Bread Alone (49 page)

“Well, I do.”

Her expression reminds me of those forties detective movies. Some guy’s always getting hit in the head with a blackjack, and he gets this really goofy look on his face just before he drops to the floor.

“What?”

“I’ve been making some phone calls. I talked to my lawyer and I
talked to my mother. My divorce won’t be settled for a while, but my mother’s loaning me thirty thousand dollars against the settlement.”

She laughs ruefully. “Oh, bless your heart, Wyn, it’s a lot more than thirty thousand dollars.”

“Of course. But there’s nothing in the agreement that says you have to pay her the lump sum all at once, is there?”

“No …”

“So we negotiate. I think Diane will be amenable, don’t you?”

She nods slowly, but I can tell she’s afraid to put her full weight down on this solution for fear it might collapse under her. “Why do you want to do this? You do understand that Diane and I never made a lot of money.”

I smile. “It’s sort of about missed chances.”

I hold out my hand to shake on it, but she grabs me in a bear hug. “Wyn, thank you. Thank you so much.”

“That, and I’m looking forward to being Linda’s boss.”

Her sudden laughter bounces off the cement walls of the storeroom.

Twenty

C
M and I are having a celebration dinner. Halibut with a white-wine reduction sauce with capers. Puréed acorn squash. Salad of baby lettuces. Champagne. And for dessert, Tyler’s Jackson Pollock cake—hazelnut pound cake glazed with white-chocolate ganache and decorated like one of Pollock’s paintings in spatterings of chocolate, caramel, and espresso icing.

CM raises her glass. “To my best friend and Amazon sister—now an official bread maven.”

“Yesterday I couldn’t spell entrepreneur; today I are one. You know, I don’t think one bottle of this is going to be enough. Can we put another one in the fridge?”

She crosses her eyes. “We could, except we’re out.” “How could we be out of champagne?” “I don’t know, but we are. This is the last bottle.” “I’m going to have to go get some more. Put the top on this one and give me your keys while I can still drive.”

She throws me her purse. “I’ll make a fire and wash the lettuce. Get some goat cheese, too.”

I should never go near Thriftway when I’m hungry. I come back with three bottles of champagne, five kinds of olives, two kinds of goat
cheese and a small wedge of lemon Stilton, and a quarter pound of raw cashews, which CM loves.

She peers into the bag. “Are we feeding a gypsy camp?”

A fire’s burning cheerfully in her little fireplace, and I’m unloading my purchases when I recognize the music coming from her tape deck. It’s the tail end of “Cleaning Windows” by Van Morrison. I get the open bottle of champagne out of the fridge.

The last notes fade out and then a breathy tenor spills into the void.

I Only Have Eyes for You by The Flamingos

“What tape is that?”

She shrugs. “I found it in your box. It’s got some great stuff on it.” She hands me the card. Twelve songs. Title, artist, record label, running time.

“It’s the tape Mac gave me when he left.” On the back he scrawled, “Remember to listen.”

“Let me see it.” She pulls it out of my hand and studies it while I fill our glasses.

“I’m starving. Let’s get dinner started.” I turn on the fire under the sauté pan and pat the excess water off the fish, but CM reaches around me and turns off the burner.

“What are you doing?”

“You need to listen to this. The person who made this tape has something to say.” She takes my hand and pulls me over to the futon. “Don’t you see what this is? It’s about you.”

“Give me a break.”

“Look at these songs.” She waves the card under my nose, but when I reach for it, she pulls it back and reads, “ ‘Brown Eyed Girl.’ That’s you—”

“Right. After all, I
am
the only woman in the world with brown eyes.”

She ignores me. “ ‘Sally Go ‘Round the Roses’—that’s about finding your significant other with someone else. ‘Changing Horses’—about breaking up. ‘Tangled Up in Blue’…” She pushes her hair behind her ears and flops down next to me.

“It’s just a coincidence. He likes Dylan.”

