FRESH lettering across the stomach

Three in the morning and the ovens are already breathing. You'd laugh at me, up to my elbows in flour, writing to you on the back of a delivery docket. Dad's stool is still beside the proving cupboard. Nobody has had the nerve to move it, least of all me.

I found his sign-writing kit under the stairs on Tuesday, the little brushes wrapped in greased paper and the tin of vermilion gone hard as toffee. I thought I'd touch up the board over the door, the one that says FRESH in letters he painted the year you were born. The paint wouldn't sit right. I thickened it with linseed and it crept down every stroke, so the R ran into a long red tear and the S bled off the edge of the board like glaze off a bad tart. Mrs Okafor from the post office stood on the pavement and said it looked like the bakery was crying. She bought four rolls anyway.

I've decided to leave it. Dad always said a sign should look like a person made it, not a machine. So every morning now I unlock at half four, switch on the lights over the bench, and read the word backwards through the glass the way he used to, drips and all. The first batch goes in at five.

The kitchen smells the way it always did. The drips are drying on the board in the cold, and I think he would have liked them.