Bread Alone (36 page)

“Why?” Okay, it’s a rhetorical question, but I want to hear him say it. “Unfinished business.” He holds me gently, resting his cheek on my hair. “I can’t believe how good you smell.”

“The bakery.” I smile. “Want some coffee?”

He’s as tall as I am, so when he pulls back, we’re exactly eye to eye.

“No,” he says.

By Monday night, the
chef
has doubled in volume and the surface is textured with tiny bubbles. When I take the towel off, the unmistakable odor of fermentation rises from the bowl. I add more flour and water and mix it energetically.

The third time I check the
chef,
it’s doubled in volume again. It’s soupy and roiling with life. I pinch off a piece and put it on my tongue. The bitter acidity flares like a match before giving way to a nutty aftertaste. It’s ready to make
levain.

I’ve conveniently forgotten that Linda’s coming back until I let myself in the back door Thursday night just in time to see her standing over the garbage can with my
chef.

“What the hell are you doing?” I shout. Her head jerks around and I almost laugh at the shock on her face. I’m sure nobody at the bakery has ever taken this tack with her.

She recovers quickly. “Who told you to make this?”

“Nobody told me to make it. I did it for myself, not for the bakery, so just leave it alone.”

“I don’t want it around here.” She pulls the towel off, throws it on the floor.

“Ellen said I could let it ferment here. I’m taking it home tonight.”

She looks me in the eye and dumps my
chef into
the garbage. Total disbelief combines with frustration to immobilize me. Then I hear myself say, “You are the sorriest excuse for a human being I’ve ever met.”

She’s almost grinning, she’s so pleased with herself. “What did you say, missy?”

“I said you’re a bitch.” I turn and walk out the back door, down the alley.

I hear the back door open and she screams, “You’re fired! You know that, don’t you? You’re fired!” It’s what she wanted all along.

I light the stove, wrap a blanket around me, and sit in my chair, drawing my knees to my chest. Mac says I need to let it burn hot for thirty minutes every day or two to clean the creosote out of the chimney pipe. The fire grows, snapping ferociously at the kindling.

Okay, now what? She’s a bitch. She’s unreasonable, impossible to work with. She’s pathetic and stupid. But I’m unemployed and she’s not.

Working alone for these three nights has crystallized the image of
my future. Unlocking the door and feeling the oven’s heat rush out to meet me. Turning on all the lights to find the whole place clean and quiet, expectant. For the first time, I think I understand what CM must feel when she stands backstage, waiting for the music.

I imagine working in the daytime with Ellen and Tyler, Diane and Misha and Jen. The camaraderie would be fun, but what I remember most is the noise. And I’d have to make muffins and scones, not bread.

Other alternatives are even less appealing. How can I work in a shop or teach English or sit in an office all day? I think of Lauren at the employment agency where I went that morning after David’s announcement.
“I don’t mean to startle you, Wynter, but sometimes we have to do things we hate.”
I bet she laughed about me later, sharing war stories with the other client counselors.
“Let me tell you about the one I had today—the all-time queen dumb-ass rich bitch.”
And I was. Last year at this time, my biggest worry was whether to wear black or white to the Black-and-White Symphony Ball.

Linda’s beyond comprehension, true enough. But why did I let her get to me? It’s just a
chef.
Worst-case scenario is, I make a new one. Why did I have to go berserk? Nothing like cutting your own air hose. I reach for my pillow, on the couch.

When I open my eyes it’s light out. I have incredible kinks in my back and neck from sleeping in this weird pretzel position, and someone’s banging on the door. When I unfold myself out of the chair, my father’s old copy of
Might Flight
tumbles onto the rug. I pick it up and lurch for the door.

“Wyn, I’m so sorry.” Ellen rushes in before I have time to say anything, shuts the door behind her. Then she looks at me. “Oh, I woke you up. I’m so upset.”

“Sit down.” I point to the chair. “I must have fallen asleep.” I fill the teakettle and put it on. “What time is it?”

“Seven.”

“Ellen, I’m sorry I lost my temper …”

She shakes her head vehemently. “I’m sorry you had to put up with her.”

“She told you?”

“She was proud of herself I’ve already told her she has to apologize to you.” She gives me an ingratiating smile. “And I told her you’re going to be making some new kinds of bread. That is, if you want to, of course.”

I look at her in surprise. “You mean you still want me to work there?”

“Are you nuts? First of all, you’re a great baker. Second, you’ve lasted with her longer than anyone in the history of the place. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been through this. She’s run off everyone we’ve put in there.”

“Can I ask you a question? Why do you keep her on?”

Her gaze shifts to the teakettle, which is starting to whistle softly. “I just can’t bring myself to fire her. She’d never be able to get another job. Too old, too obnoxious … She’d end up on unemployment. She’ll be retiring soon, but till then, I guess we’re stuck with her.” She shoots me a pleading glance. “You’ll stay, won’t you?”

“What I don’t understand is why she threw it out, even after I told her it was mine and I was taking it home.”

She runs a hand over her close-cropped dark hair. “She’s just a miserable human being, that’s why. Her bitterness poisons everything she does. And you committed the unforgivable sin of trying to help her. She’ll hate you forever for that.”

The kettle’s blasting now. “Want some tea?”

“No, thanks. I’ve got to get back. I just ran over here to make sure you weren’t pulling up stakes and heading for L.A. Listen …” She hesitates. “I know it’s going to be really awkward going back in there tonight—”

I laugh. “It won’t be the first time I’ve shared space with someone who didn’t want me there.”

I don’t knock. I use my own key to unlock the door and go in. She’s just bringing two flour buckets out of the storeroom.

“Hi.”

