This time, she actually backed down. Unusual. “Well, all right,” she said. “Would you like a piece of this pound cake from Mrs. Fryt?”

For Florence to placate him with food was not unusual. He’d been putting on weight since she’d started working for him. The problem was her cinnamon rolls. Her husband had left her childless (she often spoke of how she envied Mr. Mickelson’s fine family) and she seemed to view baking as the most significant act of creation of which she, a forty-year-old widow, was capable. John couldn’t complain. There was nothing that lifted his spirits in the morning better than walking into the bank to the smell of her freshly baked rolls.

Sometimes, he imagined her alone in her small house in Pine Rapids, where she had recently made her home after years living upstairs above her husband’s shop in nearby Victor. Imagined her standing in her dimly lit kitchen each evening mixing flour, sugar, milk, lard, egg, yeast, in a crockery bowl, patiently stirring in the last of the flour a sprinkle at a time. Imagined her with her pink hands, shaping the dough into a ball, covering it with a bright towel, washing her hands clean of the flour, putting away her apron, turning her back on the covered dough left there next to the sink overnight to rise. Imagined her removing the pins from her old-fashioned champagne blond hair and letting it fall to her shoulders. She was tall, ample in all the right places.

And he could imagine the next morning, the way she would come into the kitchen in her robe and slippers, hair tied with a ribbon at the nape of her neck, and uncover the risen dough. He could see her rolling it into a rectangle, lovingly drizzling butter in long yellow swoops like the earliest streaks of morning sun, then sprinkling white sugar crystals like snow across the whole landscape; finally, tap-tap-tapping the cinnamon shaker and watching the cinnamon collapse against the heat of the butter. Then, carefully, rolling the dough into a cinnamon-striped cylinder; slicing the cylinder into small disks, placing them into the pan to bake. There was no anger and no duty in her labor as he conceived of it.

For there was no anger or duty in any aspect of Florence that John could see. Some might have been bitter to have their husband taken from them in the prime of life, but Florence simply said she was grateful for the good years they had had. “I knew when I married him he was ten years older. And a Yankee, to boot. Still, it came as a surprise, so soon. But I reckon he’ll always be part of me. We were married twenty years.” So she would say, brushing a strand of her hair out of her eyes, turning to the file drawer to clean out, reorganize, alphabetize.

“A rolling stone gathers no moss,” she always said.