Owl and magnolia on upper back

Old Hester Vane kept the bakehouse at the bottom of that lane, and she kept an owl too, though she never admitted it. It sat on the beam above the peel rack, grey as ash, with a collar of curling marks on its breast like the scrolls on a bread stamp. Hester fed it crusts and it never once let her catch it blinking. Her husband Tom called it the night clerk, because it kept the accounts of who came in late and who left with flour on their boots.

Tom had carried a magnolia cutting back from the coast in a jam jar, and it took nine winters to flower against the yard wall. The year it finally opened, Hester found the owl sitting in its branches at three in the morning, pink petals curled under its feet as if someone had painted them there. She held the lamp up and told it, you have no business with my tree. The owl turned its great round face to her and did not move.

Tom had died in the frost that February, and Hester understood at last that the bird had been keeping his place. So she left the back door open every night after that, and at first light she pressed one petal into the top crust of the first loaf and set it on the sill. By morning the bread was gone and the petal with it. Then, one dawn, there was a single grey feather lying on the flour sack, and the loaf was still warm. Hester swept it into her apron pocket and went to light the ovens.