Bill stands and looks out the window of Harry’s Bakery. Three weeks and the medication is not exactly kicking in, no strong message, more like a hand on his shoulder that seems to convey the idea of relief, the possibility that the end of his long depression may be around the next corner. Could he trust that message?

With this thought, the day slows down, as if four o’clock was a barrier to time and it would be all right to waste some of it — a bonus, part of the compensation in a low-paying job. The sun is stalled on the other side of the river, its hot rays blocked by the awning Harry put up in better times, its blue and white canvas now faded to dirty grays.

No two of the young trees along the sidewalk look alike, but the town’s public works department has tried: each thin trunk is wrapped in burlap and supported by wires pegged to the ground.

The peak from two-to-five is over now. Harry is not in the shop and Helen and Darlene are making boxes by rote, folding the flat white cardboard until each piece becomes a cube. They’ll be out the door soon, Bill thinks.

He wonders if his wife will make the 5:52 out of Grand Central. He should call her. Segments of memory float in from his first marriage, when he was the one who took the commuter train every day. He recalls the joy of coming home when his children were young. “Where’s Yessel?” he says to himself, replaying the game of finding all six of them, one at a time, a hide-and-seek ritual they invented. All the pet names come back. “Where’s Gerolt? Where’s Gedda, Missey Yin, Yessel, Mar-Tea and J-o-h-n?” His silent voice rises as it did then, his sing-song, Daddy is being silly voice.

As an explorer on the continent of finance, he is unable to see into the landscape, has no map and no compass, can’t remember what he did then with seventy thousand dollars a year, now that he is earning a fraction…

The money he once earned is now a mystery to his deficient but ever-present accounting system. As an explorer on the continent of finance, he is unable to see into the landscape, has no map and no compass, can’t remember what he did then with seventy thousand dollars a year, now that he is earning a fraction of that.

Good thing the layoff didn’t come when the children were young, when there was, as his mother used to say, “All Those Mouths To Feed.” Probably feeding children is the strongest motivator of them all for “Putting Food On The Table.” His mother again.

When he ended up on the street two years ago, downsized, something less than family survival was at stake. He had saved some money and after more than a year of interviews and freelance work and some unemployment checks, he’d settled with a good deal of misgivings for the four to twelve shift at Harry’s Bakery. Simple, really: he could walk to work now, and he’d be eligible for social security in three years; in the last five years in advertising he had not gone up the ladder, so he had to get off the ladder.

What would his friends say? He had dealt with that question very badly, avoiding some people, but easily giving up suits and ties, swallowing some pride, and joking about the warmth of the bakery’s ovens as a welcome change from his earlier profession.

And there was no question now that he liked working in the bakery; his first medication, he called it. He’d never worked alone before, which required some getting used to. In his first weeks, he’d heard sounds coming from all directions. One night, after eleven, there were fierce noises in the back alley. He’d opened the door, expecting that Eddie — the baker who used to come in at midnight and who had been fired by Harry for being drunk — was out there throwing the garbage cans around. But it was only some sexy cats.

Harry had taught him well and now, with Eddie gone, Harry came in early in the morning to do the baking. Bill’s job was to make sure everything was ready. Cleaning the same 20-quart pots for the Hobart mixer night after night had turned into less of a chore than what he’d first expected. The combination of impenetrable metal and absorbent wood surfaces met him with contradictions and comfort. The stainless steel tables and huge pans became welcome to his touch, even when the tiny thermometer over the sink told him it was cold in the back room. Rising mounds of bread dough were the last thing he looked at every night before he left; they caused him to smile when he first saw them and he’d felt the same sense of pride every night since.

The slicing machines could be troublesome — quiet assassins who could lull you into carelessness with their benign hums. He was also careful with the sharp knives and the chemicals in the cleaning closet. For comfort, after everyone had gone home, he listened to an enormous German-made radio, dusty with flour on top of one of the refrigerators. When Bill had once reached up with a damp sponge to clean the dial face, Harry quietly said, “Better leave well enough alone.”

