Stones for Bread (30 page)

I shift on the stool, keeping my legs crossed, awkward in the new skirt I wear, one of three I bought last week when Seamus mentioned
having dinner. All women eventually care about how they look, don’t they? I tell myself I’m a late bloomer.

“So,” Seamus says. He swallows almost his entire glass of iced tea. “Anything . . . new?”

He wants to know if I’ve decided about Jonathan Scott’s offer. I shake my head, because I haven’t. The only other person I’ve told is Xavier. When the large FedEx envelope came, I simply handed it to him and asked him to look through it. The next morning he motioned me out to the back delivery area with his eyes and, once I was with him, asked me if I was seriously considering doing the show.

“Considering? I guess I am. I don’t know how seriously, though.” I didn’t tell him that his own words taunt me, the ones he spoke on regret and ego and wanting more. A television show is the most
more
I could imagine. “Would you do it?”

“In an instant,” he said.

“That doesn’t help me.”

“Are you looking for a reason to say no?”

“I’m looking for someone else to give me one.”

Xavier clucked his tongue. “You won’t find it here.”

I don’t want to want the show; that’s my problem. I want to believe I’m above such things, that Wild Rise is enough for me. Seamus tells me to pray about it, and I try, but either I fall asleep while doing so or I stare at the darkened ceiling in my bedroom, hearing all manner of answers in my head, unsure if any are from God.

I poke at my noodles. Seamus stabs his; they fall from his fork and he uses his fingers to push them on again. Cecelia waves her spoon at him. “It’s easier like this,” she says.

“Real men don’t use spoons. Except for cereal. And ice cream,” he tells her.

The phone rings. After hours I will let the machine deal with it, but I’m thankful for the distraction. I reach over and snatch it from the cradle. “Hello, Wild Rise.”

“Hi, yes. I’m looking for Liesl McNamara.” A woman’s voice.

“This is she.”

There’s silence.

“Hello?” I ask.

“I’m sorry. I just can’t believe I’m talking to you. We saw you on television and we—oh, you don’t need to hear any of—”

“Who is this?”

“My name is Dana. Dana Preston. My mom thought it would be easier if I, well . . . if I did the calling. Oh, I don’t know now. She’s here. I’m going to get her to come to the phone—”

“I’m sorry, Dana. I’m in the middle of dinner now. Would it be okay if—”

“You’re my sister,” the woman blurts.

I blink. “Excuse me?”

“Well, half sister. We share a mother.”

I laugh, a part-nervous, part-annoyed titter. “That’s not possible.” Seamus looks at me, brows low. Shakes his head slightly and mouths,
What’s going on?
I wave him off. “My mother didn’t have any other children.”

“Not Claudia McNamara.” She says it the American way—c
law, claw, Clawdia
—and images of my mother’s funeral assault me. The broken trough on the floor. My broken father on the floor. Something, though, worms even deeper. “Mary Preston. My mother. Your biological mother. She was Mary Lombardi then.”

“Look, I don’t know what kind of—” I am saying words, but the woman on the other end of the line is talking over me, things about dates and towns and being too young, and will I wait a minute because some other person wants to say something but can’t because she’s crying, there’s too much crying, and finally I can’t take the roar anymore. My head is filled with sand crabs and burial urns and the crashing of the waves against my skinny seven-year-old legs.

I hang up.

“Liesl?” Seamus is on his feet, at my elbow. I blink, waver. He steadies me. “What’s going on?”

Laugh it off. Say it was a wrong number. A prank. Sit down. Finish dinner. Ignore. Bury. Let the waves come in and sweep it all away
. I can’t follow any of my brain’s commands, however. For the first time in years I want a hairbrush and a locked bathroom, and five minutes to beat my thighs until my skin splits.

“Liesl?” he asks again.

“Just go.”

Cecelia hunches beneath her sweatshirt. She’s pulled the hood up and sucks the ends of the drawstring. Her hair, French braided today, won’t reach her mouth. She whimpers a little.

“No, I’ll go,” I say, shaking Seamus from my arm and finding my way upstairs to the apartment, my entire body a pulsing mass of heat and thundering blood.
You look like your father’s Aunt Elinor
, they told me. They showed me photos. They wiped globs of green mucus from my toddler nose, stayed up all night with me during my second-grade bout with chicken pox, fed me, clothed me. Loved me. My father taught me to drive. My mother taught me bread.

I’m in the bathroom, the hairbrush on the counter. The threeday stubble on my legs stands upright with anticipation. I look in the mirror, face pale except for two rouge-red circles on each cheek—no, deeper than red. Purple, in that bloody, recently butchered meat way.
If your right eye offends you
. Taking the brush in both hands, I position it over the edge of the vanity, bristles scratching the Formica as I press down with one hand on that side, with the other hand on the handle until it snaps off.

I fling both parts into the shower.

There’s a story in the Grimm Brothers’
German Tales
about a poor widow whose only child dies, and it grieves the woman more than
anything that this child has no shoes. Her beloved cannot be buried barefooted, so she bakes shoes of bread and puts them on the child’s feet, and the coffin is lowered into the ground. But the child will not rest, appearing again and again to its mother in anguish, and this continues until the townspeople dig the coffin from the earth and replace the shoes of bread with shoes of leather.

This is
bread sin
. Giving loaves to the dead is an honor. Placing it on their feet is a horror, for now they must walk upon the sacred food for eternity.

