Bread Alone (47 page)

“You shouldn’t stay here by yourself,” she says.

I stand up, smile at them. “I was trying to muster the energy to go to work.”

“Where do you work at this time of night?” he asks. “The Queen Street Bakery. On Queen Anne.”

She says, “You’re kidding. That’s where I get my bread. Look.” She sticks out her chest to show me her Queen Street Bakery T-shirt. “That’s what I do. The bread.”

Her face lights up with interest. “Well, your bread’s wonderful. Especially the new kinds. That banana-cinnamon stuff and the cornmeal-millet bread. You really make all that?”

“Yeah, it’s great,” her husband says.

I think I’m blushing. “Thanks. I’m glad you like it.”

“I’m excited to meet you,” she says. “Maybe we’ll see you there sometime.”

I laugh. “You have to get there before seven in the morning.”

They wave and move toward the street, but I stand still. Waiting for him to appear out of nowhere, like in the movies. Take off his baseball cap, push his hair back. Smile his great smile and say, “I figured I’d find you here.”

Finally, I turn to follow them, and as I do, a current of air rushes past my face. It becomes a full-fledged breeze, deep and fresh, smelling of the ocean. I picture it coming in off the water, pushing little whitecaps ahead of it. It cools my face. My head falls back in relief; I look at the stars. The heat wave’s broken.

The bus driver has his directional signal blinking, ready to pull out into Eastlake Avenue. As I run for it, I catch a reflection in the glass doors of a building—someone else trying to catch the bus—a famous bread baker, running down the sidewalk, braids bouncing in the wind, yelling at the driver to wait. I slide into a seat, catch my breath, and brush at the dampness on my face.

If I were writing a story about myself, it would begin: “In her thirty-second year, she discovered her Right Livelihood …” Or as CM would say, I’ve discovered what I am. I’ve peeled off the outer layers one by one—my father’s daughter, David’s wife, a divorcée—and I find, at the core, a baker of bread. A woman who likes working while the rest of the world sleeps. Who enjoys living alone, who doesn’t own a car or a house. Who’s happiest in jeans and a flannel shirt. Who chooses friends for the pleasure of their company, not their usefulness. Who’s open to love. Or would be, if she could learn to recognize it.

It’s only about eleven when I get to the bakery. Linda’s already there. I can see her through the front window. Beyond the darkness of the café, our work area glows like the stage of a little theater. I watch her move between the Traulsen, the ovens, and the worktable, her stubby torso seeming to dance for some unseen audience. She’s actually smiling. It occurs to me that she probably enjoys making bread as much as, if not more than, anything else in her life. It’s not the same for her as it is for me. She draws comfort from the routine; I need to experiment. But it doesn’t make her pleasure less valid.

Sometimes my own arrogance amazes me—I come waltzing in with my Ralph Lauren sweatpants, full of how things were done in France, prodding her to change the way she’s been working for twenty-five years. No wonder she didn’t want me around.

Saturday morning, I’m getting ready to sack out when there’s a knock at the door. I open it and there’s Daisy Wardwell, in yellow warm-ups and a white T-shirt, smiling through her perfect makeup. She says she was in the neighborhood and wanted to stop by and say hi.

“Oh my God, look what you’ve done to this place.” I can’t tell if she’s horrified or impressed. “This is wonderful. It’s so … warm and inviting.”

“Listen, Daisy, I have a pretty good idea why you’re here.”

She gives me a mock pout. “Yeah, kiddo, it looks like Mr. Keeler’s about ready to take over the property again.”

“When do I have to be out?”

“There’s no rush. From his perspective. He can’t move back in until the house is ready. The problem is, starting in about a month, there’s going to be a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.”

“Workmen?”

She nods. “Now, if that doesn’t bother you, you’re welcome to stay till the fat lady sings.”

“The problem is, I sleep during the day, so I guess I better start looking around. You know of anything right offhand?”

“Nope. It’s not a real great market right now, kiddo. But we’ve got a couple of weeks. I’ll get on it and see what I can find. Meanwhile, you might want to start getting ready, just in case we have to make a fast jump.”

“Yeah, probably a good idea.”

“Sorry, kiddo.” She fluffs her blonde curls.

“No problem. I knew the deal going in.”

I’ve accumulated an amazing amount of stuff in an amazingly short time. Clothes, books,
batterie de cuisine,
tapes, furniture, linens, and, of course, my tools. I appropriate boxes from the bakery’s weekly deliveries, fill them with various nonessentials, and stack them against the wall where my long-planned bookcases were supposed to go. After one week, it starts to look like the seeds of a conceptual art exhibit, and I haven’t heard any good news from Daisy.

Tuesday night I’m packing the contents of my desk—admittedly, there’s not a lot, only about one box worth. It’s a warm evening and I’ve got the windows and door open, entertaining the neighborhood with Van Morrison. One of Mac’s all-time favorites. He introduced me to the song “Cleaning Windows.” He loved it because it tells a whole life story in four minutes or whatever the time is—what the guy does for a
living, who his friends are, what music he listens to, what books he reads, what he eats. It is rather wonderful.

There’s nothing specific—I don’t hear a noise or see anything, but I have a sense of someone on the porch. I get up and wander into the living room, push open the screen door. CM’s sitting on the rail. I think she’s been crying, but it’s too dark to see for sure.

I fling myself on her, nearly knocking both of us over the rail and onto the ground. In a second, she’s hugging me back and we’re both crying and then we’re both laughing.

“At least you didn’t give me a bloody nose this time,” she says.

“I love you.” I wipe tears away with the heel of my hand. “I missed you. Oh, God, CM, I’m so sorry. I was such a bitch. I promise I’ll dance at your wedding.”

