cut edge, like the pages of a closed book. Old Mr. Bakken, who still came in on Saturdays at eighty-three with a cane and an opinion about everything, had picked up one of her pecan kringles once and held it to the light and said, "Who did this one," and when the shift lead pointed at Ayanna, he had looked at her for a long moment and said, "Hm," which the other bakers told her afterward was the best review he had given anybody since 2011.
She was saving for culinary school, the pastry program at Gateway, and she had been saving for it for three years, and she had been eleven hundred dollars from enough when the pipe burst on Racine Street, and now she was six hundred and forty dollars from enough, and she was not going to think about that this morning.
Tavon's wife watched Nyla on the mornings Ayanna worked, and walked her to school, and Ayanna picked her up at three-ten. It was a system, and it worked, and Ayanna was proud of it in the way you are proud of a thing you built out of almost nothing with your own hands and nobody else's.
She had the napkin in her wallet. It had been in her parka pocket for a week and then she had moved it to her wallet, behind her driver's license, and every time she opened the wallet she saw the edge of it. MOIRA SZAFRAN, HEARTHSTONE WASH AVE. Under the name, the column: pot pie 13.99, chili cup 4.49, crackers 0, grilled cheese 6.49, and the line, and the total, 24.97. And then, underneath, in smaller letters, because she had added it later in the motel room after Nyla was asleep: paid 6.00. owe 18.97 plus tip.
Her grandmother had kept a book like that. Mama Phee, Ophelia Cutler, who had raised Ayanna in a house on Milwaukee's north side from the age of four, had kept a black composition notebook in the kitchen drawer with every debt she owed and every debt she was owed written down in pencil, and when a debt was paid she did not erase it but drew a single neat line through it, so you could still read it, so you could always see what had passed between people. When Ayanna was ten she had asked why she kept the old ones, and Mama Phee had said, "Because when somebody does for you, baby, you don't want to forget it, and when you do for somebody, you don't want them to have to remember it. The book remembers so nobody has to carry it."
On the first Monday in March, her day off, when the hold on her card had long since dropped and her paycheck had cleared and she had paid Tavon's mother-in-law for the gas bill and put forty dollars back in the school jar, Ayanna put