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Mrs. Amici to snarl a reply, but for once she seemed speechless and a little shaky. “Where did you . . . ?” she stammered, looking at Ellen’s ring.
    Ellen held out her hand. “It has been in my husband’s family for a long time,” she said. “I just love it.”
    “Some families have all the luck.” Mrs. Amici pulled Barney away. He stopped and howled before trotting down the street again to check out the enigmatic scent of yet another streetlight.
    “I’m sorry about that,” I said to my new clients. “I had hoped the spell of cake and frosting would have protected you a little longer. Mrs. Amici is our resident snark.”
    “No problem,” Ellen said, still smiling. “It’s that poor puppy’s loss. I’m sure he’s never had anything as tasty as what’s in this box.” She opened the car doors and put the cake box in the backseat. The mother and daughter drove off just as the postman handed me my mail.
    Too bad the spell didn’t last for me, either, I thought as I shuffled through the bills and the junk mail.
    A card with handwriting all too familiar to me would go straight in the trash when I went back inside.
    Next, I pulled a plain postcard out of the stack, postmarked Kansas City. I didn’t think I knew anyone there.
    I turned it over and immediately recognized the spiky handwriting.
    Dad.
    When I tried to picture my father, what I got was the snapshot from my fourteenth birthday—Dad looking away from the camera, his long arm looped around my bony shoulders as if I were the stake to which he was tethered.
    When I imagined Dad’s voice, all that usually came to me was a Ray LaMontagne song, strummed on a guitar, about how his hometown was bringin’ him down, and how he was going to finally stay gone. If Dad had a theme song, that would be it.
    From my sixteenth birthday onward, I’d gotten a postcard or two every year, from all over the country. They were always mailed to Gran’s old house in some misguided way, I surmised as I got older, to avoid my mother. But they eventually reached me. As far as I knew, he had never sent money, even after Mom and I lost our house on the hilltop.
    His greetings were always brief. Just a “Happy birthday” or “I love you.” Never anything about how or what he was doing or where he really was. Or asking about me, either.
    He didn’t know I had graduated from college and pastry school, worked in small-batch bakeries and high-style patisseries, gotten married, and become a professional baker. He didn’t know his absence had been both an unlikely gift and an ongoing curse; I’d had to stand on my own two feet, but maybe I had taken that a little too far. He didn’t know that I now owned a business, and had recently bought Gran’s old house. He didn’t know his own mother was slowly losing her memory. What he didn’t know took up more than half of my life.
    As I held the card, I felt a conflicting mix of emotions—sadness, irritation, yearning, and, I was almost embarrassed to admit, still a little girl wanting her daddy.
    I debated whether to just pitch the postcard, but instead I started reading. And it took my breath away.
    It wasn’t the message: “Sorry for all this. Miss you. Love you. Dad.”
    It was the return address printed in the upper left corner.
    Project Uplift, a homeless outreach program.
    Homeless?
    MARCH 1932
    Two little girls in short-sleeved cotton dresses, ankle socks that just wouldn’t stay up, and scuffed saddle shoes held hands as they crossed the brick street—just as they promised their mama they’d do.
    The older sister, Olive, held the market basket and the money. As they walked into Amici’s on the corner of Pearl and Benson streets, the familiar glass case along the left side of the store displayed a meager selection of meats and cheeses. Along the right, tins of Worthmore’s and Stegner’s chili, Dinty Moore beef stew, and several varieties of Campbell’s soup lined the shelves. And in the middle, boxes of