My grandmother left me her bakery in a handwritten will on a piece of graph paper, folded twice, and tucked inside a recipe card for walnut brittle.
The lawyers were not thrilled about this.
Her name was Rose Marchetti, and she had operated the bakery on Clement Street in San Francisco for forty-one years with the specific stubbornness of a woman who had decided at twenty-nine what her life was going to be and had arranged everything else around that decision. She made bread that people drove across the city for. She had refused, on four separate occasions, to sell to a development company that had offered her increasingly unreasonable amounts of money, because the offers, she told me, were not about bread. They were about location, and the location was hers, and no one was buying her location.
She died at eighty-one, two weeks after her last loaf was pulled from the oven, which I think was precisely the exit she would have chosen if she had been consulted.
The graph paper will said: The bakery belongs to Nina. She knows what to do with it.
My name is Nina Marchetti. I was thirty-four years old when my grandmother died, and I was living in Chicago working as a financial analyst for a firm that paid me well and required approximately eighty percent of my waking hours. I had not worked in the bakery since I was nineteen, when I had spent a summer learning to shape sourdough and properly laminate croissant dough, which my grandmother had insisted I know regardless of what I planned to do with my life.
She said everyone should know how to make bread properly. That it was not a culinary skill but a form of fundamental competence, like reading or swimming, and that a person who did not know it was missing something she could not afford to be missing.
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