At four in the morning the bakery smells like two things: the sourdough that has been fermenting since yesterday, and the flour that hit the bench ten minutes ago. Anyone who has worked here more than a month can tell by the smell alone what stage the room is in.
Petra is at the table with the razor. She is left-handed and she scores with her left. The boules come to her in rows of six on a couche, and she cuts each one with two short strokes — a cross, not a cross, an ear lifted on one side. She doesn’t think about it. She thought about it for three years and then stopped.
Joaquín is at the oven. The deck is at 460, steam loaded. He slides the peel under a row, lifts, pivots, and the six loaves go onto the stone in a single motion. He has a count in his head that is not a clock. The oven tells him what it is doing. When the crust begins to set he opens the vent, and he knows when that is without looking.
They do not speak during the first hour. The door of the walk-in opens and closes. The mixer is off. There is a radio at the back but no one has turned it on. This is a room that does not need a radio.
Petra finishes the last row on her couche and carries the board past him to the bench, where she scrapes it clean and reflours it for the next batch. She passes close enough that her elbow could touch his if either of them moved wrong. Neither of them moves wrong. This is also something they stopped thinking about. It took about eighteen months.
The first loaves come out at five. Joaquín pulls them onto the cooling rack in the same rhythm he put them in. The crust is the color of old brass. The scoring has bloomed open where Petra cut, and the bread looks the way bread looks when it has not been argued with.
At five-ten Petra speaks for the first time that morning. She says, big batch tomorrow, right. Joaquín says, yeah, fifty. She nods. They go back to not talking.
The second row goes in. The third. At six the front unlocks and the first customer is a regular who buys a baguette every day and leaves sixty cents too much in the dish. Neither of them counts her money. She counts her own.
By seven the racks are full and the room smells like four things instead of two. Petra washes her hands. Joaquín pulls the last boules. They nod at each other on the way out of the kitchen.
The ovens are already warming for tomorrow.