Bread Alone (25 page)

Doug, my little fir tree, is still sitting in his pot on the porch, still wearing his red bow.

“You should plant the tree,” Lloyd says when we come back.

“I don’t know how long I’m going to be here.”

He picks up the pot, squeezes it gently. “Well, you might have to leave it behind. But if you don’t stick it in the ground soon, it’ll get root bound and die. I’ve got a shovel in the trunk.”

While he drills a tunnel in the door for the peephole, I dig a new home for Doug, just in front and to the left of the porch. When I knock the tree out of the pot, I see that the roots have already started to curl under and double back on themselves. I untangle them gently and spread them out over a mound of earth in the hole, scoop dirt around the root ball, tamp it down. I imagine him sighing and wiggling his toes in the dirt.

I lean the shovel against the porch rail and come inside. “Will it bother you if I watch?”

Lloyd shakes his head, absorbed in the mechanics of putting in the locks. The little piles of sawdust under the windows escape his notice. But then, I’m used to David, whose tranquility could be marred by fingerprints on a glass tabletop.

“Would you like some tea or a beer?”

“Tea’s good. Thanks.”

I put the teakettle on and make a fire in the stove. As the room warms up, he pulls off his sweatshirt and uses the inside of it to wipe his forehead.

“Good fire,” he says.

“My father taught me.” I hand him a cup of tea and close the air vent on the door of the woodstove.

He looks around. “I think that does it.”

“I really appreciate your help.”

“No problem.” He has the quietest voice for a guy. “You oughta get yourself some tools, though. Learn how to use ‘em. Since you’re gonna be livin’ alone.”

Hello. I’m going to be living alone?
Not really. At some point, David’s going to come to his senses. Or worst case, eventually there will be a replacement. Alone is temporary. A vacation. Hearing it pronounced in Lloyd’s flat, steady voice makes it sound alarmingly final. It’s like being hit in the back of the knees. “Yes,” I manage. “I guess I should do that.”

He calmly sips his tea, oblivious to having just turned my life upside down. “What’s in the boxes?”

“Mostly books. Clothes.”

“You could build some shelves,” he says.

I laugh weakly. “I’ve never built anything in my life.”

“Be a good first project.”

“I can’t afford to run out and buy a bunch of tools and wood and stuff right now. Maybe in the spring.”

“I got some tools you can use.” It’s as if he hasn’t heard me. “I’ll give ‘em to Ellen to bring to you.” He gazes at me steadily, daring me to decline.

“That’s very nice of you.” Okay, I’ll take the damn tools. That doesn’t mean I have to use them. I can go out and buy some shelves.

“Be a lot better ‘n what you can buy in the way of shelving these days,” he says. Another sip of tea. “They’re all particleboard.”

“Ellen said you’re a boatbuilder. Where do you work?”

“Whidbey Island.”

“You commute to Whidbey Island?”

“Once or twice a week. The other nights I stay on my boat over there.”

“Oh. That’s great. So how did you meet Ellen?”

“She saved my life once.”

“Oh. Really?”

“Really.” When I don’t ask the next logical question, he answers it anyway. “I was a junkie. One night I was so strung out, hurtin’ and full of self-pity, I decided to just kill myself quick instead of slow.” His eyes never move from mine and I find that I can’t look away. “But before I pulled the trigger, I picked up the phone and called the crisis hot line. Ellen answered the phone.

“She talked to me for two hours. Got me to go to a detox clinic. Whole time I was in rehab I used to call the hot line and hang up till I got her.” He smiles minutely for the first time since I’ve met him. “Finally talked her into meeting me for coffee. Think I was already in love with her before I ever laid eyes on her. Goin’ on ten years now.”

“That’s”—I clear my throat—”some story.”

“Yep.” He drains his cup, takes it to the kitchen sink and rinses it out. “Thanks for the tea.” He pulls his sweatshirt back on, drops the drill in his tool kit. “You have any questions about usin’ the tools, I’m home most Saturdays.” He disappears out the door.

Well, I really do need some shelves.

Eleven

I
love to watch Diane assemble and decorate cakes, especially the wedding cakes, because they’re the most elaborate and some of them are pretty different from your average white wedding cake with flowers. Like the one she did for this couple who both work for Greenpeace. They wanted a cake that represented (their words) “the oneness of life and the harmony of sea, earth, and sky.” Other than giving her the theme, they said she was (their words) “free to unleash her creativity.”

She spent weeks leafing through photo and nature magazines, art books, doing sketches. In the end, the cake was three layers—chocolate, lemon, and hazelnut—stacked asymmetrically. White-chocolate buttercream frosting was colored greenish blue on the bottom to represent the ocean, chocolate in the middle for earth, then sort of a marbleized pale blue on top for the sky, with wispy white clouds. It sounds weird, but it was beautiful. Diane fashioned exotic sea creatures and animals and flowers and birds to populate the three layers. The bride and groom were represented by a little mermaid and merman—I guess that’s what you’d call a guy mermaid—porcelain figures that the bride had found somewhere.

Anyway, the couple had a friend who worked for the
Post-Intelligencer,
and a color photo of the cake ended up on the front page of the “Style” section and now the phone never seems to stop ringing.

It’s so busy that I don’t get to sit and watch anymore. Diane drafts
me for making buttercream or doing the crumb coat, which is the first layer of icing that you put on to cover the crumbs and make a smooth base for the finish frosting. She does it so quickly that it looks easy. Just glob some icing on and smooth it like glass with that offset spatula. But I found out immediately that it requires more hand-eye coordination and patience than I possess.

