The night shift
The alarm went off at 2.45 am. For a moment Mei didn’t know where she was. Then she remembered: she was thirteen today, and she had asked for the strangest birthday present any of her friends had ever heard of.
“You’re sure?” Dad whispered from the doorway. He was already in his white apron, and the hallway light made a halo of his messy hair. “You can go back to sleep. No one would blame you.”
“I’m sure,” she said, although her body was begging her to stay under the doona.
For as long as she could remember, Dad had left for the bakery while the rest of the street was asleep. She knew him as a man who napped on the couch in the afternoons, who smelled faintly of yeast, and who missed every school assembly that started before lunch. She had always wanted to know what he actually did in those dark hours. Now she was going to find out.
The bakery was a cave of warmth after the cold street. Two ovens ticked as they heated. Flour dusted every surface like a light fall of snow, and the radio murmured an old song Mei half recognised.
Dad handed her an apron that reached her ankles. “Rule one,” he said. “Everything happens in order. You can’t rush bread.”
For the next three hours she weighed flour on the big steel scales, watched the mixer fold the dough over and over like a slow wave, and learned to shape rolls by cupping her hand and turning the dough against the bench until it pulled itself tight. Her first ones were lumpy and lopsided. Dad baked them anyway.
At half past five the first trays came out, and the smell was so good it was almost a sound. By six, Mrs Kowalski from the flats next door was knocking on the glass, as she did every morning, to buy a loaf of rye before her shift at the hospital. Then came the tradies, the nurses, the bus drivers — all the people who were awake while Mei usually slept.
“They’re my people,” Dad said, sliding a warm roll into her hand. “Someone has to feed the ones who start early.”
Mei looked at the line of tired faces brightening as they reached the counter, and something clicked into place. All those missed assemblies had not been because Dad didn’t care. He had been here, making sure a nurse could eat before a twelve-hour shift.
At seven he drove her home to get ready for school. She fell asleep in the car with flour still in her hair.
That afternoon there was a small paper bag on the kitchen bench. Inside was one lumpy, lopsided roll, and a note in Dad’s blocky capitals: YOUR FIRST BATCH. NOT BAD FOR A BEGINNER.