By late October 2011, we were almost sixteen months into the arrangement we'd signed that July, with access running from August through November. Four a.m. shifts had flattened time into a long gray corridor, broken chiefly by Thursdays when the sausage maker ran late and left the ovens too hot for our first bake.
I'd stopped thinking of it as temporary somewhere around month nine, the way you stop thinking of a limp as temporary once it's outlasted the cast, and then October arrived and the lease reminded me, bluntly, that it had always had an end date.
Tess and I stood in the empty unit on Quarry Street on a Thursday morning, Nolan unlocking it himself, which told me something about how much he'd personally decided to invest in deciding whether we belonged there.
"Full hood system," he said, walking us through, his voice doing the flat recitation of a man who has given this tour forty times and is only now, for the first time, uneasy about who's receiving it. "Walk-in's newer than your old one. Loading dock around back."
Tess ran her hand along the same kind of steel table she'd tested at Daywheel, a gesture I recognized now as entirely her own and nothing to do with anyone's grandmother or anyone's garden.
"It's bigger than what we have now," she said. "Bigger than the old storefront kitchen, even."
"It would need to be," Nolan said, "if you're planning to rebuild the accounts you lost." He turned to me directly. "I'll consider the application on its own terms this time. Not through an introduction. Just the business, on paper, like anyone else's."
I heard what he wasn't saying underneath that, the quiet implication that the last application had come to him wrapped in a friendship with a man who no longer existed under that name, and that this time he wanted no such wrapping anywhere near it.
"That's fair," I said, and meant it, though it cost me something to say so plainly, because fair and painless were turning out to be two different animals entirely.
He left us the paperwork and a two-week window to return it, standing in the doorway a moment longer like he wanted to add a condition he hadn't decided yet how to phrase.
"I'm not asking about her," he said finally, nodding toward Tess without quite looking at her, "not on this form. Not yet. I'm telling you that might come up later, depending on what else comes out."
"Depending on what else comes out from where," I said, already feeling the old tightness returning to my chest, the one that had lived there most of that July.
"There's more material getting released," he said. "That's all I know. I read it in the same place you'll read it." And then he was gone, and the unit was ours to consider in silence.
That night I sat at the kitchen table with the application and the number I'd been avoiding looking at directly: the last of our moving-and-reserve fund, enough to cover the application fees, the inspection costs, the deposit hold, but nothing left over if anything at all went wrong on the other side of signing it.
"If this doesn't work," Tess said, reading the number upside down from across the table with the plain honesty she'd never lost even in the worst of it, "we don't have a second try."
"No," I said. "We don't. But staying at Daywheel past November isn't a choice either, not once this lease runs out, so this is the try we have."
I signed where the form asked for a signature and set the fee aside in an envelope I'd mail in the morning, and told myself, without much evidence either way, that spending what little we had left on a chance was still better than spending nothing and losing the chance by default, though I understood, folding the envelope shut, that I wouldn't know which kind of true that was for another two weeks at least.