The aluminum proofers could be difficult to scour. A new definition of proof, these sheets browned with daily use. At his last agency in the city, Bill would volunteer for proofreading jobs, take it as a challenge, especially on winter afternoons when there was time to look out at the corner of Broadway and 53rd Street below his window. If not great literature, advertising copy at least contained the same 26 letters and there were certain elements of language in advertising that were not found in print anywhere else. And with a set of proofs on his desk Bill felt lucky at having the power to correct and revise, one last chance to make a better job of it.

He felt now the contradictory emotion that came to him again and again lately — how can it be after all these years — how can I now be in a position to not envy anyone, and how can I learn to accept it?

Darlene and Helen are cleaning the chromium trim around the glass counters with paper towels dipped in seltzer water. The water leaves no streaks on chrome or stainless steel, and Harry brings two-liter bottles of it from the supermarket for this purpose.

Bill has given the two women the nicknames Strange and Charm, the Quark sisters. Strange/Darlene, twenty years older than Charm/Helen, is the least friendly to Bill. She does not acknowledge his arrival into the shop each day, speaks to him only when she has to, and generally takes pains to avoid eye contact. Distrust, Bill thinks, is her strong suit; silence is her armor, and she hugs it close.

“They say,” Darlene begins, “nightmares can give you peace of mind.”

“In the daytime, you mean?” Helen plays along.

“Mm, supposed to blow off steam at night and have a head like a calm pond the next day.”

“Dream therapy. Cheaper than what the doctors charge.”

“Anyway they wrote it that way in the paper.”

“What paper?”

“One Frank brings home. When he cleans the cars he finds most everything. This watch!” Darlene holds up her left wrist and shows Helen her prize.

“They don’t have to turn stuff in?”

“Who’s ta know?”

“He could get a reward.”

“Mise-well get it while you can. Anyway, it goes to Grand Central when they turn it in.”

“So he brings everything home?”

“Only the small things.”

Helen begins to laugh and the laughter spreads to Darlene. They touch each other’s arms in a half embrace, as if the giggles are weakening their legs.

“Can’t you hear the boss,” Helen gasps. “Nice briefcase you have there, but if you didn’t come in with it you can’t go home with it.”

“Most of it’s worthless junk, anyway,” Darlene says, “like umbrellas and garbage, coats and hats and gloves, lots’a cell phones. The pay is good — not as good as a carpenter and stuff like that — he’s looking at a good pension in a couple years.”

“And Darlene will be leaving us.”

“Thank God!”

The Charm Quark, Helen, has an easy way with the customers in the shop. They take to this not ever completely serious woman, respond, perhaps because she in her way asks them to respond. Many customers know her name and some ask for her when she is not working.

The time a man asked Helen’s advice about what to have for dessert — he was making his first wok dinner that night and didn’t know how to end it — Helen said without a blink, “Apple pie.”

“Wow! Why apple pie?” The man was taken off balance by her certainty.

“Just suppose your meal isn’t everything you want it to be,” Helen said. “I’m sure it will be great — but just in case, with apple pie you have a dessert that cannot fail. Cake’s too heavy. Chocolate cake out of the question. Apple pie never fails.”

The man bought two. There was only a short pause after he went out the door before Helen said, “Lemon cookies probably would have been a better choice, but our pies are slow-moving.” And she laughed.

Darlene said she didn’t like to give advice like that, because the customers’ tastes varied so much it was hard to judge. Still laughing, Helen raised both hands and patted the side of her head: “It’s not hard, once you get the hang of it.”

Darlene, wearing her usual white apron and black scowl, says, “I just wish we could get that old mailman back again. There’s nothing in the world’d make me happier. This new guy comes in every day like a politician running for office.”

“Give him a chance,” Helen says. “In a few months he’ll be as bored as we are and you’ll love him.”

“I don’t have much use for mailmen. They never bring me anything but bills. This guy smiles at me every day now. Where’s he coming from? Look’en for free cookies?”

“People are nice to us, generally.”

“Where’s the money in that?”

“You’re looking for money, you came to the wrong place,” Helen says.

Darlene speaks quietly: “I have to tell you, I found a way to make an extra dollar or so.”

