Pieces of Broken China

by Dean R. Blanchard

  My father and Tyler bought two cases of cookbooks, which they gave out to their clients as Christmas presents. Mr. Spellman bought a case of The Cobblestone. He displayed the cookbooks on top of his bakery case between a loaf of nine-grain and a loaf of pumpernickel. Mom bought many cookbooks to send out as Christmas presents to family and friends.

  In late spring of 1980, I graduated with an Associate of Science in Food Service Management.

  I returned to Mr. Spellman’s bakery with my sourdough pot. I baked sourdough on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and kept track of the sourdough breads that sold.

  I always took a loaf of sourdough home at the end of the day. I was full of pride and just knew that one day this would be Seth’s sourdough shop.

  What I hadn’t noticed was that more bread was taken to the mission at the end of the day than I first realized. When I asked Mr. Spellman about the mission bread, he told me business was slow.

  I recalled the conversation Tyler had with me about the large chain grocery store in town. None of that mattered to me. Yes, they baked sourdough breads, but none of them were like my sour. I knew because I humbled myself one weekend and bought one of their loaves of sour. It was really good, but I would never have admitted that to anyone.

  * * *

  A year later Mr. Spellman was confident that I could operate the bakery on slow days alone. He told me to work six days a week and to take Sundays off for family and relaxation. He had posted the bakery schedule on the large cork board mounted on the back wall of the bakery showing the types of breads he baked each day. His bread recipes were easy to follow. I knew his home telephone number if I needed him. Mom and Eleanor stopped by at times to see how I was coming along.

  When I was certain nothing could go wrong, my world suddenly collapsed around me. On Sunday, June 19, 1983, also Father’s Day, Mr. Spellman suffered a stroke while at the dinner table. Eleanor kept her composure as she called the ambulance and then my home. Dad rushed out the front door and drove off to the emergency room. Tyler raced after him with Mom and me in his car. When we arrived at the emergency room, Mr. Spellman was dead.

  I was in shock. Mom sat with Eleanor as she sobbed into Mom’s shoulder.

  “My sons are on their way, she sniffled.

  For some reason, and I’m not too certain why, I looked at Eleanor and asked, “The bakery killed him?”

  Eleanor sat up, looked at me, and said, “The bakery didn’t kill Andrew. He did that all by himself. He was offered a bakery position in that chain grocery after it moved into town. He insisted his homemade breads were much better quality.”

  Eleanor turned to Mom and said, “Andrew was diagnosed with heart disease a few years back. His doctor told him he needed to slow down. That stubborn man wouldn’t listen.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Mom asked.

  Eleanor wiped her eyes with a napkin from the box sitting on the table next to her. “He didn’t want anyone’s pity.” She glanced at me and added, “He was full of pride.”

  I swallowed hard at those words.

  * * *

  I returned to the bakery the day after Mr. Spellman’s funeral to pick up my sourdough pot. Later that afternoon, Dad sat down with me at the dinner table.

  It was then I realized how much my father had been there for me, quietly observing my dream.

  “Do you still want to own your bakery?” he asked and then added, “Eleanor is going to shut the bakery down because it’s an old building that used to be in the main part of town. The center of the business district moved as the town expanded. People don’t go out to that part of town anymore.

  “There’s an empty bakery downtown on Front Street. I was the owner’s accountant for a long time. He had no business sense, and I told him so. When he suggested that I cook the books, I walked away from him.” Dad sat quietly for a moment.

  He continued, “If you want your own bake shop, I’ll set you up in business. Give it some thought. When you’re ready, I know the realtor who has the key to the bakery, and later I will help you with a business plan.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I can tell you how many loaves you need to sell a day before you make a profit. It’s called a profit-and-loss statement.”

  Had I heard my father correctly? He had offered to set me up in my own sourdough shop, a dream come true.