She wipes her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater. “Thanks for the offer. Unfortunately, there’s not going to be one. A wedding.”

“What? Why not? What happened?”

She gives me a crooked smile. “You were right.”

“No I wasn’t. I was petty and bitter. And jealous.”

“Maybe.” She laughs. “But you were still right.”

I slip my arm through hers, pulling her inside. “Let’s have a glass of wine and debrief you.”

She looks at my box pile. “Where are you going?”

“I’m not sure yet. I have to get out of here. But, later with that. Get us some glasses while I open this.”

We sit Indian style on the couch, and she says, “Thanks for the bread. It was great.”

“Why didn’t you call me when you got it? I thought you hated me.”

She shrugs. “I’m sorry. By that time I was too embarrassed. Not too embarrassed to eat it, however.”

“So what happened?”

“Exactly what you said would happen. He started having trouble with some of the resources he listed for his dissertation. His adviser claimed they didn’t exist. So he was exchanging nasty notes with his
adviser and then the whole committee got involved and he went into his Olympic door-slamming routine. From there it was a very short drive to me being selfish and not understanding what he was going through. We were fighting every other night and humping like bunnies in between. I got to the point where I was so wound up I couldn’t eat—imagine that, if you will. I couldn’t sleep. I started breaking out in this hideous rash under the ring—a sign from God, no doubt.”

She waggles her reddened, puffy ring finger at me. “Anyway, I threw it at him last night and told him to get his ass out of my apartment. He stormed out and I haven’t seen him since. He probably spent the evening exposing himself to coeds in the stacks.”

“So he hasn’t officially moved out?”

“He has to come back and get his stuff. If he hasn’t gotten it by Sunday morning, I’m putting it on the front lawn for some homeless person.” She stops for a long swallow of wine and a sigh. “How did you know?”

I shake my head. “I didn’t. I was just being petty. And jealous.”

“You were not.”

“Yes I was.”

“You’re not that kind of person,” she says firmly.

Which just proves that a true friend is somebody who insists on believing the best of you, even when faced with irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

“Tell me what’s going on with you,” she says.

“Oh …” I lean my head on the back of the futon. The Shirelles are wailing on “Baby, It’s You,” and I have to wait and hear my favorite part, where it sounds like a calliope. When the song ends, I say, “Remember that oldies record Katie had? The one she taught us to dance to?”

CM laughs. “You mean the one with ‘Please Mr. Postman’?”

I nod. “What was the name of that one we played over and over? We kept picking up the needle and setting it down till it was full of skips.”

“ ‘Party Lights.’ “ She smiles. “God, I hadn’t thought about that in a while. Those were the good old days.”

I swirl the wine in my glass. “I’ll say. All we cared about was getting the steps down so we could look cool. It didn’t matter that no one would dance with us because we were too tall.”

“We weren’t too tall. They were too short.”

“Whatever. You know, Mac played that song at Bailey’s one night, and I almost didn’t recognize it without all those little hiccups.”

She pulls her knees up, looping her arms over them. “Justine Wynter, where are you going with this?”

“I don’t know. I was just thinking how you get used to things. Even if they’re totally wrong. At some point, you start believing that’s how it’s supposed to be.”

She gives me a look of perfect understanding, as only a longtime best friend can. “Gotcha.”

“David was absolutely right, you know. He said, ‘Don’t you even know when you’re unhappy?’ Obviously, I didn’t. If he hadn’t kicked me out, I never would have had the nerve to walk away.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go writing him any thank-you notes just yet. Not till the money’s divvied up, anyway. What about the handsome stepbrother?”

“He went back to his ex.”

“Really? That’s strange.”

“Actually, it makes perfect sense. He was more enamored of the nuclear-family lifestyle than of me specifically. And I was starting to have déjà vu. You know—a second term as executive wife in Marin instead of Hancock Park.”

“He was a good Transition Man.”

I treat her to a Linda-style snort. “The shortest transition in history.”

“How’s Mac?”

“Fine, I guess. He’s up in the San Juan Islands writing the great American novel.”

Her X-ray vision burns into my brain. “Too bad. I liked him. For you, I mean.”

“I sort of liked him, too. But we never got beyond the platonic.”

“Maybe he’ll come back to Seattle.”

I start chipping orange flakes of Caribbean Sunset polish off my big toenail.

“And what about all this?” She nods at my pile of boxes.

“The owners ready to start working on the house again. I knew it would happen eventually, but it’s not good timing. Daisy says the market’s pretty stagnant.”

“Wyn, just move into my place. As soon as I can get Butt-head out.”

“Don’t you think you need some peace and quiet? Some time to yourself?”

“What I need is to have my Amazon blood sister around.” She grins. “Just like old times.”

CM goes home and I skip off to work in a rosy glow, which lasts until about 5:55 in the morning. At that point, Ellen comes in looking like Death’s blue-plate special.

“Diane had to go to Baltimore again,” she says in reply to my questioning look. “Her mother hasn’t been doing well, and they think she may have suffered another small stroke.”

“That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” Linda mutters. She heads for the door, leaving me to wheel out the cooling rack and arrange the bread on the shelves.

Ellen’s floundering this morning. After filling the register, she sinks into a chair and lays her head on her arms. At a loss for anything inspirational to say, I crank up the espresso machine. Now that I’ve mastered the espresso machine, I confess that being
barista
every once in a while makes me feel undeniably cool. Like some gorgeous, skinny, but well-endowed
signorina
with black hair and pale, flawless skin. Who works at a coffee bar in Milano or Firenze and is secretly—or openly—coveted by every artist in the district. They flock to the coffee bar each morning to watch her hips sway with maddening grace as she pulls their espresso. They kiss their fingertips at her and leave thousands of lire on the bar.