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Empty. Filled up. Running over.

Twelfth Street in east Davenport has long been on Terry Timmerman’s daily path. So it was only a matter of time before he’d walk through the doors of East Side Bakery and meet Nikki LaTray.

In his younger days, Terry often passed by Holst’s Market in the Mount Ida neighborhood. Then a few years ago, he noticed that someone had opened a bakery in the aging building. “I stopped in for some cookies for the office,” remembers Terry, a St. Paul member and volunteer coordinator for the Quad City chapter of Habitat for Humanity.

Terry is convinced that “God brought Nikki into my life and my family’s life. I had a feeling Nikki and I were going to grow together.” Now, every time Terry and his wife Marti strike out for the Twin Cities for family visits, his adult children have one request: “Bring cookies from East Side Bakery.”

Thirteen years ago, Nikki was working for $5 an hour with a railroad company in Missoula, Montana. Separated from an abusive and alcoholic husband, she could barely scrape together grocery money for herself and two sons, then eight and five. Rent payments were impossible. She had an eviction notice in her hands.

Then the man who is now her ex-husband took the kids. “He threatened I would never see them again. I was so desperate. I knew he was serious. It was a matter of keeping myself and my kids safe.”

So Nikki approached her boss, a man she thought didn’t even know she existed. He met her panic with kindness. “We’ll find a place for you,” he assured her. Within an hour, Nikki clutched plane tickets to the Quad Cities, where the company was relocating employees to a recently-acquired railroad. “We left with the clothes on our backs and $200 from the company.”

In those early days, she “had kind of lost my faith. My childhood was not very good.” Her father had been a cruel man. “That led me to make choices,” unfortunate choices.

She was astonished when good people extended a helping hand. She looks back now and realizes that, “in every breath I take,” God has been present. God’s presence has often come in the “generosity of strangers: a box of food on the porch, or pillows and blankets to keep us warm.” Later Nikki wrote a card to her Montana boss, a man of faith: “You are my hero.”
“I realized you never go through anything alone.”

Terry sits in the bakery, listening to Nikki’s story. He shakes his head. “How fortunate you must feel to get out of that situation, the nerve it took, the people who helped you along the way. In your boss’ heart, he had to do something about it.”

Davenport, Iowa, was the “biggest place” Nikki had ever seen. She settled her family into a motel on Kimberly Road, and started to work the very next day. Over time, she found day care for the boys. Then one day a woman called: “The police are here. A man says he is the boy’s dad.” He had convinced a judge that Nikki was a danger to her sons. He possessed papers that gave him temporary custody.

Nikki chokes with emotion now. “The kids were screaming. They didn’t want to go. The youngest one still had a blanket and he cried, ‘No, Mommy!’ The police had to peel him off of me. The police handcuffed me, which made the kids more upset.”

Nikki’s boss connected her with a divorce attorney at a reduced fee. The boys came home to Nikki. But the horror continued. When summer custody put the children in danger, Nikki drove 24 sleepless hours to retrieve them. Now the ex-husband is in prison for armed assault.

“Some people look at this time as such a hardship,” says Nikki. “But I look at it like a rescue that I was thrust into.”
Chaotic circumstances made Nikki “do what you don’t think you can do. It was not even a choice. I was on auto-pilot. You’re tested to a primal level.”

Terry observes, “Don’t come between a mother and her children.” One day, Terry spotted 10 little ducklings crossing the street. “I watched the mother duck. She put herself into harm’s way. The ducklings were panic-stricken, but she managed to get all her babies across the street to safety.”

Nikki worked hard. And she cooked great meals for her growing boys. “Mom,” they used to say, “You cook so good, you should open a restaurant.” Then she bought a house. “Mom,” said the boys, “You said you could never buy a house. Some day you’ll have a restaurant!”

Then in 2003, the bottom dropped out. The railroad closed. Employees were being relocated to South Dakota. Nikki’s sons didn’t want to move. Nikki had a bit of money to live on, but jobs were scarce. “I started to panic.”

One day in early 2006, Nikki was walking around her Mount Ida neighborhood, not far from the Village of East Davenport. She spotted a renovated building, once a meat market. “The wheels started turning.” It’s just right for a bakery, she thought. Nikki “plunked down” her savings and by May, she was open for business.

Tuesdays through Saturdays, Nikki works solo in the bakery, turning 100 pounds of flour each week into artisan breads, handmade pastries, and mouth-watering cookies. The boys hold down day jobs, working to pay the house mortgage. By night, they run a savory pizza business out of the Twelfth Street storefront.

“I thought, well, if you bake it they will come. But it’s not that easy,” says Nikki. “There’s nothing to take home right now. But every year we’re doing better. I feel like this is going to be our breakout year. I feel it in my gut.”

Terry adds his perspective: “Coming here saved you, Nikki. After hearing your story, I keep thinking that keeping your bakery afloat is a piece of cake.”

A couple of years ago, Terry Timmerman walked into Nikki LaTray’s bakery. He fell for Nikki and her cookies. “I didn’t set out to hook up St. Paul and Nikki.” But Terry is a “spinner” at heart. So he took Nikki’s story to his congregation in the form of peanut butter cookies.

Each time Terry and Marti host a Membership Inquiry Class with a plate of Nikki’s cookies, he tells her story: “This woman was essentially homeless. And now she’s running this bakery on Twelfth Street.” Terry always makes sure that leftover cookies make their way downstairs for the church staff. Soon he converted receptionist Jennifer Garvey. “She was the one I was after. If she gets behind something, she makes sure everyone tastes it.”

Nikki baked an array of delicious desserts for a five-week stretch of St. Paul’s Beta course in January. In no time, word went viral. Her bakery started showing up on Facebook posts of St. Paul people: “Try East Side Bakery. It’s fantastic.” “I love that place!”

Then early this month, Nikki spoke to a gathering of St. Paul’s Lutheran Men in Mission. At midnight the night before, she thought, “It’s just too hard. I can’t do this. No way.” But she screwed up her courage. She took off the shelf her dark memories — memories that she had long since parked as she tried to move on with her life. For the first time publicly, she told her story.

“What were your impressions of the people of St. Paul?” Terry asks her.

“You just gave me goose bumps,” Nikki replies. “When I spoke, I got so emotional. I thought I was making a fool of myself. But all these men, they were so kind to me.” Her dad and her husband had been cruel men. “I was not used to men being kind to me. They were thanking me and I thanked them.”

“No one was judging you that day,” Terry observes. “Did you feel the hand of God?” The men of St. Paul “did me a favor,” responds Nikki. “They did more for me. I don’t have to hide it any more. I don’t feel shame any more.”

The next morning, Nikki sat in a pew near the back of the St. Paul Sanctuary. The sun drenched the worship space. “It was such a beautiful day. Sitting there, it was such a comfort.”

Now when the door bangs at East Side Bakery, Nikki sometimes wonders if the person stepping in to buy cookies or an Italian beef sandwich is from St. Paul.

Nikki clanks the bowls on her baking surface, scooping flour from a 100-pound sack. Time and again, in spite of hardship, she has received “a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.” (Luke 6:38)

Terry reflects: “When your cup is so full that it’s running over, my wife Marti likes to say, ‘We’re drinking from our saucer.’”
Filled up. Running over.

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"This, quite simply, is what it means to be a Christian: to follow Jesus into the new world, God's new world, which God has thrown open for us. " ~N.T. Wright, theologian