  He took me downtown to see this bakery. A realtor he knew was waiting for us when we arrived. When I stepped into the bakery, I was immediately taken back to Mr. Spellman’s bakery. This bakery was much smaller but had newer equipment. It had a large convection oven, a proofing box, and racks to put the baked loaves on. The bakery case was smaller than Mr. Spellman’s, but it did have a deep fat fryer to do donuts. My father gave me the key to the bakery to keep for a while. Many days I went down to the bakery and sat on a stool behind the bakery case.

  One day when I was at the bakery Mr. Richardson walked into the shop.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked as I shook his hand.

  “News travels fast around the business community. A realtor friend of mine who eats at the Cobblestone Inn mentioned it to me the other day. I think he gave your dad the key to the bakery.” He glanced about the bakery as he asked, “You’re going to do this?”

  I hesitated for a moment. Now I questioned if I wanted to work as hard as Mr. Spellman.

  Mr. Richardson said, “You can always bake your sourdough at home. If I were in your shoes, knowing what I know now about the baking business, I think I would become an accountant.”

  I don’t remember going home that night. The next morning I laid the key of the bakery on the dining-room table in front of Dad.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “What do I have to do to get my accounting license?”

  Speaking in Tongues

  Mom had been alone long before Dad died, long before I left for college. Our close, loving relationship had deteriorated after Dad returned from Vietnam. But the week after his funeral was my hell week with Mother. She sank into emotional oblivion, shutting herself off from her grief and me. After I graduated from high school I chose a college far enough away from Mom to be still close to her if she needed me.

  Out of the blue one day Mom called to ask me to spend a week of my summer vacation camping and hanging out with her. I hesitated because I did not want to return home to memories of a happier time when I was young, before Dad went to Vietnam.

  I had been camping and fishing with Mom and Willow, my black smoked tabby, since I was eleven, so I knew the routine. Without a word between us, I helped Mom unpack her ancient, cream-colored Jeep, its chassis scarred and pitted with rust.

  I knew how she wanted camp set up: two pup tents, open flaps facing Half Moon Lake. I unrolled and unzipped our sleeping bags, set lanterns by the posts outside the tents, unfolded two aluminum chairs with orange webbing, and set them aside.

  Midpoint between the tents and the shoreline, Mom dug a shallow pit. Then she gathered fire starter and heavier pieces of wood from an ancient cottonwood that had snapped in half during a windstorm. She dropped a handful of charcoal briquettes in the bottom of the fire pit and squirted them with the fire starter. She removed a stick match from the pocket of her denim shirt and swiped it against a rock. When the match flared, she cupped the flame with her hand and dropped it inside the pit. Fire erupted from the briquettes. Crouching, Mom rubbed her hands together as she gazed into the dancing flames.

  After a while Mom stood up straight, raised her arms above her head, and drew in a deep breath. “Umm. Smell that fresh air, girl.” She dug her toes into the warm sand. “This was your dad’s hangout. He brought me here in that old rust bucket heap of his on our first date.” She gestured toward the Jeep. “After he came home from Vietnam, he’d come down here when he wanted to be alone.” She paused and studied me. “He loved you very much.”

  I moved my chair closer to the fire and watched Mom layer pieces of dried wood. Suddenly they
burst into flames.

  Mom sat down in the chair across from me, the fire warming our faces. “His anger had nothing to do with you.” She paused, looked at me, and then added, “Or me either.”

  I didn’t believe her, so what could I say? I just watched her tend the fire, her face leathered from too much sun and taut from the stress and frustration of trying to make a marriage functional, her thick, black hair disheveled and hanging all over her neck and face. She was staring at me, waiting for a reply of some kind.

  “He didn’t care about me because he wanted a son,” I said.

  “No,” Mom replied. “Being a boy would’ve helped less. Be glad you were his daughter.”

  “It didn’t matter what I was. The way he yelled at me proved he didn’t have caring feelings for anyone.”

  “Your father learned to numb his feelings in Vietnam. Made death easier to take.”

  “How can you defend him after what he did to us?”

