The bakery timer rang after my father stopped breathing

Dear Delyara, My father died in the room above our bakery while the first batch of bread was rising downstairs. I was holding his hand when the timer began ringing through the floorboards. My sister told me to ignore it. Father would have shouted if we let the bread burn, so I went down. The dough had risen beyond the edge of the bowls, soft and alive, while his body upstairs had become something the doctor would soon call finished. I shaped the loaves with flour still stuck beneath my fingernails from touching his blanket. Customers began arriving before the funeral home. They had heard he was ill but did not know he had died. An old man complained that the bread was late. I nearly told him he could wait forever. Instead, I opened the oven. By six, the bakery smelled exactly as it had every morning of my childhood. Father used to say yeast does not respect grief, weather, holidays, or laziness; it rises when it is ready. Today, I hated it for proving him right. We sold every loaf. Upstairs, his slippers remained beside the bed. Downstairs, people tore warm bread with their hands, and none of them knew the man who taught me to make it had gone cold before dawn.