Stones for Bread (13 page)

I leave the building, turning away from the window of Wild Rise, and go quickly down another street, in the opposite direction either Xavier or Gretchen travels home. I walk toward the park, where families feed the ducks after supper and eat ice-cream cones and young couples twist around themselves on blankets under the trees. I walk, and feel eyes on me. My shoulders straighten; usually I hunch into myself, disappearing into my bland, midsized clothing. I make eye contact, smiling at the young mothers wrangling their toddlers, nodding and responding, “Yes, it is,” to the hunched, wrinkled couple walking arm in arm, the husband saying, “Beautiful night, isn’t it?” as I pass. I engage the community around me, something I reserve almost completely for within the four walls of the bakery. I feel, for a few minutes, a part of something outside me. As if I can belong somewhere, can root myself without having my hands trapped in dough to keep me from drifting away.

I am more beautiful than all my pieces allow—ankles and elbows powdered with dry skin, bony shins, knees turned in, bread-puckered thighs neatly hidden beneath my dress, no breasts to speak of, lips stretching to invisible when I smile. And stirring within is that distinctly feminine tickle, an awakening, an acceptance of how I’m made.

I want Seamus to see me this way.

Some evenings he goes to this park with Cecelia. I sit on a stone bench by the fountain so I don’t look lost and scan the area for them. Of course they are not here. I stay a few more minutes, hoping with a kind of hope more like prayer they will appear. I don’t pray it, though. For all my religious shortcomings, I do take faith more seriously than lamp rubbing for God-the-Magic-Genie to come grant my three foolish wishes.

They don’t show up.

I can drive there, to their home, invite them out to a movie, or a milk shake at Friendly’s, or simply tell them I missed them.

Him. I miss him.

I won’t go. All the hair dye in León’s enchanted suitcase can’t hide my true color, that of a woman who chooses bread over all else, who refuses to allow people too close. I walk home, the dress and mascara and admiring glances losing most of their luster, and instead of preparing for
Bake-Off
, I eat the supper of the spinster—Lean Cuisine pasta primavera and an entire bag of chocolate-coated, peanut butter–filled pretzels—and scrub my face with a washcloth until it burns.

Eight

There’s a difference between the air of a house that’s occupied and an empty one. I’ve always been able to tell, waking up on Sunday mornings and knowing, as soon as awareness washes over me, whether my parents are downstairs or in the backyard. Or gone, as is the case recently with my mother’s strange behavior.
Mania
.

My father says her new pills are working.

It’s because of the vibrations. We inhale and exhale, sending ripples out around us. Our bodies radiate heat, another silent wave jostles the air. Perhaps even the sparks jumping from one neuron to the next leak from our skin, electrifying the atmosphere. However it happens, the world around us quakes with the living. Stillness comes only in the empty spaces. Or death.

I’m home from school, and as soon as I’m inside I know I’m alone. The door is unlocked. “Mom?” I call, not expecting an answer. A tingle of apprehension smolders in my pelvis.

The garage is closed. I saw that as I stepped off the bus. We have a one-car garage and no electric door opener. My mother’s Buick stays
in there; Dad parks his work truck in the driveway. When she goes out, the door gets left up until she returns.

I know I’m alone, but I check each room anyway, beginning upstairs. Unoccupied, all of them. In the kitchen, dough rises in the trough on the counter, a blue checkered tea towel blanketing it. And then I see it. The shade is drawn on the door leading out to the garage. It’s never down. Sometimes my mother closes the yellow half curtains, but the shade always remains tightly rolled behind the valance. The fear grows. I don’t want to, but my arm moves of its own volition, tugging the thin rod at the bottom of the shade. It retracts, shooting up with a slapping sound.

My eyes are closed.

And then they’re not.

The Buick sits in the garage; it’s not running—not now, at least. The hose from our vacuum has been taped to the exhaust pipe, pulled tight over the hood, and threaded through the driver’s side window, which is open only enough to trap the hose in the glass. A towel hangs from the window too, pink with seashells printed on it, from our guest bathroom. Another is on the ground, crumpled next to the front tire. My mother’s body slumps against the steering wheel.

