Malia's Oven (Part 2)

The click became a noise on the Wednesday, three days before the festival. Then, at half past four on Thursday morning, with forty balls of dough rising on the rack, the oven simply stopped.

The repair man came at nine and was in the shop for twenty minutes. The dead part was a control board, he said, and for an oven this old it would take three weeks to come from the factory, if it came at all.

The impact was simple, and Malia did the math while he was still talking. No oven, no bread. No bread, no shop. No shop for three weeks, no festival, no rent, and no way back.

She put a paper sign on the door. Closed today. Sorry.

By eleven the sign had done something she did not expect. The man who comes in every morning for two coffees read it twice, then went away and came back with the woman who runs the laundromat next door. By two o’clock there were four people in Malia’s kitchen who had never been in her kitchen before.

One of them, a retired man who had spent twenty years fixing ovens for a pizza chain, took the back panel off, looked inside for a while, and said the board was dead but the oven was fine — and that a bakery two towns over had closed in June, and its ovens were still sitting in a storage unit.

The unit cost her four hundred dollars and a Friday. The van belonged to somebody’s son. Getting a deck oven, the kind with a heavy stone floor, through a back door that is thirty-two inches wide takes six people, two hours, and a certain amount of shouting in three languages.

At half past eleven on Friday night they got it in. Malia turned it on and stood in front of it with her hand out, the way you feel a child’s forehead.

It was hot. On the left side, it was much too hot.