For a short time after my wife left, my daughter and I lived a few doors down from a French bakery on the south side of San Antonio. This was only the second place we’d lived in San Antonio, the first being the much larger apartment we’d shared with my wife on the north side. That apartment had had three bedrooms and a large kitchen and a small communal living space, a kind of courtyard that we shared with several of the other residents in the building. This place, by contrast, was much smaller, almost claustrophobic with its low ceilings and narrow corridors and small windowless rooms. I’d chosen it mostly for the location, which was just a few blocks south of the downtown area, and because I thought my daughter would like to be a little closer to some of the parks and restaurants she liked. Because it was so small, however, we spent a lot of time out of the house, and her favorite place to go, of course, was the French bakery down the street, the patisserie, as she liked to call it once she’d learned the proper name, the patisserie with the mille-feuilles.