“Even you don’t believe that. Look at this one.” She laughs. “ ‘Cold-water Canyon’—obviously Gary. ‘Cleaning Windows’—that’s Mac.”

“You have a vivid imagination.”

“‘I Only Have Eyes for You.’ That’s so romantic—”

“It’s not romantic, it’s just—”

“Just what?”

I stare at the lights of the city framed in her window. “It’s what was on the radio the night he drove me to the hospital in the snow.” “Wyn, call him.”

“He doesn’t have a phone. Besides, even if you’re right, which I don’t think you are, he made that months ago—”

“No excuses. Can’t you get him a message? No, you need to go up there. Take the Camry.”

“And leave you with no car?”

“Taking the bus won’t kill me. Go tomorrow.”

“I can’t go tomorrow.”

“Why not? It’s Saturday. You don’t have to work.”

“I don’t know how to get there.”

“Piece of cake. I’ve got maps. Basically, you just drive up to Anacortes—it’s about an hour and a half—and get on the ferry.”

“I don’t know where he is.”

She smiles. “But you know how to find out. Don’t you?”

The last song is playing now. “The Dimming of the Day” by Richard Thompson. He has one of those pure Celtic male voices that’s like a knife in your heart.

“CM, don’t do this to me. I was just getting used to his being gone.”

She puts the tape case down on the coffee table, folds her arms, and
gives me her green-eyed stare. “If I’m wrong, you’ll have plenty of time to get used to his being gone. If I’m right …”

Later, when all that’s left of our celebration dinner is a few pleasant aromas and a chunk of cake covered in plastic wrap, and we’ve had enough champagne that we sing “The Night They Invented Champagne,” and CM remembers how to make the cork-popping noise by flipping her little finger out of her mouth, and after we have one more hug, and she’s gone to bed … then I curl up on my side on the futon to watch the last embers of the fire die in the dark.

Maybe I’ll be like CM—devote my life to my art. The idea has a certain appeal. But even before I finish the thought, I know it’s not the same. CM has something—a steel cable that runs through the center of her life. Around it, all the other threads of her existence are gathered.

Bread is my job, my craft. A
boulangere
is what I am. But I’m not CM. Instead of a steel cable, I have a hollow core. I need someone. But is it Mac? He’s truly a man outside my realm of experience. Even if what I feel is … what I think it is, I mean, could it possibly be the L-word? Even if I feel that way, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he’s just on the rebound and he needs a Transitional Woman. Or maybe he just wanted someone to fill a space in time till he got ready to move on, and he’s no longer interested. And even if he’s interested, and I’m interested, there’s no guarantee that it would work. I mean, we’re so different.

I sit up, punch the pillow, flop back down, roll over on my back.

From the darkness of her bedroom, CM’s voice floats out to me. “The car has a full tank of gas …”

The
M. V. Anacortes
glides through a dreamscape of islands that emerge from the fog and then disappear back into it. I’ve been hearing about the San Juans ever since I moved to Seattle, but this isn’t what I imagined—no sandy beaches, no palm trees. Just rocky, conifer-covered
mountains thrusting up from the cold, blue Pacific. Air so clean it sears your throat with a sweet ocean smell. CM said that September wasn’t too late to spot killer whales, but everything that looks like a black dorsal fin turns out to be a floating log or a duck or a curious sea lion.

The boat’s metal ramp clangs down on the Orcas landing, and the Camry bounces cautiously onto the road. I ask the guy who’s directing traffic how I get to Eastsound.

He smiles at me as though he doesn’t get asked that question five hundred times a day, and says, “This here’s Horseshoe Highway. Just stay on it.”

The road drops down into a tunnel of trees that opens out on to rolling green hills. Mist pools in the low spots, but the fog is quickly burning away under the persistent gaze of the sun.