“A second job?”

“Here,” she looks around. “A woman came in a few days ago and bought bread and I don’t know what all — came to a perfect twelve dollars on the register. I was alone at the time. You must have been in the back. She fumbles in her wallet. You ever notice how some women, not the men, like to give you the exact amount, even the pennies sometimes? This one gives me, finally, a ten and two ones and she flies out the door. I held the money in my hand. Before I knew what I was do’en I folded it up tight and slipped it right here. So quick. I never thought about it.”

“I know why.”

“So you tell me.”

“You think he owes us — like when he doesn’t pay us when we call in sick.” Darlene shoves her hands beneath her apron. “I’m not sure. I think I took it from her not him.”

“Snooty?”

“Above average.”

“Young?”

“Younger’n me, younger than Madonna and Cher, maybe younger than JLo! But I think it was that damned fumbling with the wallet. Make ’em wait. It gets to me sometimes. They stand there with nothing to do all that time while I’m putting their stuff in boxes and bags. Why can’t they wake up and take out some money while they’re waiting? Good thing she didn’t have a … woodyacallit.”

“Charge card?”

“Mm. Anyway there’s jobs in White Plains that pay better.”

“Go for it.”

“Not me.”

She takes a sugar-covered cookie from a tray on the counter, breaks it, tosses some pieces into the plastic garbage can and nibbles the remainder.

“This is my last job, thank God.”

Bill and Harry are of the same generation and are easy with each other in a way that Harry has come to more frequently acknowledge. And yet Harry, who grew up in Maine and retained some of its curtness, only responds, “No money,” when Bill recommends the purchase of a bagel machine. And although Harry accepted Bill’s ideas about coffee to go and a second-hand espresso machine, they were not bringing in a lot of money so far.

Two nights a week, Harry takes some leftovers to the prison, two towns north. “Probably the guards eat most of it,” he complains. “I don’t care one way or the other, but with all I have to do I wish they would get into one of those trucks the taxpayers bought and come up here and get this stuff. I don’t deliver to anyone else.”

Harry’s way of dealing with his abundant generosity usually turns and twists on its way to irony. He also carries with him the old-fashioned, long-discredited but never replaced habit of agreeing with everyone. This is true even with the outrageously bigoted Sid Ostrum who comes in almost every afternoon, not to buy anything, but to push his opinions on Harry. One day it was, “The Germans, the Swedes and the Irish are getting smarter about immigration lately.” This was greeted by Harry’s noncommittal nod. Yet, the day Sid spoke loudly about the black basketball player with AIDS, “getting what he deserved,” Harry bristled and asked Sid if he could get him something. Ostrum, with a smirk, said, “Can’t afford it. Cheaper at the supermarket,” and he didn’t come back for a few weeks.

The two women change their shoes. Helen asks Darlene why she is so “different” with Bill. “Don’t you like him?”

“Jerky-balls? He’s no trouble, really. He’s not someone I feel real close ta, that’s for sure. Just someone I work with.”

Helen says, “I like it when he sings.”

“He sings?”

“Sure. He sings all the time. You just don’t listen.”

“He doesn’t sing loud enough for me to hear.”

“He sings sad songs. You might not be interested.”

“God forbid.”

“Kind’a cute, for a man his age.”

“Too cute, if you ask me. Seems to be holding back something, not let’n on what he really thinks.”

“Business seems to be a little better.”

“Thank God for that,” Darlene says and then laughs as she adds, “Maybe it’s all that espresso we’ve been selling.”

A wall fan in the back room sucks out warm air with noisy efficiency. Helen and Darlene hang their aprons on wooden pegs next to the door to the toilet. Bill waits at the front door of the shop and locks up after they go out. They disappear down the sidewalk, talking, Darlene’s aqua-painted toenails peeking out of white-strapped sandals, Helen in brown-leather clogs.

Harry wastes no time. “I’m trying to make some changes,” he says. “I got myself a man to bake on the night shift — he’ll let me know for sure in a couple days.”

Again? Bill thinks.

