The Wizard's Herbarium: The Wolf Child

Part 10

Foaming was a quiet place.

Colt didn't feel like getting out of the car. It seemed like so much work. Figuring out where he was sleeping that night shouldn't have been difficult and yet, suddenly seemed like a gargantuan task to him.

It was the smell that tempted him out of the car and his thoughts.

The bakery looked like a place cut right out of a fairy tale. The entrance was a small door that was framed by greenery from bushes planted on either side of the building. As Colt approached the door, he noticed the huge windows. Inside, the windows let natural light into a small sitting area. The floors, walls and ceilings were all wood. There was a bathroom, a small room for children to play and a newsstand with a local paper on it. There was no one else sitting in the bakery and it was quiet, making Colt want to stay a moment.

They had to move through the sitting area to get to the till where the pastry fridge had all the goods on display. The kitchen was open too. Colt could see a woman with graying hair rolling out dough. Flour covered the surface she was working on and was smeared all over her apron.

"Hello, welcome." A young girl said from behind the counter. She seemed to recognize Colt's travelling companion because they began to chat in a way that was familiar.

Colt was too busy examining the pastries to listen. There was a wide variety of things to choose from, but there wasn't many of any one item. There were only four croissants displayed, for example. They did come in chocolate and strawberry with cream and berries in the middle of the pastry, but it wasn't anything like a large bakery in the city where they carried seemingly unlimited amounts of everything.

Still feeling the disappointment over the croissant he ate the other day, that was what Colt ordered.

As the girl was fishing out his pastry, another young woman opened the door labeled 'employees only' behind the counter. Beyond the door, Colt could see the inside of a house with baby toys strewn about.

"Mom - oh." The woman looked several years older than the one behind the counter and had a baby on her hip. "Sorry, I didn't know we had customers," she said to Colt before moving into the kitchen to talk instead of shouting over the space.

Colt watched the conversation in the kitchen that was something to do with the baby. 

He liked this bakery. The other bakery in town was also a family business, but it didn't have the same feel this one did. There was a quiet pride about the place that Colt liked, and deep down, the chef inside him respected it. He saw why so many people liked the place.

Colt took his pastry into the sitting area, right in front of the window, but before he could bite into it, his travelling companion came over.

"I gotta go to work," she said. "I can't hang out around here."

"Let me grab my stuff from your car, then," Colt said. It had been so long since he'd enjoyed any  peace that now that he had it, he wanted to cling to it, even for a few minutes.

He hoisted his bag and the box containing the air mattress out of the car and returned to the bakery. He took up his abandoned pastry in the spot by the window and took a bite. It was good, better than he could have imagined, and definitely better than the stale thing he'd eaten the other day. The flavours were delicately balanced - sweet but not too much.

As he stared out the window, something caught his attention in the corner of his eye. It wasn't a person, Colt knew that much, and he ignored it out of principle at first. When it continued to distract him through the rest of his meal, Colt finally turned to look at it.