“I’ll figure something out.” He turns to look at me directly for the first time since we got in the truck. “Looks like I stayed away too long.”
“You stayed as long as you needed to. I think we both had some issues to work out.”
He smiles ever so slightly. “That’s my California girl.”
He turns the key on, but doesn’t start the engine. On the radio Bruce Springsteen is singing “Brilliant Disguise.” He flicks it off. “I missed you.”
I turn to him, leaning my back against the passenger door. “I missed you, too. But I told you when you left not to look for me standing on the porch waving my hankie.”
“Veranda. I believe your exact words were ‘Don’t expect to come back and find me standing on the veranda waving my lace hankie.’” He makes a minute adjustment in the side mirror. “But I guess that’s pretty much what I did expect. My mistake.”
“Oh, stop it. You act like I’m punishing you. That’s not how I feel.”
“How do you feel?”
I can’t help it. I burst out laughing. “This is totally amazing. You show up after a year in Siberia, no warning, no explanation, and suddenly you want to talk about feelings?”
“I thought that’s what you always wanted me to do. Have you changed your mind?”
“It’s been a hard year. I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things.”
He leans his head back, and I notice the dark smudges under his eyes, the stubble of his beard. He probably drove most of the night.
“You need to get some sleep. We can talk this afternoon.”
Without opening his eyes, he says, “Is it too late?”
“For what?” Yes, I have a sadistic streak. I want to hear him say it.
“For us.” He manages to invest it with such vulnerability that I want to cradle him like a child. However, I’m not going there. Not yet, anyway.
“We have a lot to talk about.” I get out of the truck, walk around to his side, open the door. “Move over.”
“What?”
“I said, move over. I’m driving. You’re practically comatose.” He slides over to make room for me and I climb in. “My landlord’s a really good guy. He’ll probably let you crash on the floor at his place, at least for the day.” The Elky starts up without a protest, and I make a U-turn at the stop sign.
By the time I pull up in front of the house, Mac’s snoring.
He knocks on the back door at four o’clock. He’s showered and shaved, but his eyes still look tired.
“What are you making?” he asks.
“Struan. It’s a Scottish harvest bread.”
He smiles. “Don’t you get enough bread baking at work?”
I look up from the jar of wheat bran. “Do you get enough music playing at work?”
“Touché.” He pulls a chair out and sits down.
“Do you want something to drink?”
“Have you got any coffee?”
“Not made, but you can make some if you want. The pot’s on the stove. Coffee’s in that canister next to the sink.”
He dumps this morning’s grounds in the garbage, rinses the pot, and fills the bottom with water, the basket with ground espresso.
“Cups are hanging on that rack by the fridge.” I measure out the coarsely ground cornmeal and the rolled oats, dump them in the bowl with the flour and bran.
“What’s in here?” He picks up a small pan on the stove.
“Brown rice. For the Struan.”
“It looks like it’s got everything in it but the kitchen sink.”
“That’s because it does. It has all the harvest grains—corn, oats, wheat, millet, and rice. It was made in western Scotland on the eve of the feast of St. Michael the archangel. He was the guardian of the harvest. The oldest daughter of each house would bake the breads—small ones for the family and huge loaves for the community. On the feast day, they would take the bread to early Mass and it would be blessed in remembrance of absent friends.”
The espresso pot begins to hiss and sputter. He pulls it off the stove, pours some in his cup and sits down at the table again. For a few minutes he just watches me add the brown rice, honey, and buttermilk to the grains in the bowl and stir it with a big wooden spoon.
“You’re angry.”
I stop stirring and let my eyes meet his. “I suppose on some level I am.”
He drinks the rest of his espresso in one swallow and sets the cup down. “I feel like there’s some kind of invisible wall around you. There are so many things I want to tell you and ask you. And all you want to do is tell me about the history of Scottish harvest bread.”
I give the dough a last stir, and dump it out on the floured counter.
“Hard, isn’t it?” I begin to knead the stiff, crumbly dough. “When you want to talk to someone, you need to know how they feel, what they think. And they just want to talk about how viruses mutate and how ospreys return to the same nest every year and that there are frogs in the Arctic that freeze solid in winter and—”
“Okay.”
I keep kneading the bread. Struan takes longer than most breads because it has so many whole grains, but gradually it begins to change under my hands. The shaggy mass becomes lighter, more elastic. The grains even out, and what emerges is a beautiful golden, moist round of dough. When you press the heel of your hand into it, it gives way a little before springing back. I wash and oil the bowl, set the dough in, and cover it with a damp towel.
He watches me silently while I wash all the utensils and put them in the drainer, wash my hands and rub hand cream into them. I sit down across from him and we look at each other.
He clears his throat. “Josh seems like a good guy.”
“The best. Did you meet Turbo?”
“Meet him? I slept with him.” He smiles. “Of course, I think I was on his couch.” He pauses. “Do you…Are you involved with—?”
“Turbo? Yeah. He’s about the most reliable male I’ve ever met. All you have to do is give him toast and he’s your love slave.”
He waits for me to answer the real question.
