Everybody in the neighborhood knew the bakery sold more than cannoli, although nobody could explain exactly what else was moving through the back room. Deliveries came after midnight. Men in expensive coats entered through the alley and left carrying pastry boxes far too carefully. The owner’s daughter insisted the family was legitimate, which only made people more certain something criminal was happening.
Her boyfriend remained skeptical until the evening he arrived with flowers and found three men seated around the kitchen table discussing “the problem on Ninth Street.” They stopped talking when he entered. One of them slowly covered a ledger with a dish towel.
Later, he asked the question he had been avoiding. “So yo mama’s mobbed up?”
She nearly choked on her coffee. “My mother runs a bakery.”
“Beg pardon,” the boyfriend said. “Ain’t yo mother also got a guy named Uncle Frankie who ain’t related to nobody.”
“He delivers flour.”
“Which explains why he carries a shoulder holster.”
“He has back problems.”
The explanation became harder to defend when her mother appeared at the apartment the next morning carrying a cake and asked whether anyone had been bothering him at work.
He mentioned a supervisor who had denied his vacation request.
That selfsame supervisor resigned by lunchtime.
After that, small inconveniences began resolving themselves. Parking tickets disappeared. A noisy neighbor moved. A landlord suddenly remembered the security deposit. Each time he asked how any of it happened, his girlfriend blamed coincidence.
Then he made the mistake of joking that he could use a raise.
The following Monday, his boss called him into the office, pale and sweating, and offered thirty percent.
That evening, he confronted his girlfriend.
“Baby, lemme just be clear that I ain’t complaining, but I need to know whether your mom ‘n’ em is actually dangerous.”
She considered the question carefully. “Dangerous to whom?”
From the kitchen came the sound of her mother opening the oven.
Dinner was a tasty lasagna. Not one single solitary soul mentioned the raise.
On the way home, he noticed the flower shop downstairs had placed a handwritten sign in the window:
WE DELIVER.
And he damn sure believed it.
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