I float to the sofa—I must have because I have no recollection of my legs moving—and sit on the center cushion. The ghost of a thought comes to me, that I should call my father or an ambulance, but it’s gone so quickly I wonder if it was even there at all. And then nothing is there but the sensation of everything inside my head—the
me
I was when I jumped off the bottom step of the school bus, over the puddle, before opening the front door of my house—melting from between the wrinkles of my brain and dripping, dripping, dripping down, pulled by gravity. Down the back sides of my cheekbones, my throat, my chest cavity, coating my stomach like Pepto-Bismol in the commercials, into my pelvis. It doesn’t move to my thighs, though; they are straight out, and the laws governing the universe
won’t allow these memories to go anywhere but down. But all the old
me
must escape somehow, and it does, through the baby fat of my puberty-swelled backside, through my pores, soaking into the couch cushion beneath me.

I am completely emptied, ready to be refilled by a life without my mother.

We’ve settled into a routine, the three of us. Or maybe more so, Jude has settled into ours. He knows I always move to my right when I’m bringing the dough to the cooler, no matter where I begin in the kitchen. He knows Xavier begins whistling two minutes before the bread is due out of the oven; Jude watches the clock, waiting for sixty more seconds to tick off, and then stands with peel in hand before his grandfather reaches for the door. The bread dance. My mother had it perfectly choreographed with Oma; I never learned the steps. I used to think I would have, if I’d been given more time with her. At eight, nine, ten, I still knocked over measuring cups of water and tripped over the edge of the rag rug in front of the sink, falling against my mother as she weighed the flour. But even now, as I still sometimes bump into Xavier and I see how seamlessly Jude glides around us, I wonder if it’s a giftedness I don’t have.

It’s more than grace of movement, though. He has a sense of bread I cannot fathom. I’m not certain Xavier expected so much either. He reads flour, senses its properties, knows which grains to use to achieve his desired results in texture and flavor and body. I offered him several books on baking science and artisan recipes, and he shook his head, saying, “Thanks, but I don’t read so well. And I can’t figure those dumb formulas to save my life.” His experimentation isn’t random and driven by emotion, like his grandfather's. He simply
knows
.

I admit a little envy.

Not even my mother could do what he does. She toiled, and there
was a pride in all the hours she devoted to cultivating and improving and
becoming
. My grandmother, perhaps, baked on instinct. Children only understand so much and memories metamorphose as they’re replayed over and over, but I think I saw Oma sprinkle this and pour that, and somewhere in the recesses of my mind I dust off snatches of conversation, times my mother told me how my grandmother could make bread from sand. Talent like that must skip a generation or two.

Once the first batches of bread are taken from the oven, I ask Jude to open and work the counter. Already a small line has formed outside. “You sure?” he asks. “They’re coming to see you.”

“They’re coming to be on TV.”

“Okay then.” He strips off his white, sweaty tank and buttons on an oversized tent of a Hawaiian shirt.

“In my kitchen? Really?” I say.

He shrugs and smiles in this four-year-old way. “Sorry.”

“Tropical doesn’t seem your style, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“It’s borrowed,” he says, and then, “Pops, heads,” while throwing the balled-up shirt at Xavier.

The older man catches it and checks the tag. “So is this.”

“I don’t have anything clean.”

“Washer’s in the basement.”

“Yeah, I know. But your dresser’s just a few steps from my bed.”

Xavier throws the shirt back at Jude as he scuttles out into the café. “Teenagers.”

“How’s he doing?” I ask, picking up the shirt between two fingers. “This is gross.”

“Give me.” He crams it back into Jude’s canvas bag, washes his hands. “I don’t know. About the boy, I mean. He’s quiet. We talk, but not about what made him leave. I’m not certain it was a particular event, but everything leading up to it heaped onto him and he finally suffocated.”