And more stories are told. A woman is turned to stone for rubbing bread on her son’s clothes. Cities sink into the sea because the people who live there use bread to block rats from leaving their holes. Even Shakespeare, in his
Hamlet
, writes of a baker’s daughter who, after refusing bread to the Savior, is transformed into an owl. These fables infiltrate the world over, told and retold, heightening the importance of bread to levels reserved for God himself. In Germany, the bakers won’t turn their backs to an oven, as it’s disrespectful. Loaves are not to be laid on a table without cloth or cover, so the “friend of man will not have a hard bed.” Even today, in some cultures, bread dropped on the floor is quickly retrieved and kissed, a holy apology.

I get in the car and drive home.

Do people ever stop thinking of their childhood houses, cities, towns as home? I’ve lived away from Sutter’s Point nearly as long as I lived in it, and still it’s where I’m going now to seek out answers and comfort. I can phone my father, but my interrogation is a face-to-face one. My mother is still in that house too. I want both of them there.

Tomorrow’s Sunday. I don’t have to worry about preparing dough or opening the bakery. I put the mess in the kitchen out of my mind. Seamus probably will take care of it anyway. He’ll be worried, looking for me tonight, in the morning. I tell myself I owe him nothing, no
explanations, no courtesy calls, no excuses, really. The coolness of my internal protests unsettles me. I thought I’d been making progress in the relationship arena.

The sun sinks behind the mountains as I drive, a cling peach stewed in its own juices, the horizon saturated with cool orange light. I scan through the FM stations. The radio doesn’t block my thoughts. I make conversation in my head, practice posing difficult questions to my father. My mother too. I think over the inches of my life, feeling through the pockets and zippers and lint-caked corners, trying to recall some hint of—
anything
—indicating I am not their biological child.

Nothing.

In first grade, Deena Howard told everyone she’d been adopted. She’d known for, well, as long as she had the ability to know things. Her parents didn’t keep it a secret from her; as a small child, the story of her origins was a favorite bedtime tale. Her mother drew pictures and wrote a poem about it and stapled the pages together, and they would read it together before the good-night kiss and lights-out song. Deena brought the handmade storybook in for show-and-tell, and when I came home from school, I slurped down my mother’s chicken noodle soup and told her, “Deena Howard got adopted. That means her mommy and daddy bought her as a baby.” I have no memory of the conversation beyond that, if my mother corrected my inaccurate definition or if she said anything at all. I only remember the soup, not too hot, the chicken shredded into toothpick-sized strips, the potatoes nice and mushy, and little, slick oil bubbles bobbing over the surface. I didn’t look at her when I told her; I was trying to keep the carrots off my spoon.

Another friend, in high school, confided in me about her adoption. Her parents revealed it to her only days before, when she turned sixteen. Of all the emotions she felt and was still feeling, surprise wasn’t one of them. “I never fit,” she said. “I never truly felt a part of them.”

I have no feelings like that. I always seemed the perfect-sized puzzle piece, like the baby Jesus hand-carved and balanced in Mary’s
arms in my grandmother’s antique German crèche. She would wiggle him out
just so
in order for me to hold him, and then when I finished turning his tiny, crazed body over in my hands, she gently maneuvered him back into place, so firmly in the virgin’s grasp that not even my knocking the figures off the side table shook him loose.

Still, I have no doubt the words of the woman on the phone are true.

As I drive, it’s this certainty with which I wrestle. Why do I believe it? Why don’t I discount the woman as a hoaxer or a loon and simply put the conversation away, into a place I’ll never visit again? I pull into the driveway of my childhood home, the answer settled. I know because Truth recognizes truth.

I haven’t been here to visit in three years, not since Wild Rise opened, despite living only two hours away. The front door is unlocked; I go inside and am struck by how little has changed over the years. The couch. The mat in the entryway. A soap dispenser on the kitchen sink. A telephone. The television. Otherwise, it’s the same as the day my mother died.

“Dad?”

He doesn’t answer. I open the basement door, the light on down there, and descend to my father’s workshop, to a room that’s really not more than a cellar, with an uneven stone floor and damp walls, and beams sticky with cobwebs above. He’s standing at his bench—always stands when he tinkers—unscrewing some small part from some bigger one, bug-eyed safety glasses across his face. “Dad,” I say again.

Looking up, Alistair wipes his thumbs across the goggles and then simply snaps them off his head, knocking his prescription lenses from his nose. He fumbles to reclaim those before they fall to the floor, and he does, catching them against his shirt before tucking them back onto his face. “Liesl. Did I forget you were coming?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here? Not that you’re not welcome any—”

“Who is Mary Lombardo?”

“Lombardi.” He sets down his screwdriver. “It’s Lombardi.”

He takes off his glasses again, huffs on them. Wipes them on the hem of his shirt. Sighs. “Mary Lombardi.”

“Yeah.”

“We should go upstairs.” And then, as if he’s decided he has no right to ask anything of me, he adds, “Please?”

I nod, wait to follow him. In the kitchen, he motions to a chair and I sit. “Your mother would make that tea of hers. In the milk.”

“With honey,” I say.

“And bread. Always, always bread.”

“Sometimes she made muffins.”

“I suppose you’re right.” He takes two white teacups from the cabinet beside the refrigerator, each ringed with brown stains. “You’ll have to settle for scorched coffee. I did brew it this morning, though. Not yesterday.”

“It’s fine, Dad.”

He pours the black liquid into the cups; they rattle in the saucers as he carries them and slides them both in front of me. I move one across the table as he brings a carton of milk and the sugar bowl. “I’m out of half-and-half.” He sits, opens the carton, and sniffs. Wrinkles his nose. Turns the container and checks the date. “I’m not sure this is good still.”