Her name was Oksana Boyko-Kowal. She was fifty-two. She closed the bakery for the first time on a Saturday in December in forty years, put a sign on the door that said FAMILY MATTER, BACK SOON, and sat down with Joyce at the little table in the back by the ovens.
Joyce showed her everything. The placement paper. The baby photograph with the purple studio stamp. The slip of paper in old Ukrainian.
Oksana read the slip of paper twice. Her hands were shaking.
"That's her writing," she said. "Kateryna's. I've seen it on the recipe cards. All my life."
The story came out slowly, between them, the way stories do when two people each have half of it.
Kateryna Boyko had come to Hamtramck from a village near the Polish border in 1929, at nineteen, to work in a cousin's bakery. In 1934, in the worst of the Depression, she was twenty-four and unmarried and pregnant. The father was a young man from the bakery who went back to the old country and did not return. There was no work. There was no money. Her cousin said she could keep her job or keep the baby. Not both.
She gave the baby to the nuns at St. Hedwig's in March of 1934. A good Polish family named Nowak took her in. Kateryna was told she could never contact them.
"She married my great-grandfather in 1937," Oksana said. "They bought the studio next door and knocked out the wall and made the bakery bigger. They had four sons. She worked behind this counter until she was eighty-six."
She looked up at the braided bread on the shelf.
"And every Christmas, she baked one kolach that wasn't for eating. She put it on that shelf with a candle. When my grandmother asked why, she said, For my first one. She's coming home someday. Then she wouldn't say anything else."
"When did she die?"
"1998," Oksana said. "We kept baking it. My grandmother, then my mother, then me. We didn't know why anymore. We just knew we had to."
Joyce sat with that for a long time.
Twenty-eight years. Her mother had been alive, ninety minutes up the highway, for twenty-eight years after Kateryna died. And for sixty-four years before that, while Kateryna was alive. Both of them had been baking the same bread on the same night.
"Did your mother ever come here?" Oksana asked quietly. "To this street?"
Joyce thought about it.
"She was born here," she said slowly. "She grew up six blocks away. She went to St. Florian's school." She stopped. "Oksana, she must have walked past this window a thousand times."
"Did she ever buy bread here?"
Joyce did not know. She would never know.
Then she remembered something. A small thing, the kind of thing she would have caught on the line. A detail that did not match.
Every Christmas Eve, her mother had baked her braided bread from scratch. The whole thing. Except for one ingredient. She bought the poppy seed filling for the middle. She never made it herself. She drove ninety minutes to Hamtramck every December to buy it, from a bakery she would never name, and she would never take Joyce with her.
"She said the store-bought filling was better than she could make," Joyce whispered. "That's what she said. Every year. She drove down alone."
Oksana stared at her.
Then she got up, went into the back of the bakery, and came out with an old cardboard box full of index cards. Kateryna's customer book. Regular orders, in the old woman's writing, going back to 1945.
She turned the cards for a long time. Then she stopped and set one on the table.
Mrs. H. Wisniewski. Gratiot Falls. One pound poppy seed filling. Every December. Since 1960.
Under it, in Kateryna's shaky hand, in Ukrainian, three words.
Father Tomasz would translate them for Joyce later. But Oksana read them out loud right then, in the back of the bakery, in a voice that was not steady at all.
"She has my eyes."
Neither of them spoke for a long time.
Joyce thought about her mother, at twenty-six, in 1960, driving ninety minutes in the snow to a bakery on Joseph Campau Avenue. Buying a pound of poppy seed filling from an old woman behind the counter. Every December. For thirty-eight years.
Did they know? Both of them? Neither of them? Had they ever said one word to each other besides "a pound, please" and "Merry Christmas"?
It did not matter, she decided. It did not matter at all.
They had stood across a glass counter from each other once a year for thirty-eight years. That was more than either of them had been promised.
On Christmas Eve, Joyce baked her mother's braided bread in the kitchen in Gratiot Falls.
She made the dough the way Helen had taught her. Three strands, woven together into a ring. She brushed it with egg so it would shine. For the filling, she used one pound of poppy seed, from Boyko's Ukrainian Bakery on Joseph Campau Avenue, which Oksana had refused to let her pay for.
Kim drove over from Grand Rapids with the grandchildren. Oksana drove up from Hamtramck with her husband and her mother, who was seventy-eight and cried when she saw Joyce's kitchen.
When the bread came out of the oven, Joyce set it in the middle of the table and put a white candle in the center.
Then she picked up her phone and called a number in Hamtramck. Oksana's son, who was home watching the shop.
"Is it there?" Joyce asked.
"It's here," he said. "On the shelf. Mom told me to light it at six."
Joyce looked at the clock. It was five fifty-nine.
She struck a match and lit the candle in her mother's bread. Ninety miles south, in a little bakery on Joseph Campau Avenue, a young man struck a match and lit the candle in his great-great-grandmother's.
"There," Joyce said softly. "She's home."