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something becauseeveryone else is, but when you get it home, it’s just this ugly crab that does nothing and you wonder why you ever wanted it in the first place. So Paolo was the hermit crab, and he got dumped. Not that Paolo is ugly. He’s not at all. He’s nice and funny and he has an accent that makes even Jules smile, which happens with no one else. My mom had to talk to her about it.
    With me, Paolo jokes a lot but mostly about things I don’t think are funny. I laugh anyway because I don’t know what else to do. He always starts in with, “So are you married yet?”
    â€œNo.” I sort of shrug and laugh as he squeezes past me and says hi to Jules. Jules actually laughs too, which is crazy.
    â€œReally, a handsome guy like you? I bet all the girls are chasing after you,” asks Paolo again. “Don’t you think so, Jules?”
    Jules says yes, but it’s a yes about him, it has nothing to do with me, so she laughs. And I laugh again because I still don’t know what to do.

    I walk back to the office, where Mom is hanging another picture on the Blunder Wall. It’s one of my favorite things in the bakery, and nobody really knows about it. It’s a wall full of pictures of baking mistakes that have happened here. Mom collects them because they make her laugh. And when they happen, she says, “Isn’t that Blunderful!” Sometimes, but not always at the time of the disaster, like the dozen pecan pies that exploded and needed to be remade in two hours. That was a rough one. But the bagels that ended up looking like owls always get her. Today it’s a picture of a tart that melted.
    â€œHey, Ducks. Look at it. It’s a raspberry murder scene!” She smiles really big and hangs it near a photo of a cake that deflated.
    Mom looks like her job. She’s a baker, so sloppy and sort of flour dirty. She’s always covered with flour. Or powder of some kind. And her hair is always back in a tight, tight ponytail with a bandanna tied on top. And her nails are always clipped. And all her T-shirts are blotched with butter or oil or eggs. You can smell the dough on her. You know what she’s making that night because you cansee the stains all over her. When she smells like cinnamon or fresh berries and her fingers are stained blackish red, that means tarts and muffins and cinnamon rolls. And other times, it’s the stinging smell of rye that takes a long, hard whiff to get to the sweet part. At first it’s like salty grass. And that’s just sort of gross. It’s always different, but still it’s always her. I love that.
    â€œWell, bread is a process, and sometimes it just goes a little wrong,” Mom says with a big laugh. “Let’s hope not tonight.”
    Maybe this doesn’t sound anything like a mega piece of news or something, but for Mom, that is seriously the most important phrase in the world. It’s Everything. I guess you could call it a mantra, but I would have to Google it to make sure that’s right. It’s definitely her slogan. “Bread is a process,” she says in the morning when she gets up at five thirty. And every night when she falls asleep at the kitchen table trying to take off her shoes. It’s her excuse for not being places on time or even showing up at all. Or for missing family dinner, or the one time, when I tried to play baseball at the park. I wassort of glad she wasn’t there to see that one.
    Nanny was. She said to me, “Well, at least you can run. We just have to sort out which way.”
    Mom is always at the bakery. She works super hard. But the fun part is you get to taste what she does. She gets to make something good and make people feel happy. That’s pretty great. It’s another part of the secret side of the bakery, I guess. Knowing what goes into the Kamishovitches’ strawberry anniversary cake, or that the Lieberman cake is for Tim, who has