“You were right, though. About his hands.”

“If his father—” He stops. “Yes, but not nearly as right as I thought I was.”

And there’s stillness as Xavier wedges between his son and grandson, loyalties tangled like the metal Slinky I played with as a child, invariably knotted beyond mending after a few ill-fated tumbles down the stairs.

When the silence goes on long enough to make me think he’s burrowed too far into his own thoughts to come back without an interruption, I say, “Oh, I forgot. Patrice Olsen said something yesterday about photos?”

Xavier blinks. “Of your mother. And grandmother, if you have any.”

My arms go cold. “What on earth for?”

“Backstory,” he says, circling his shoulders until one pops. He lifts the corner of a damp towel, checking the dough, his work carrying him away from the sadness still graying his eyes.

“What did you tell her?”

“Nothing. She’s read your website. You mention baking with your mother. That Olsen woman likes the intergenerational aspect.”

“What about the quitting my day job aspect? Fleeing the big, bad city for the mountains of New England.”

“Won’t resonate the same way with viewers, I’m afraid.”

“How would you know?”

“It’s what I was told when I suggested the same.”

“You tried to get me out of it.”

“That I did.”

I shake my head, flicking my hair from my face. I washed and dried it this morning and rubbed in a blob of gel from a tube I found in the linen closet, in the basket where I toss all those things I buy for a certain occasion and use only once—wart removal pads, Nair, gauze bandages, melatonin capsules, Tums. The new style makes me dress differently too. It’s fine to slump around in shapeless clothes with my
hair tied back in a rubber band, but nice hair requires accessories, so I wear beaded earrings and a coordinating necklace. The earrings distract me; I keep brushing them away, thinking some insect is crawling up my jaw. “I guess I’ll go look for them now.”

“Is that quiet resignation I hear in your voice?”

“Maturity, I think,” I say. “Your Liesl’s done gone and grown up.”

He laughs. “Not too much, now. Sulking does a bit of good every here and again.”

“All right, if Patrice Olsen comes looking for me, tell her I’m being a good girl and I’ll get in touch with her sometime this afternoon.”

“She’ll find you, don’t you worry about that.”

I push open the kitchen door just as Jude swings through in the other direction, knocking me backward. “A little help out here? It’s psycho.”

“Zave, call Gretchen and ask her to come early. And that friend of hers who fills in sometimes. Erika?”

“Will do. And I’ll get some extra loaves in.”

The bakery has been open an hour and already the bread is half gone. Jude and I work the counter, the line of customers snaking toward the screen door. A few of the women pull compacts from their handbags and touch up their lips. Those who aren’t regulars ask about the
other
baked goods—muffins and scones and bagels—they can eat with their coffee while waiting for the cameras to catch sight of them. I tell them we don’t do those things here, my voice scuffed with irritation. Jude smiles and explains things much more personably than I, slicing and toasting thick pillows of cinnamon-coated raisin and offering that to people, topped with a pool of melted cultured butter, fresh from the farm down the way. The day tourists find this quaint; the green eaters, sustainable and local; and the rest happy to have something sweet now that the sticky buns are gone. Everyone is smiling, and I wonder if Jude can also turn water into some sort of fermented beverage.

Patrice Olsen weaves through the crowd with a cameraman, asking questions and filming the chaos. The local newspapers are back as well; Jude looks at me in a way that says,
Be nice
, and it’s his grandfather’s face fifty years and forty pounds ago, and I try my best to answer all the reporters’ questions without growling. One of the papers also photographs Jude in front of the sunflower-shaped art bread he’s made this morning. I haven’t seen it until now and am as amazed as those
oohing
and
aahing
around me. The bread is made in two parts: the center a simple boule covered in ground sunflower and sesame seeds, the outer a disk of curved petals. Jude tells the journalist he baked this outer part around a stoneware bowl so the seeded inner loaf could be cradled within it. He’s made three of them. I price them at twelve dollars, and could have easily sold two dozen more.