I lean back and prop one foot up on the chair next to me. “No, I’m not involved with Josh. It would be way too convenient. His wife left him. You left me—”
“I didn’t leave you. I just had to leave for a while.”
“You weren’t here. You weren’t with me. That’s all I know. Josh and I would probably get along really well, but he’s still in love with Fran, and I’m…”
“You’re what?”
“In limbo. I seem to have gotten used to your being gone.”
His thumb explores a gouge in the battered tabletop. “Don’t you think you could get used to me being back?”
“I suppose I could. The question is, do I want to?”
“That’s definitely the question. What’s the answer?”
“I don’t know.”
He takes my hand in both of his, turning it palm up, as if he’s going to read my fortune. It feels good, just sitting here in the kitchen with him holding my hand.
“I want to tell you something.” He traces the lines in my palm with his index finger, then looks up into my eyes. “I didn’t leave because of you. But at first, I thought if I stayed away long enough, I’d find out that it didn’t matter if I came back. If I saw you again. But what happened was, the longer I stayed, the more it mattered. Until finally it got to matter more than anything else. More than writing, more than going to Alaska, more than—anything. When you came out of the bakery this morning, the way you looked…I thought you were glad to see me.”
“Oh, Mac.” I let out a deep sigh. “Of course I was glad to see you. I am glad you came back. It’s just—everything’s changing so fast.”
“Like what?”
“Just in the last six months—Tyler’s best friend died, CM’s gone back to L.A. We’ve lost our lease—”
“On the bakery?”
I nod.
“What are you guys going to do?
”
“Close the doors. We’re in debt up to our eyeballs, and Ellen’s tired of swimming upstream. She wants to move over to Whidbey with Lloyd and just make Mazurkas wholesale. And I can’t blame her.”
“How did you lose your lease?”
“Nate, our landlord, sold the building to some dentist from Bellevue who’s got delusions of grandeur. Our lease is up May first and he’s raised the rent by twenty percent to finance his renovation plans for our ‘architecturally significant’ building. Nobody can afford to stay except Gene, the photographer.”
From the corner of my eye, I see Tyler strolling out of the bathroom in her underwear. “Man on the hall,” I holler, and she does a one-eighty into her bedroom. “So…” I look back at him. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t even know if I’m going to stay in Seattle.”
“What about the divorce?”
“That’s about all that’s settled. I’m officially single. And we have a court date in June to divide the assets. I’m just trying to hang on.”
“Well, I have some news.” He leans back, balancing the chair on two legs. “I finished the rewrite.”
I sit straight up. “Really?”
“Really.” He smiles. “I worked on it all winter. I sent it back to Steve Devine three weeks ago, and he’s now my agent.”
“Oh my god, Mac, that’s wonderful. You must feel so proud.”
“What I feel is lucky. Incredulous.”
“Hi, Mac.” Tyler enters, now sartorially impeccable in her black jeans and black T-shirt. She looks at me. “How come everybody you know talks like that?”
“He’s got an agent!”
“Awesome.” She goes to the refrigerator and pulls out the orange juice. “Just like a real writer dude.” She wanders into the living room, and I hear her talking on the phone.
I get up for a glass of water, and when I squeeze past him, he takes my arm. Part of me wants to sink back into the luxury of him. To wake up with him next to me. Then that other part of me—the small but vocal minority—is saying no. He hears it loud and clear. He drops my arm.
“You have to give me some time,” I say.
“I guess that’s fair.”
twenty-five
The familiar brown boxes have sprung up in our living room like mushrooms after a good rain. Since I left L.A. over two years ago, my personal belongings have probably spent fifty percent of the time in these boxes, either in storage, in transit, waiting to be in transit, or waiting to be unpacked.
It feels a lot like living inside a kaleidoscope. No sooner do I get situated in one pattern, then everything changes again and moves on, leaving me clinging by my fingernails to some little fragment of colored glass that used to be part of my life.
I plop down on the couch and put my feet up on the closest box. It’s almost eight o’clock at night, and sun still beams in through the window, flashing into rainbows when it hits Tyler’s lead crystal rotating slowly by its fishing twine. I have no idea where she is. She’s been gone a lot lately, disappearing with her enormous tote bag thrown over her shoulder, coming back at all hours. I’m reluctant to ask her what she’s up to; after all, I’m not her mother, and she is—technically—an adult, but I worry.
I think about calling CM. Then I think about having a glass of wine. Next I think about ordering a pizza or nuking some spaghetti sauce. I don’t do any of those things, though. I just sit there. As if I’m waiting for something. When the Elky pulls up across the street, I understand that I was.
It’s been a strange three weeks. Knowing he was back but not really believing it. There hasn’t been any communication aside from a few brief, awkward phone calls, that always seem to end with me saying I’m not ready yet.
Seeing him now, I realize that I am. Ready. Whether I want to be or not.
The first thing I notice when he gets out of the truck is that his hair is short. Practically a buzz cut. He gets it cut like that once every year. Every year? Both years that I’ve known him. For all the rest of the years, I have nothing to go on except his word. He looks left, then right, then jogs across the street, up on the porch. His hand is already raised to knock when he looks through the screen door and sees me on the couch.