I’m scared. Like riding my two-wheeler for the first time after my father removed the training wheels. He’d tried to talk me into it for weeks. He said they hadn’t touched pavement in the last dozen outings. But I wanted their presence. I needed to know that if I failed to maintain perfect balance, if that theory about forward momentum was all a lie, that I wouldn’t go somersaulting to my doom. In the end, he just took them off. If I wanted to ride, he said, I’d have to just get on and pedal like crazy.

I have no plan, no idea what to say to Mac when I see him. I’m just pedaling. God, why did I let CM bulldoze me into this fool’s errand? It’s been almost five months since he gave me that tape. What if he doesn’t feel that way anymore? What if he never did? I bang my palm on the steering wheel. Goddamn him. This whole mess could have been avoided if he’d had the
cofines
to just say something to me.

Of course, I could have said something to him, I suppose. Like that night on the ferry. But what would I have said?
Don’t go?
What if he’d just looked at me and said, “Why not?” I would have jumped overboard.

The highway bends ninety degrees right and I cruise into the village of Eastsound. There are only three or four streets, so I turn on North/Beach Road, the first one, and park at the curb. The wooden sidewalk is lined with cafés, a bookstore, two art galleries, a sporting goods store, a
small insurance office. I follow my nose to a tiny bakery tucked away in a courtyard, hoping a pumpkin muffin will fix the hollow feeling in my interior. The muffin is moist, dense with nuts and dried fruits, but I put it back in the bag after one bite.

At the end of the block, on the left-hand side, is Jaimie Johnson Real Estate. The door’s locked although its nearly ten thirty. Rick said there’d be someone here at nine. Maybe I’ve blundered into some obscure island holiday custom of closing offices on the third Saturday of the ninth month. I’m about to walk away when I hear a cheery, “Hi. Can I help you?”

A tall, dark-haired woman is walking toward me, clutching a pink mug. “Dorrie Alesworth.” She holds out her hand. “Sorry, I had to have some caffeine and there’s no one else here this morning.”

“I’m Wyn Morrison. Rick Bensinger talked to someone about my getting a map to his cabin.”

“Oh, yes. You know it’s occupied right now?”

My gaze slips across the street to the small parking lot, unconsciously scanning for white El Caminos. “It’s—I actually need to see the person who’s staying there, not the cottage.”

“Come on in. I’ll mark it on the map for you. It’s real easy.”

How nice that something is.

I lay the photocopied map on the passenger seat, turning it to orient myself to the yellow highlighter tracings. Back on Horseshoe Highway. The road skirts Crescent Beach and a sign warns potential oyster rustlers to keep off the oyster beds. Left onto Terrill’s Beach Road, nowhere near a beach as far as I can tell, then right on Buckhorn Road. In a few minutes, I start to see tantalizing glimpses of water on the left. Exactly half a mile later by the odometer, a sign announces “Madrone Cottage.”

I slam on the brakes even though I’m not going that fast, and sit there sliding my sweaty palms around the steering wheel. When I look in the rearview mirror, there’s a silver Honda Civic waiting patiently behind me. If this were L.A., or even Seattle, the driver would be laying
on the horn by now. I wave an apology and turn in, bumping up the rutted drive.

A white clapboard bungalow appears suddenly, poised on the edge of a meadow as if preparing to dive in. The Elky sits on a patch of gravel to the left of the covered porch. He finally got the fender painted.

I park near a clump of trees about twenty yards from the house and get out, closing the door gently. I can smell the sea, but the only visible ocean is the swaying green and gold meadow grass. A squirrel’s piercing chatter makes me jump like a guilty trespasser.

Bob Dylan’s nasal twang blasts out the open window. “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” I’m almost to the porch when the music stops abruptly.

“I’m going for a run. You coming?”

Obviously, he’s not alone. My heart thuds in my ears, less a noise than a vibration, as if it’s underwater. If I circle around into the trees, I can wait and see who he’s with. If it’s a guy, fine. If it’s a woman, I need to decide whether to humiliate myself or just slink back to the ferry landing.