On Wednesday, Avis stands at the window, peering through the latticework of leaves and spines at the neighbor pinning up her washing. The doorbell chimes startle her. She drapes a towel over a rising brioche dough, feeling newly capable, a tick of expectation as she goes to answer. When she opens the door, at first all she sees through the screen is a glint in someone’s hand. Pushing open the screen door, she realizes it’s Eduardo, one of Stanley’s delivery people, holding Avis’s antique silver tray. “This was propped against your front door.”
When she’d left the tray at the neighbor’s feet the other day it was etched with tarnish all along the swirls and the central silver coin. Now it gleams. Avis marvels, turning it over. Someone has polished every crevice, rubbed at every impossible edge and crook; not a speck on it. Eduardo carries his cooler into the kitchen, stacks tubs of strawberry purée in the freezer. There are almonds for her macarons, vanilla pods, raw cocoa. She follows him in, props the tray against the wall, staring at the gleam. After he finishes unloading, Eduardo stands, about to lift the cooler, then stops in place, looking out the back window. “Is she Haitian?”
Avis turns. Their backyard is framed in the wide window above the sink. “I don’t actually know.” She can see the woman shaking out a wet pink skirt. “We haven’t really talked.”
“Did you notice those?” He gestures up.
Avis is momentarily dazed by the bleached sky: a hawk of some sort floats by, wings glinting and flat. Something twinkles at the near corner of the neighbor’s yard, nearly hidden among the branches. “What is that?” Avis puts on her kitchen readers. She sees it now: small creatures fashioned out of straw and grass — a mouse and two small birds, swaying, suspended by invisible strings.
Eduardo stands beside her at the sink. He smells slightly sour, like physical labor. “Voodoo,” he says. “They’re some kind of little offerings.”
“Really? Voodoo?” She lifts the stem of her glasses. Once, while delivering some cakes with Carlita, another assistant, Avis spotted a dark knob of some sort in the street. She stared, unable to identify it until she was nearly standing over it: a dog’s paw, cleanly severed mid-leg. Carlita had grabbed her and pulled her away, muttering a Hail Mary under her breath.
“It’s just another religion,” he says dismissively, and turns back to study the kitchen. “So cool here. This place reminds me of Hansel and Gretel.”
Avis continues to stare at the bouncing straw mouse. “I wouldn’t let a gumdrop or candy cane within twenty feet of my kitchen.”
“Well, you’re not that kind of witch.” Eduardo squats over the cooler, stuffing plastic bags back into it and slapping the top shut again. He backs out of the kitchen holding his cooler; at the front, he opens the screen door with his shoulder. “According to Stan, you’re the real deal,” he says, starting down the front steps. “A real sugar artist.”
She stands in the doorway. “I’m just a worker bee.”
Eduardo opens the truck and slides in the cooler. “He says you’re a genius.”
“Stanley?” Her voice is quiet. “Really did he say that?” She averts her eyes. “About me?”
He shrugs. “You know, with the Haitians, there’s a pretty interesting relationship to sugarcane — if you’re interested. It’s sacred to them.” He opens the van door and props his arm on it. “But it’s pretty horrible. They have to harvest it for other people and they starve. You and her should talk about sugar some time.”
When Avis returns to the house, the air inside feels like the bottom of a well. She browses through her work folder, stuffed with orders on slips and receipts: Monday — cinn. palmiers — the Morris Group. PI&B — mocha cr. puffs, 5 Saint-Honorés. Winslow Co. retreat 20 plum tarts… She tries to plan the day’s baking schedule but she keeps putting down her pen, returning to the French doors, cracking them, leaning out into the damp air. How still it is in the hottest part of the day! Just a minor insect whir, a few random bird notes — everything deadened by molten heat. She returns to the kitchen: the woman and her bird have gone in for the day. Why doesn’t she feel relieved?
FOR TWO DAYS, Avis sneaks out of the kitchen after she’s set out dough for the first rising, to climb into the densest section of overgrowth, among webs and rotting avocados and palmetto bugs — muck, spores, and tiny-legged things falling into her hair or down the back of her shirt. From there, she watches the neighbor pull what seem to be weeds, bundling them neatly in the lap of her apron. The woman wears a bib apron like the sort Avis’s grandmother wore — white, tied with strings behind the neck and waist. Under this, she wears a variety of simple housedresses in honeyed colors, turquoise, sea green, lavender, and pale rose, usually some sort of kerchief tied over her hair. From a distance, she looks delicate as a girl, but Avis suspects she is just a bit younger than herself. While she gardens or hangs laundry, she sings or murmurs to the mynah who waddles nearby and occasionally attempts to climb the fabric of her dresses. She speaks in a rapid, staccato language that Avis think must be Creole: the bird often responds in exactly her voice, mirroring each word: bonswa, bonswa, souple, pa fe sa… Watching this woman gives Avis such pleasure — the rhythm of the woman’s voice, the filigree of birdsong in the trees, the atlas of breezes carrying jasmine, vanilla, and gardenia — even the sweetness of the rotting mulch and briny air bewitches her.
That Thursday, Avis leaves the kitchen the moment Brian departs, wiping her hands on her apron, and goes to the place in the fronds. She presses against the avocado trunk, hidden under a screen of leaves. Rain begins misting through the fronds: the cloud cover turns the morning sky into a emerald post-dusk hue, mixing things up. Soon she sees the back door nudged open by a brown foot, a flicker of pink toenails: the woman emerges in an old lemon-colored shift — bateau neck, sleeveless — beneath an apron. She places a metal pot on the ground, then sits beside it on the cement step, just under the eave of the house. There’s a pile of leaves in her apron, as usual, and she sets to work, stripping pieces of greenery, tossing part, throwing the rest in the pot. After she has worked methodically for some minutes, the woman begins to sing. Avis strains to hear: it’s a syrupy old tune she’s heard somewhere before. Mon amour, je t’attendrai toute ma vie… Oh mon amour, ne me quitte pas. Her voice is thin but on-key. Avis releases a breath and the fragile sounds of air and insects are part of that diastole. She is so relaxed she is almost drowsing.