“Hi,” he says.
“You didn’t call.”
“I didn’t feel like hearing you say you weren’t ready. Can I come in?”
His old blue T-shirt is faded and threadbare around the neck, his jeans are worn smooth over his thighs. If you didn’t look too closely, he could be twenty years old. Even from here to the door I can smell him. Soap and water, an after-work shower.
“You look like a man who needs a beer.”
His grin comes straight to me, like a match on a trail of gunpowder. “I’ll get it. Sit still.” He heads for the kitchen. “What do you want?”
Excellent question.
“I think there’s an open bottle of sauvignon blanc in there. If not, I’ll have a beer.”
He locates everything in the kitchen without much effort. I hear the clink of a glass on the counter, the hiss of carbon dioxide escaping as he pops the bottle cap on the beer. He hands me my wine and sits down on the sofa, close to me, but not too close. Now I can see the faint line on his forehead where the baseball cap rests. I want to reach up and put my fingertips on that little place at his hairline where the hair grows back instead of forward. But I swear I’ll chew my hand off first.
I take a sip of the cold wine, focus on his fingerprints in the condensation. “I hear you’re working for Josh.”
He nods. “He’s got a lot of rentals—”
“I know. I’ve lived in two of them.”
He ignores my snappishness. “Some of them he’s rehabbing. Some just need routine maintenance. I’ve been doing a little of both.”
“Where are you living?”
“Charleston Arms. Furnished rooms to let. Hourly, daily, and weekly rates available.”
“It’s a flophouse.”
The corners of his eyes crinkle. “Correct. I am flopping there. The Alexis was booked up.” He takes a long drink of beer and sets the bottle on the floor.
“Don’t kick it over. I can’t afford to pay for having the carpet cleaned.”
“If I kick it over, I’ll pay to have the carpet cleaned.”
I look at him sideways. “Why are you in such an obnoxiously good mood?”
“I’m in an obnoxiously good mood because I’m here, sitting next to you on your couch, drinking a beer after a hard day’s work. You’re in a bad mood because I’m here sitting next to you on your couch, and you want to be in a good mood, but you won’t let yourself.”
I glare at him. “How about I’m in a bad mood because I’ve lost my bakery and I’m broke and I have to go back to L.A. and go to court with my ex-husband and his new wife and fight about money and I don’t know what I’m going to do after that.”
He turns sideways to face me, his arm resting on the back of the couch, suspiciously close to my shoulder. “Those are all legitimate and weighty concerns. Nevertheless, I’m sticking with my original theory. You’re in a bad mood because you won’t let yourself be in a good mood. Because I’m here.”
When I look over at him, he’s wearing that sweetly serious expression I remember so well. I hate it when he’s right.
“Can we just sort of…talk?” His slightly embarrassed look tells me that the irony of the situation isn’t lost on him.
I lace my fingers together, resting my hands on my stomach. “Mac, this is so hard for me. I feel…I don’t even know how to explain how I feel. It’s a tightness, like I’ve got a grip on myself and I can’t loosen it even a little, because if I do, everything goes.”
“I probably know more about that feeling than you think.” A pause. “How about this: I’ll talk. You listen.”
“That would make for an interesting change.”
He breathes in, very slowly. “I’m not consciously trying to keep things from you, you know. It’s just
that talking about myself, my feelings—I think it goes against my most basic nature, and second, I never really had any experience of it growing up. You were close to your father, right? And you had your mother, too. I know your relationship with her wasn’t always easy, but at least she was there. And for most of your life, you’ve had CM. My dad was gone even before he died—”
“What was his name?”
“Dennis. After he died, Suzanne was never all there, either. And then Kevin…”
“But you had friends, didn’t you? From school or—”
“Sure, but you know how guys are. They don’t have the kind of friendships women do. Especially at that age. We played sports, drank beer. A meaningful conversation for us would have been about cars or the possibility of getting a copy of the history test or lying about how far we got with some girl.”
The breeze filtering through the screen door is getting cooler as the sun disappears. It feels good on my bare legs.
“I guess the closest friends I’ve had were Nick Hatcher and those guys I climbed with. And even then, it wasn’t a talking thing. It was based on our shared love of rocks, and it stuck because of what we went through together. I know you don’t think I ever tell you anything, but, believe me, I’ve talked more to you than I have to anyone in…a long time.”
“You mean since Gillian?”
He shakes his head. “There wasn’t a whole lot of talking going on there, either.”
“Whose choice was that?”
“It wasn’t a choice. It just was what it was. I liked her as a person, and I think she liked me, but the relationship was physical. She really wasn’t into conversation.”
“Well, I am.” I lean my head back and close my eyes.
“I can’t promise that I’ll always blurt out what I’m thinking and how I feel. But I can promise that I’ll try.” He waits a few seconds. “I want to try.”
I want to look at him, but I can’t. My eyelids refuse to open, the same way they do when you try to look directly at the sun. But I sense him there, the heat of him, the displacement of air when he moves, the cool current of his breath.
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