Bread Alone (37 page)

“That’s what we call them.” Her tone is defensive.

“You should call them crescent rolls.”

Mac looks at the ceiling. “Wyn, we’re going to miss the bus.”

“Crescent, croissant.” She shrugs. “What’s the difference?”

“Allow me to show you.” I set the box on the register and rip the croissant in half crosswise. “What do you see here?” I brandish half under her nose.

“Half a croissant.”

“Wrong. You see half of a crescent-shaped roll. This is bread, and not even very good bread. Look at the mushy crumb. A croissant is pastry. Flaky layers, each one separated by butter so that it puffs up crisp and golden. Instead of being dry and bready inside, you should be able to separate the layers into almost transparent sheets.”

The girl looks a little scared.

“There’s the thirteen.” Mac stares glumly at the bus grinding to a halt across the street.

“You want the croissant or not?”

“No,” I say.

“Yes, I do.” Mac jams the lid back down, grabs my arm, and pushes me out the door. “Goddamnit, we missed the bus.”

“There’ll be a two along in a minute. I can’t believe they try to pass this shit off as a croissant.”

We park ourselves on the bus bench. “Eat your scone and leave my crescent roll alone.”

The scone feels suspiciously warm and spongy. I stick my pinky into the interior. Just as I suspected.

“What’s the matter with it?”

“It’s hot.”

“You should be happy. It just came out of the oven.”

“It’s squishy. And hotter inside than outside. That means it just came out of the microwave.”

He sighs. “Fräulein Wynter, the bread Nazi.” But he’s laughing when the number 2 bus pulls up.

At Steve’s Broiler early one Sunday morning, we sit in a Naugahyde booth that would easily hold eight people, eating feta-cheese omelets and watching the old guys at the counter suck on unfiltered cigarettes and drink coffee.

A young woman wearing a baseball cap, flannel shirt, and jeans comes in with two little boys and they climb into the booth next to us. The rugrats are cute—about seven and five years old—and they could’ve been made by the same cookie cutter, except the older one has brown hair and his little brother has blond curls. The kids have coloring books and their mother gives them a box of crayons and tells them to share. She sips her coffee and gets engrossed in a magazine. Mac watches them with more than casual interest.

“So tell me about it. You never talk about your childhood. What you did or what it was like. Was it happy? Unhappy?”

He folds his napkin and lays it next to his plate. “There were actually a lot of factors involved.”

“A lot of ‘factors’? That sounds like an algebra problem, not a kid. You had a brother. Kevin, right? What about your mother? Your father? Friends?”

“I had buddies.” He smiles briefly. “That’s the jock equivalent of friends. Except you don’t actually have to talk to buddies. You just punch each other in the arm and laugh a lot. I went out for every sport there was. And plotted my escape from New York.”

“Lots of kids play sports and punch their buddies and think about escaping from their hometown.”

“True.” He lets out a long breath. “Okay, here’s the
Reader’s Digest
condensed version: My mother was an art student. She met my dad—the original happy wanderer—in a museum. In a few hours, they were madly in love. They went to his place and screwed their brains out—”

“Mac …”

“I’ve kind of distanced myself from the whole thing. Anyway, she got pregnant. I guess in those days there weren’t many options in that situation. They got married. Kevin was born. Things were fine for a while, then he got restless. He took off for South America, working for an oil company, I think. After a year or so, he came home. She took him back. Bingo. I’m in the oven.”

“Didn’t they ever hear of birth control?”

He shrugs. “If they had, I wouldn’t be here. So life went on. He’d be home for a while, then he’d get the blues in the night. When I was twelve, he went to Canada to hunt moose or something and he never came home. His plane went down in the Canadian Rockies and they never found it.”

“Did you ever wonder if he was really dead?”

“For years, I was convinced that he was alive. I used to make up stories about him being taken care of by some hermit or having amnesia and not knowing who he was. I even wondered if he’d wanted to disappear.
Not that he would have planned it all, but maybe it seemed like a convenient out.”

“Is that what your book’s about?”

His eyes lock on mine. “What makes you think I’m writing a book?”

I start to laugh. “Oh, come on, Mac. I may not listen to all the words, but there’s nothing wrong with my eyesight.”

“Meaning what?”

“The way you’re always scribbling in those notebooks.”

“I told you, it’s a journal.”

“My bullshit indicator is blinking double reds. I suppose it could be a journal, but I’m picking up an intensity. A certain unity of purpose.”

He seems somewhat abashed. “Well …”

“I’m not asking you to show it to me. Just to admit to what you’re doing. Why are you so embarrassed?”

His eyes are suddenly dark. “I don’t want to be an asshole about it. I’m not a writer. I’m a bartender who writes stuff.”

“As long as you think of yourself that way, that’s what you’ll be.” I take my last bite of cinnamon-raisin toast.

Sounds of a scuffle draw our attention to the next booth, where the kids are locked in a tug of war over a blue crayon.

“Knock it off or nobody gets to color,” the woman says, not looking up from the magazine. The kids act as if they don’t hear her. The older boy manages to get the crayon away from the younger one and starts writing on his napkin. The little one chooses an orange crayon and imitates his older brother’s artwork on his own napkin. The calm lasts about fifteen seconds, and then the older kid decides he wants the orange crayon, too. He grabs it away from the little guy, who promptly begins to cry.

The mother looks up. “I told you guys to share.”

“Christopher took mine,” the little one wails.

“So get another one and stop being such a baby.” She resumes her reading.

The waitress sets down our check. Mac hands her a twenty and continues to watch the kids while I watch him. The younger boy pulls out a
green crayon and resumes his napkin art. The waitress counts out our change and we scoot out of the booth. There’s a sharp slapping sound and a yelp. The older boy now holds the blue, orange, and green crayons and the little one’s crying again. The mother’s looking around like she’d rather be somewhere else.

