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but sweetly, even though you would never catch
her
going out on a work night.
    Today I am up to the challenge. Mine is a busy bakery, today even more so than usual. I've only been working up front serving customers for a month or so, and that only once a week. Using a cash register, talking to customers, making pleasant conversation while keeping things moving — these things don't come easily to me. Yet today I wrap my head around transactions both simple and intricate. I'm on, and it feels good.
    I don't know how I choose the places I work. I'm not really looking for money or status. I just want a place where everything is as it should be and my efforts are essential, not superfluous; a place where I don't have to use hateful jargon or lie.
    My co-worker Mélanie leaves and I'm alone. It gets busier. Somepeople want time-consuming things to drink on site, hot chocolate made by melting real chocolate pieces in hot milk or café-au-lait in bowls, while other people just want loaves of bread. These two classes of people share a single line-up.
    The best part of my tape arrives. A song called “Nie” comes on slow and dirge-like, tearful and sweet, and brings on a change of pace and feeling in the room. It makes me see the bakery as if in slow motion, like a party in its sweet spot: people gliding radiant across the kitchen and no one has ever been funnier or more beautifully themselves, and you can almost
see
the connections between them, like lines in a drawing, and no one is thinking of elsewhere. OK, this isn't a party; it's a bakery, but still. Now “Nincompoop” comes on, a bit faster and more rhythmic, but still wistful. (I remember this song played once at the
Bonnet d'Âne
. It was snowing and I was somewhat in love with the waitress, and the traffic light, the only non-white thing outside, changed colour in time with the song: green, yellow, red.)
    Here, though, three women, old friends, are having coffee and catching up, their happiness effortless and measureless. A kid climbs on precarious stools but he will never fall or burst into tears, he will just keep climbing and in the long line up people wait patiently and smile at each other, and there is no waste in my movements; nothing spills, nothing drops, nothing breaks.
    A woman in line looks at me curiously.
    â€œI like your shirt,” she says.
    â€œI got it at a thrift store, in Vancouver; I don't know what it means.” The shirt shows a red phoenix and underneath says in a clear sans serif, “PHOENIX.”
    â€œOh, you're an anglophone?” she says in perfect English. Only then does it register, that trace of accent I heard in her French. Or maybe I did notice before. Maybe that's why I mentioned Vancouver.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?” she asks.
    â€œI don't know,” I answer, truthfully. “Trying to learn French?”
    She's no longer looking at me according to the demands of the client-server relationship, but the way that you look at a friend you love when you listen to them completely. Some people seem to look at everyone that way, all the time, but I am not one of those people. She's looking me directly in the eye, and though I can't always dothat, this time I look right back at her. The music is still perfect and the other customers shift position in harmony to our melody, background to our foreground, as in a film when the main characters are in focus but not the others, the extras, who yet provide colour and shade. I get this strange woman her bread.
    â€œWell, it's working,” she says.
    The feeling that has been contracting in me to a single point now expands. I smile and say “thanks” while this feeling moves outward in concentric circles, like the ripples on water whose calm you've interrupted, or like a body stone, or like falling in love (though that's not what's happening here). It's as if she
knows
, though what she knows I can only make crude guesses at; as if she were