One dark afternoon, when it’s just the two of us, she enlists my help with a new recipe for orange frosting to go on a chocolate fiftieth-anniversary cake. Standing in front of the stove watching sugar melt and turn brown is normally about as fascinating as watching paint dry, but the risk of experimenting with a cake that’s due to be picked up at ten tomorrow morning intrigues me.

“What if it doesn’t work?” I brush sugar crystals off the side of the pan with a wet pastry brush.

“Then I’m here till midnight redoing it. So let’s proceed bravely but carefully.” She turns on the burner under a pan of milk.

“If you majored in art, how on earth did you get into this?” I ask her. “Was your mother a baker?”

Her laugh is sharp. “My mother is the real estate queen of Baltimore. Or was till she retired. She was never home long enough to bake. Or do much else. Be careful with that. Nothing burns quite like hot caramel.”

The sugar is a deep golden brown now, and the mercury in the candy thermometer is nudging 360 degrees, so I turn off the flame. It boils up like a cauldron as the milk goes in.

“To answer your question, my gram was a fabulous baker. She raised my two sisters and me. Till she died—then I inherited the job.”

“What did your father do?”

“Drank himself into liver failure.” Her voice is flat and free of emotion. She peers over my shoulder into the pot. “This looks ready. Why don’t you start on the Italian meringue.”

I separate the eggs by letting the whites slide through my fingers the way she showed me weeks ago—a slimy but efficient method.

“I think that might be why I loved art and sewing and cooking,” she muses. “All the things my mother didn’t seem to care about. To spite
her for not being room mother or baking us birthday cakes or taking us to buy Easter dresses or even putting Band-Aids on our goddamned skinned knees.”

With the egg whites whipping in the small mixer, I put the sugar and water on a burner to make a simple syrup. “It’s funny. My mother drove me nuts because she was there all the time doing all that stuff. Trying to teach me piano and sewing. Maybe there’s no way they can win.”

Diane stops beating the crème anglaise and stares into the middle distance. “Who knows.”

For a second, I think she might cry. Instead, she sniffs a little bit and sets the bowl of crème anglaise into a larger bowl filled with ice.

“Where are your sisters?”

“In Baltimore. Married, with children, the image of domesticity.” She laughs ruefully. “They made their peace with my mother a long time ago and just did what they wanted to do. Now they take her casseroles and she baby-sits the grandkids and it’s all very huggy/cozy. Me, I had to run off to West Timbuktu to make it on my own. And not just any business would do. It had to involve all the things she either couldn’t or wouldn’t do.” Her laugh is tight. “Guess I showed her, huh?”

I squeeze some oranges and boil their juice down to a concentrate while she beats three pounds of butter to white satin in the Hobart.

“Do you get back there very often?”

“I’ve never been back. It’s almost six years now.” She pushes her bangs off her face with her forearm. “Okay, here goes.” Her determined smile is almost a grimace. She adds first the crème, then the meringue, then the vanilla and the orange syrup to the butter as the paddle turns steadily in its prescribed arc. At the end, she tosses in a dab of orange-paste food coloring and the grated orange zest.

She has a funny way of tasting things, putting a dab on the center of her tongue and pressing it against the roof of her mouth a few times to spread it around. “Mmmm. Try some.”

I spoon out a little. It’s one of those flavors that explodes in your mouth. “I love it—the burnt sugar taste with the orange and the silkiness … I want to rub it all over me.”

“A waste of good buttercream.” She laughs. “Unless you’ve got someone in mind to lick it off.”

On the first Friday morning in February, Tyler calls in sick with the flu.

Ellen looks pained. “Wyn, I hate to even ask you, but is there any way you can stay till about nine-thirty, ten? Just to get us through the morning rush.”

“I don’t have a problem with staying, but I don’t know anything about using that machine.”

“Misha can sling the espresso. You can go back and do muffins and scones with Jen. By the way”—she gives me a knowing smile—”I’ve got some tools for you out in the car.”

I take my mocha back to the work area, where Jen’s wearing the biggest grin I’ve ever seen on her face. Short and chubby, with fair skin and dark hair, she looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy’s sister.

“What’s up?”

“Nothin’. I’m happy because Misha has to work out front and I don’t.” “Is it that bad?”

She shrugs. “I guess it all depends on whether you like dealing with customers. Personally, I’d rather shovel shit with a teaspoon.” Her blue eyes spark wickedly.

She pulls the bucket of bran-muffin batter out of the Traulsen, hands me an ice cream scoop. “We do three dozen of these. When you’re done, the dry ingredients for the cranberry muffins are over there.” She points to the other end of the huge worktable. “Mix in the wet and then you can scoop those, too.”

In a few minutes, Ellen comes back, dabbing at her forehead with a tissue. She picks up a tray of cooling blueberry muffins. “It’s crazy this morning. What muffins have we got for tomorrow?”

“Cranberry, bran, and I’ll make some pumpkin when I get through with the cinnamon rolls,” Jen says.

“I can do the pumpkin.”

“That would be a big help.” Ellen jerks her head in the direction of her old brown desk. “The recipe’s in that red notebook.”

I wash my hands and riffle through the pages till I find it.

Misha’s Pumpkin-Millet Muffins

1¼ cups unbleached white flour

½ cup whole wheat flour

¼ teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

¾ cup sugar

2½ teaspoons pumpkin spice mix
(see below)

½ cup millet

2 eggs

½ cup vegetable oil

1 cup pumpkin

⅓ cup water

2 tablespoons maple syrup

½ cup raisins or currants

Mix together dry ingredients and millet. In a separate bowl, beat eggs, oil, pumpkin, water, syrup, and raisins or currants. Add wet ingredients to dry and mix just until combined. Scoop into muffin tins that have been greased or lined with paper liners. Bake at 375°F for 25 to 30 minutes. Makes 1 dozen.