there was a line out the door by seven. By ten the cardamom knots were gone. By two the sourdough was gone. By six the place smelled like warm sugar and bleach, which is to say it smelled like the end of a good day.

She turned the radio up. It was a station that played old soul and salsa in no particular order, and at closing time she liked it loud enough to feel in her sternum. She filled the mop bucket, squeezed in a capful of the lemon cleaner, and started at the far corner by the proofing cabinet, working backward toward the front door the way her grandmother had taught her, so she would never mop herself into a trap.

Her braids were tied up in a green patterned scarf. There was flour on her forearms, flour on her apron, flour, somehow, on the back of her left ear. On the inside of that same forearm was a pale crescent of a scar, a souvenir from an oven door four years ago, which she had stopped noticing the way you stop noticing your own front steps.

Mopping took eleven minutes if she did not stop to sing, and she always stopped to sing.

When the floor was done she wiped down the counter, restacked the pastry trays, counted the drawer, and zipped the cash into the bank bag. She checked the walk-in. She wrote "more butter, call Hal" on the back of her hand in ballpoint because the clipboard was across the room. Then she walked to the back of the bakery, past the steel prep table and the big deck oven ticking as it cooled, toward the screen door that opened onto the alley.

On the way, she passed the laptop.

The Laptop on the Back Counter

It sat on the back counter, between a stack of folded aprons and a jar of wooden spoons. It was a perfectly ordinary laptop. It had a sticker of a croissant on the lid that her cousin had given her as a joke. It was charged. It worked. On it lived a spreadsheet called SECOND RISE BOOKS, which Imani had built herself, with great optimism, on the day she signed the lease, and which she had not opened in more than a year.

She knew exactly what was in it. Or rather, she knew exactly what was not in it. Every receipt from every supplier, every invoice from the flour mill, every utility bill, every slip from the farmers who brought her eggs and the man who sharpened her knives, all of it lived in a cardboard box under the counter, in a sedimentary heap, newest on top. The box had been a shoe box. Then it had been a boot box. Now it was a box that had once held a stand mixer, and the lid no longer closed.

Imani walked past the laptop the way you walk past a dog ...