The Baker's Dozen

Maeve Rowan O'Sullivan had always known herself to be set apart, even before the famine parted her family from the sodden green of County Cork and set them down on Boston's salt-lashed wharves. The old country clung to her—its language in her father's tongue, its music in her mother's lullabies—but she was something new in America, something forged in the blue fire of cities and the endless hunger of ships' steerages. Her parents, both canny and resourceful, had made good: her father as a timber foreman, her mother as a nurse. They'd sent their clever girl to the Ursuline nuns and, later, the Normal School, where she'd learned to read Latin, sew a straight seam, and parse the geometry of city streets. But it wasn't teaching or nursing or any of the other respectable professions for which they'd prepared her that called to her. Instead, it was the memory of those hungry years, and the taste of black bread, heavy with rye and desperation. The memory of want, even after the family had found its footing, never left her. In her spare time, she haunted the kitchens of neighbors and bakeries along Dock Square, learning to knead and leaven and coax softness out of the hardest flour. She told her parents, one rainy spring, that her plans were simple: she would become a baker, and with her own hands she would feed the hungry of whatever city she landed in next.