“The thing is, how do you feel about coming in at three instead of four and going home at eleven instead of twelve, or maybe even doing two-to-ten?”

“Two-to-ten is fine with me,” Bill says, with relief, knowing that, this time, his number is not on the board. Harry has just given him a chance to be home every night before his wife goes to sleep.

“Good,” Harry says. “Monday next, maybe. Don’t say anything to anybody. I’m giving Darlene two weeks notice.”

“Darlene?”

Harry turns pink. “Let me tell you something,” he says, “most of the time she’s okay. But she’s got an attitude I never liked.”

“It used to be called lack of enthusiasm; now they call it negative energy,” Bill offers.

“Fine. Do they have a fancy word for crook? I found out she’s had her hand in the cash register. I didn’t say anything. Huge sums are not involved here. But she’s going — and, the way I feel, it’s better I do it than if the Department of Health comes in here and… well, to my mind she stinks up the place, is what I’m trying to say. Another thing, I can’t work night and day anymore. I’ll come in at six in the morning and go home at eight at night, if I have to, but no more graveyard shifts.”

“No amount of money is worth a coronary, Harry.”

“I hear you, believe me.”

On his downhill walk home that night, Bill thinks about Harry’s decision in the language used by men in suits: a downsizing of fifty percent in personnel on the hours Helen and Darlene work, coupled with more work (i.e. an “increase in productivity”) from him during the hours he would now work with Helen. He could easily put that kind of data into a memo to a vice-president, with the usual assurances that quality of output would be maintained. Princes were crowned when they came up with those kinds of numbers.

He thinks about Helen’s motivation. Did she talk to Harry about Darlene to protect herself, in case Harry spotted a shortage on the cash register tape? Harry was very lax on tallies of that kind. Or was Helen simply honest? Or cunning beyond belief? Or had Helen seen a way to save Bill’s job? If Harry had discovered the shortages himself, which he hadn’t, but if he had — he might have thought it was Bill’s doing — Bill being the newest person to handle money in the shop.

Darlene, he knows, will blame him for her dismissal, especially if Harry ducks the stealing issue and just tells her he has to let someone go to stay in business, which is more than likely what Harry will do; he won’t fire her for cause, which would make her ineligible for unemployment insurance.

The night is on the village like a freshly printed series of photographs, each streetlight produces uncountable gradations of black and white, while from the windows of the houses television sets pulse out smudged rainbows.

Bill has an image of Darlene: her habit of counting out change to a customer and then stopping while the customer, with hand out, waits while Darlene looks out the window and hitches her bra strap. He then has thoughts of the therapist, twenty years ago, who asked him at the start of one of their first hours together, “What is the joy in your life?” He had been dumbfounded by the question, without a clue as to what she was asking. She knew, didn’t she, that he was in the midst of a divorce? This was the end of his life, premature but definite. Now remarried, the question is still with him and so is the presence of the therapist — the conspiracy of non-lovers meeting at eight o’clock in the morning to talk of nothing but love — the compassion in her face, and the boots she wore, knee high, far from clinically correct, and her legs and knees when she did not wear boots.

The night is on the village like a freshly printed series of photographs, each street-light produces uncountable gradations of black and white, while from the windows of the houses television sets pulse out smudged rainbows. From here he can see The George Washington Bridge, its lights dancing with promise in front of the glow of Manhattan, as if all the fires of the successful were reflected against the low clouds.

There was a “smarten-up” conversation he overheard once in an elevator: “Look at Jimmy Carter,” a man said. “He was a nice guy and he worked like hell.” He is conscious of time, remembers his days in the army when he prayed he would not win the first hand of poker in the barracks, for fear of the many losing hands that could come later. He passes a doctor’s house, junk mail on the porch floor from an overflowing mailbox. No one has picked the dead-heads from the pink geraniums lining the walk; without a recent rain, they look fatigued, disorganized, leaderless.

He’d be home at the usual time, before twelve-thirty. “Is she awake?” He should have called her, as he often did in the late afternoon. She had never called him at the bakery, and as the weeks went by, he became less and less accepting of her inability to call him there. And he was never to come to an acceptance of that silence.