She gives me a blank stare and heads back down the hall. O-kay. I pull down the black notebook, put on a Mozart piano concerto, start weighing out flour for white sandwich bread. While I’m oiling bread pans, the concerto ends, shutting off the tape deck with a resounding click.

“Linda, I’m sorry about your husband.”

Silence. Is she embarrassed or does she just hate me? When I turn around to look at her, big tears are oozing from her eyes, lumbering down her face. Like she’s fighting them every step of the way. I start to slide off my stool, but she spits out, “Asshole.” Does she mean him or me? “Ya know how he died?” I shake my head. “Asshole,” she says again. “Drinking on the boat. He went over.”

“I’m sorry.”

We labor in silence except for the motors of the two big mixers.

“Ellen said I had to apologize.” Her abrupt pronouncement startles me. She stands next to the ovens, squinting resentfully at me, hands on hips. If she just had a corncob pipe sticking out of her face, she’d look like Popeye. “But I’m not going to. ‘Cause I’m not sorry.”

I sigh heavily. “It doesn’t make any difference to me. All I want is to do my job.”

“She can fire me if she wants to.”

“Ellen doesn’t want to fire you.”

“Wouldn’t be too sure of that, missy.”

“Linda, you’re making this much harder than it has to be. Bread making is a good job. We could be having fun here.”

Her hard laughter fills the room. “Fun? You little Pollyanna nitwit. Sure it’s fun if your daddy has money and you can quit whenever you want and run over to Hawaii for a few weeks. You try doin’ it for twenty-five years to bring up two kids when your old man drinks up everything he makes. We’ll see how much fun you think it is.”

The hair is standing up on the back of my neck and a wave of red
heat rises in my face. “My father is dead!” I hear myself shout. I hate it that I’ve let her get to me again. “And I can’t take off to Hawaii for a couple of weeks because I’m separated from my husband and I need the goddamn job. Okay? Does that make you happy? So just get off my case and let me do the work.”

Fifteen

I
’ve never had a man friend before. Not one who’ll sit with me in a stuffy, low-ceilinged dive in the U district through two and a half hours of
Rocky and Bullwinkle
cartoons. I reciprocate by accompanying him to his favorite used bookstores, where we spend hours sifting through dusty volumes in search of anything “interesting.”

I blink as we emerge from yet another bookshop on a narrow, grimy street off Pioneer Square, each of us carrying two recycled grocery bags full of books.

“I feel like a pack mule,” I complain. “Those places are all so dusty—”

He laughs. “Oh, quit complaining.”

“Maybe we could go to a real bookstore sometime. Like Elliott Bay Book Company. You know, someplace where they have new books. What is this fascination you have with books that have been pawed over by two or three other people?”

Even before I catch the sidelong glance he throws me, I already know I’ve inserted my silver foot in my mouth.

“I can’t afford new books all the time,” he says. He doesn’t belabor the point, and I say a silent thank-you. Most men would have seized the opportunity to remind me that I’m a spoiled brat who’s not accustomed to giving much thought to the price of anything.

Mac, however, isn’t most men. In fact, he isn’t much like anyone I can recall knowing. His brain reminds me of a meticulously organized file cabinet full of interesting but often arcane or useless information, such as the difference between a glade, a copse, and a grove. Why the second law of thermodynamics is actually more important than the first. Get him going, and he’ll ramble on about Cubism or horse racing or celestial navigation. But his favorite subject, hands down, no contest, is music, and he’s maddeningly opinionated.

I asked him one night at the bar why he never plays instrumentais. He said because they sound like something’s missing.

I said, “You think the lyrics are more important than the music?”

“Not exactly. It’s best when the words and the music work together. Like that Otis Redding song I was telling you about. The way the horns follow every phrase, kind of drawing you in.”

“I don’t remember.”

He gave me a disapproving look. “You need to learn how to listen.”

“You were probably one of those people who used to sit around playing Beatles songs backward, trying to hear them say, ‘Paul is dead.’”

“I never did that,” he said.

But I think I hit a nerve.

The one thing we never get around to discussing is his love life. He knows my history, of course, and every once in a while he’ll refer to David as the “Evil Prince.” Gary is “your brother” or “the parking mogul.” But he doesn’t expend a lot of breath on either one. I know only the basic plot outline with him and Gillian, even less about Laura. And if he’s seeing anyone now, he’s not talking. I’ve tried asking him about it, but he’s a master of evasion and diversion. It’s probably just as well.

Wind gusts up from the waterfront to meet us, blowing my unrestrained hair into a wild cloud. I grab it, wrestle it down, and plop my Dodgers hat over it.

It takes the rest of the afternoon to get back up to the Market
because we keep detouring out on the piers or stopping to look in shop windows. The cold sting in the air promises yet another storm, but for the moment, people jam the sidewalks, jostling each other happily, enjoying the break in the rain. Smells of clam chowder and waffle cones remind me that I haven’t eaten since breakfast.

“I’m hungry.”

He looks at his watch. “I’ve got to be at work by six. If you’d let me bring the truck, we would’ve had time to stop somewhere.”

“No we wouldn’t have, because we would have spent all day looking for parking places.”

We compromise by running into Phoebe’s Café on Third while we wait for the bus. The eighteen-year-old with two-inch fingernails who waits on us keeps looking at Mac under her mascara-gooped eyelashes. She hands me the white Styrofoam box that contains his croissant and my scone while he empties change out of his pockets onto the counter. I pop the lid for a peek and my blood freezes.

“This is not a croissant.” They both look up and I hold open the box as Exhibit A.

“Sure it is,” she says between gum pops.

“It’s a roll and it’s crescent shaped. That does not make it a croissant.”