  Mom paused from her fire-tending and sat forward in her chair, her eyes slow-dancing with the flames. “I’m not defending him, just explaining his behavior. I never understood your father until I sought out other wives struggling to understand their husbands. Vietnam was an unusual war. Seems most of the men who returned acted pretty much like your father, but it was because they were recoiling from the shock and horror and cruelty of combat.” She stopped talking and looked at me pointedly. “What would it have been like if your dad had been missing in action?”

  I shrugged. It wasn’t a question I wanted to answer, not here and certainly not now. “What did you ever see in him?”

  Mom leaned back in her chair, folded her arms in her lap, and mused for a few minutes. “When I met your father, he had the softest complexion, blue eyes, blond hair, and sensuous lips. From the moment my eyes caught sight of him, I knew he was for me.”

  Mom paused to pull her hair back around her neck. “That year in Vietnam etched rigid lines in his complexion, lines from the strain of fear and rage. I was naive then, didn’t understand he was experiencing a normal reaction to really bad experiences.”

  “But it was a war,” I argued. “Bad experiences are bound to happen.”

  Mom breathed in deeply and toyed with her hair. “Remember when Willow got run over?”

  I grimaced. “I’ll never forget that day. Poor cat. His body was still warm when I picked him up off the street. When I carried him into the house, he just looked at me, meowed once, then ...” I dabbed at eyes suddenly moist. “It was horrible.”

  “And your father? The men he held in his arms trying to comfort them as they lay dying? You don’t think that was terrible for him?”

  “But the war wasn’t his whole life. What he did in Vietnam mattered more than us?”

  “Willow—”

  “I don’t want to talk about Willow,” I blurted.

  “Maybe you should,” Mom said.

  “I don’t care what you say; it’s not the same as Dad.”

  “Trauma’s the same. When you couldn’t talk to your father, to you he was like Willow... dead.”

  “Sometimes I wish he’d never come home.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “I do! The dad I knew before Vietnam was soft-spoken, kind, and gentle to us, to me. When he came back, he was...” I paused and looked Mom in the eyes before finishing, “soul-dead.”

  “I don’t think a soul-dead person would need a .45-caliber gun under his pillow every night.”

  I grimaced. “Dad slept with a loaded gun under his pillow?”

  “He was so used to being alert in Vietnam, ready for attacks even when he was sleeping, that he always kept his hand on his gun. Many nights he screamed before he awoke, as if he still needed to protect himself from being killed. Remember when I warned you not to touch him when he slept?”

  “I thought it was because he didn’t want to be bothered with my problems.”

  Mom shook her head. “No, it was because he might have hit you, thinking you were the enemy. Or worse, he might have shot you.”

  “Why didn’t you take the gun away from him, turn him in for abuse... something?”

  Mom scratched the side of her head with a twig she scooped up near the fire pit and then chuckled. “I did hide it once. Biggest mistake I ever made. Thought he was going to kill me with his bare hands. I gave him the gun back but slept on the sofa after that. The next night he begged me to come back to bed, so I told him I would if he would go into counseling.”

  “That was a waste,” I said.

  Mom snapped the twig in half and tossed it in the fire. She stood up and walked toward the bank of Half Moon Lake. It was well past sunset, and a full moon was rising over the cottonwoods along the shore. The air was cool, the sky clear. I leaned back in my chair and gazed up at the Little Dipper. I remembered Dad pointing out the North Star when I was a kid, a kind and gentle-spoken dad who held me in his arms, whispering he would always be by my side.

  “Let’s walk,” Mom said, her back to me.

  Relieved to shed such a tender memory, I got up and moved toward her, my hands thrust deep in my pockets. The lake looked foreboding. “It’s so dark,” I said.

  “Dark? Look at this.” Mom made a sweeping motion with her arms. “There now,” she said, a magician’s smile on her face. “All lit up. Just us, the crickets, a couple of frogs among the cattails, and lightning bugs looking for mates.” She paused, slapped the side of her face. “And the damned mosquitoes!”