“Brian, I told you to shut up. If you’re gonna sit there and cry like a baby, you can’t color anymore.”

Suddenly Mac leans over and pulls two crayons out of the older boy’s hand. The mother and both boys stare openmouthed as he looms over them. He smiles sweetly and says to the kid, “It’s always a good idea to share. Someday he’ll have something that you want.” He hands the two crayons to the little brother and we walk out.

Spring and winter are having a tug-of-war. Some afternoons when I walk up to Parsons Garden in the mild caress of a Chinook wind, I think spring is winning. Crocuses push up through the dank black earth, yellow and purple and white. Pale green flowers of hellebore, which my oma called Lenten rose, gleam like tiny lamps in the deep shade. I daydream about fiddleheads and fresh asparagus.

By the time I leave for work at night, the wind has changed again, driving cold, stinging needles of water against my face and sending the temperature south. Winter digs in its heels, refusing to budge.

Ellen comes in early one of those wintry mornings, her eyes hollow and red-rimmed, her mouth a soft downturn. She’s one of those people who’s normally so up in the morning you sometimes want to kick her in the knees, so I start worrying about her and Lloyd. When you’re obsessed with your own marital woes, you tend to assume that’s the only thing that can go wrong in anyone’s life.

But after Linda goes out, slamming the door behind her, Ellen says, “Diane’s mother had a stroke last night.”

“Oh shit.” My very first thought is how she’ll be drowning in guilt. I would be. “I mean, that’s terrible. I’m so sorry. Is she going home?”

“She’s on her way to the airport as we speak.”

“Let me help you set up.” I turn on the espresso machine, and wring out a cloth in the enamel pail of Clorox solution to wipe the counters.

After she finishes counting change into the register drawer, she rinses the espresso baskets with a jet of steam and fills them with two quick snaps of the grinder.

“I feel awful for her,” she says, handing me a double shot of decaf. “And I’m a terrible person for worrying about the bakery at a time like this … but we’re in a real bind here. We’ve got all these cake orders. I don’t know how long she’ll be gone. Two that are supposed to be ready this morning. They’re frosted, but not decorated. She was going to finish them when she came in.” She looks at me. “I don’t suppose you could—”

“Oh, Ellen, I wish I could. Believe me, they’d come out looking like ground zero of a nuclear chain reaction.”

A tapping on the glass draws our attention to the door. Tyler’s waving at somebody in a green Plymouth Valiant of indeterminate vintage. Ellen and I look back at each other and smile. She jumps up to open the door.

“Hey, I’m really sorry. Marie’s car wouldn’t start and I had to—”

“Hi,” she practically sings. “How are you this morning?”

Tyler shoots her a guarded look. “Okay. Why?”

“I need a big favor. Can I make you a mocha?”

“Ellen, you’re creeping me out. What’s up?”

“Diane’s mom had a stroke last night.”

“Bummer.” Tyler takes off her jacket, looking from Ellen to me and back to Ellen.

“We have two cakes that are supposed to be ready this morning and—”

“Oh, no. Not me. I don’t do that hearts-and-flowers shit. No way.”

Ellen impales her with a pleading gaze. “Tyler, it’s too late to call them and say we don’t have cakes for them. We have to give them something. Please. Only one’s a wedding cake, and the flowers are all in the fridge. All you have to do is arrange them. Please?”

“What about the other one?”

“It’s a birthday cake. Generic adult. All she specified was the colors—pale peach, lavender, pale green. Like spring. You can do something with that, I’ve seen your pictures.”

Tyler sticks her finger down her throat.

“Come on, please? I’ll up your hourly for the time you spend on the cakes.”

“Oh, all right.” She closes her eyes and puts out her hands like a blind person. “Lead me to them.”

I don’t get to see the cakes, but everyone laughs about them for the next few days. Everyone except Ellen. She’s busy calling people who have orders for the following week, advising them that Diane is away on a family emergency.

“So what happened?” I ask Tyler one morning when Ellen’s out in the alley helping the people from Meals on Wheels load up the day-olds. “How did they turn out?”

She glares at me, scuffing her Doc Martens on the rubber matting. “The wedding-cake woman looked at the thing like it came out from under a rock, but she didn’t say much.”

“What about the birthday cake?”

“She freaked. Totally wigged on me. Started screaming, ‘I said peach and lavender. This is orange and purple and neon lime.’ “ She pushes up the sleeves of her T-shirt. “I told her it was cutting edge. She said it looked like the shirt Sammy Davis Jr. wore when he sang ‘The Candy Man.’ Whatever that is.”

“I think that was before your time. So what happened?”

“Ellen ended up giving it to her for free.” She rolls her eyes. “Personally, I thought it looked pretty radical.”

“So who’s going to do cakes till Diane gets back?”

She gives a little sigh of resignation. “Me. I promised Ellen I’d keep the colors down.”

A lot of the advance orders get canceled anyway.

The first time I see Diane, I almost don’t recognize her. It’s Friday afternoon and I’m making my weekly financial pilgrimage. When I step around the cooling racks, Tyler’s talking to a woman who’s arranging pansies on a small pink-frosted wedding cake. My brain skips to the idea that Ellen’s hired a part-timer till Diane comes back. Then they both look up and I see that Diane
is
back.

“Hey, Wyn.” She smiles at me, an automatic response, but her face is bleak. She looks smaller somehow, and when I hug her, she feels tiny and brittle.

“How’s your mom doing?”

“Not bad, considering what she’s been through.”