  “They always liked you better than me,” I joked halfheartedly.

  “Never bothered your dad either,” she said as she started walking along the shore.

  I caught up with her and we walked side by side. After a few minutes, she tried to pull my hand out of my pocket. At first I resisted; then I relaxed. She squeezed my hand in hers, tears streaming down her cheeks. “He did it the day after I told him I wanted us to go into counseling.”

  “Not now,” I protested.

  “He just sat in his easy chair, stuffed the .45 in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.” She trembled as she rubbed my arm with her hand. “I had gone shopping.”

  Suddenly, Mom stopped and put her hands on my shoulders, shaking me gently. “I don’t want to lose you, too. You’re all I have left,” she sobbed. “Let the bitterness go. Let it all go. One day when you have a daughter of your own I hope you talk to her much better than I’ve talked to you. Be there for her no matter what.”

  For the first time in years, we hugged one another in the moonlight at the water’s edge of Half Moon Lake. Years of tension drained from my body as I rested my head on Mom’s shoulder and sobbed. “I’m sorry, Mom. I do love you. Always have. It’s just... I thought if I shoved you away, I would forget the past.”

  She stepped back and looked at me, her eyes searching my very soul. “Remember that Pentecostal church we went to before your dad left for Vietnam? Remember how the minister spoke in tongues while his wife stood next to him interpreting what he said?”

  “Sure, but what’s that got to do...?”

  “Your father believed we were blessed, that God would never forsake us. When he came home from Vietnam, we went back to that church, but he just got up and walked out when the minister started speaking in tongues.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “We never went to church again.” Mom hesitated, twisted a strand of hair, and then took a deep breath. “I’ve been speaking in tongues. Hearing voices. Truth is, I have no power to heal you. Only you do. We haven’t had a mother-daughter relationship since your dad returned from Vietnam. I was so busy trying to mend your father, to make him whole like he was before, that I neglected you. When I couldn’t fix him, I withdrew from you, too. I was afraid I would fail you like I failed him. Forgive me, please.” She gently kissed my forehead.

  Tears formed in my eyes. “We both need forgiveness. I said some pretty horrible things about you behind your back. I wish...”

  Mom squeezed my hand. “It’s okay.
At least you won’t go on wondering how different our relationship would’ve been if only I’d tried.” She put her arm around my waist, and we continued walking around Half Moon Lake. “Do you remember when you stuffed a raisin up your nose with the eraser of a pencil? You were...”

  Mom and I didn’t get any sleep that night.

  We camped for a week, reminiscing over happier times. We shed tears of joy that we had come to this place to find solace, to heal. I reclaimed the relationship I had with her before Dad left for Vietnam. But the real gift of those hours came when I released the hatred I had harbored against my Dad. In forgiving him, I learned to forgive myself.

  I finished college, got a job, and found a guy who allowed me the luxury of following my dreams. I have a daughter now. Whenever I get frustrated with her, I recall that first night Mom and I stood on the shore of Half Moon Lake, how once we let our egos go, we discovered we had far more in common than we ever realized.

  Twin Sisters Inn

  Dawn.

  Click went the black ball against the stainless steel wheel in the cook’s window.

  Carmen was the kitchen manager. She ordered all the foods and made certain the kitchen was clean and ready for the coming meals. Eileen was in charge of the dining-room staff and the maintenance of the restaurant. It had always been this way.

  The restaurant filled with loyal customers. Many of these families had been patrons since Eileen and Carmen opened the restaurant thirty years before. Bonds of friendships had been formed, and some of their customers were extended family.

  One of that extended family was Clarence Travis, owner of Griffith’s, the town’s largest grocery store. Griffith’s Market had been in the Griffith family for generations. Clarence had been stationed in England during World War II. While there, he had met and married a British woman. After the war, Clarence had brought her back to his home town. A heart attack had claimed her life six months after she arrived. Clarence had vowed never to marry again—the loss was too much for him to cope with.