The Storyteller

by Jodi Picoult

  Mr. Weber slips the loop of the leash over his wrist and stands. "I am keeping you from going home," he says apologetically to Mary.

  "Not at all. I enjoy the company." She glances down at the old man's mug, which is still three-quarters full.

  I don't know what makes me say what I say. After all, I have plenty to do. But it has started to pour now, a torrential sheet of rain. The only vehicles in the lot are Mary's Harley and Rocco's Prius, which means Mr. Weber is either walking home or waiting for the bus. "You can stay until Advanced Transit shows up," I tell him.

  "Oh, no," Mr. Weber says. "This will be an imposition."

  "I insist," Mary seconds.

  He nods in gratitude and sits down again. As he cups his hands around the coffee mug, Eva stretches out over his left foot and closes her eyes.

  "Have a nice night," Mary says to me. "Bake your little heart out."

  But instead of staying with Mr. Weber, I follow Mary into the back room, where she keeps her biker rain gear. "I'm not cleaning up after him."

  "Okay," Mary says, pausing in the middle of pulling on her chaps.

  "I don't do customers." In fact when I stumble out of the bakery at 7:00 a.m. and see the shop filled with businessmen buying bagels and housewives slipping wheat loaves into their recycled grocery bags, I am always a little surprised to remember there is a world outside my industrial kitchen. I imagine it's the way a patient who's flatlined must feel when he is shocked back into a heartbeat and thrown into the fuss and bustle of life--too much information and sensory overload.

  "You invited him to stay," Mary reminds me.

  "I don't know anything about him. What if he tries to rob us? Or worse?"

  "Sage, he's over ninety. Do you think he's going to cut your throat with his dentures?" Mary shakes her head. "Josef Weber is as close as you can get to being canonized while you're still alive. Everyone in Westerbrook knows him--he used to coach kids' baseball; he organized the cleanup of Riverhead Park; he taught German at the high school for a zillion years. He's everyone's adoptive, cuddly grandfather. I don't think he's going to sneak into the kitchen and stab you with a bread knife while your back is turned."

  "I've never heard of him," I murmur.

  "That's because you live under a rock," Mary says.

  "Or in a kitchen." When you sleep all day and work all night, you don't have time for things like newspapers or television. It was three days before I heard that Osama bin Laden had been killed.

  "Good night." She gives me a quick hug. "Josef's harmless. Really. The worst he could do is talk you to death."

  I watch her open the rear door of the bakery. She ducks at the onslaught of driving rain and waves without looking back. I close the door behind her and lock it.

  By the time I return to the bakery's dining room, Mr. Weber's mug is empty and the dog is on his lap. "Sorry," I say. "Work stuff."

  "You don't have to entertain me. I know you have much to do."

  I have a hundred loaves to shape, bagels to boil, bialys to fill. Yes, you could say I'm busy. But to my surprise I hear myself say, "It can wait a few minutes."

  Mr. Weber gestures to the chair Mary had occupied. "Then please. Sit."

  I do, but I check my watch. My timer will go off in three minutes, then I will have to go back into the kitchen. "So," I say. "I guess we're in for some weather."

  "We are always in for some weather," Mr. Weber replies. His words sound as if he is biting them off a string: precise, clipped. "Tonight however we are in for some bad weather." He glances up at me. "What brought you to the grief group?"

  My gaze locks on his. There is a rule that, at group, we are not pressed to share if we're not ready. Certainly Mr. Weber hasn't been ready; it seems rude that he'd ask someone else to do what he himself isn't willing to do. But then again, we aren't at group.

  "My mother," I say, and tell him what I've told everyone else there. "Cancer."

  He nods in sympathy. "I am sorry for your loss," he says stiffly.

  "And you?" I ask.

  He shakes his head. "Too many to count."

  I don't even know how to respond to that. My grandma is always talking about how at her age, her friends are dropping like flies. I imagine for Mr. Weber, the same is true.

  "You have been a baker long?"

  "A few years," I answer.

  "It is an odd profession for a young woman. Not very social."

  Has he seen what I look like? "It suits me."

  "You are very good at what you do."

  "Anyone can bake bread," I say.

  "But not everyone can do it well."

  From the kitchen comes the sound of the timer buzzing; it wakes up Eva, who begins to bark. Almost simultaneously there is a sweep of approaching lights through the glass windows of the bakery as the Advanced Transit bus slows at its corner stop. "Thank you for letting me stay a bit," he says.

  "No problem, Mr. Weber."

  His face softens. "Please. Call me Josef."

  I watch him tuck Eva into his coat and open his umbrella. "Come back soon," I say, because I know Mary would want me to.

  "Tomorrow," he announces, as if we have set a date. As he walks out of the bakery he squints into the bright beams of the bus.

  In spite of what I have told Mary, I go to collect his dirty mug and plate, only to notice that Mr. Weber--Josef--has left behind the little black book he is always writing in when he sits here. It is banded with elastic.

  I grab it and run into the storm. I step right into a gigantic puddle, which soaks my clog. "Josef," I call out, my hair plastered to my head. He turns, Eva's beady little eyes poking out from between the folds of his raincoat. "You left this."

  I hold up the black book and walk toward him. "Thank you," he says, safely slipping it into his pocket. "I don't know what I would have done without it." He tips his umbrella, so that it shelters me as well.

  "Your Great American Novel?" I guess. Ever since Mary installed free WiFi at Our Daily Bread, the place has been crawling with people who intend to be published.

  He looks startled. "Oh, no. This is just a place to keep all my thoughts. They get away from me, otherwise. If I don't write down that I like your kaiser rolls, for example, I won't remember to order them the next time I come."

  "I think most people could use a book like that."

  The driver of the Advanced Transit bus honks twice. We both turn in the direction of the noise. I wince as the beams of the headlights flash across my face.

  Josef pats his pocket. "It's important to remember," he says.

  *

  One of the first things Adam told me was that I was pretty, which should have been my first clue that he was a liar.

  I met him on the worst day of my life, the day my mother died. He was the funeral director my sister Pepper contacted. I have a vague recollection of him explaining the process to us, and showing us the different kinds of caskets. But the first time I really noticed him was when I made a scene at my mother's service.

  My sisters and I all knew my mother's favorite song had been "Somewhere over the Rainbow." Pepper and Saffron had wanted to hire a professional to sing it, but I had other plans. It wasn't just the song my mother had loved, it was one particular rendition of it. And I'd promised my mother that Judy Garland would sing at her funeral.

  "News flash, Sage," said Pepper. "Judy Garland isn't taking bookings these days, unless you're a medium."

  In the end, my sisters went along with what I wanted--mostly because I framed this as one of Mom's dying wishes. It was my job to give the CD to the funeral director--to Adam. I downloaded the song from the Wizard of Oz soundtrack on iTunes. As the service began, he played it over the speaker system.

  Unfortunately it wasn't "Somewhere over the Rainbow." It was the Munchkins, performing "Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead."

  Pepper burst into tears. Saffron had to leave the service, she was so upset.

  Me, I started to giggle.

  I don't know why. It just s
purted out of me, like a shower of sparks. And suddenly every single person in that room was staring at me, with the angry red lines bisecting my face and the inappropriate laughter fizzing out of my mouth.

  "Oh my God, Sage," Pepper hissed. "How could you?"

  Feeling panicked, cornered, I stood up from the front pew, took two steps, and passed out.

  I came to in Adam's office. He was kneeling next to the couch and he had a damp washcloth in his hand, which he was pressing right against my scar. Immediately, I curled away from him, covering the left side of my face with my hand. "You know," he said, as if we were in the middle of a conversation, "in my line of work, there aren't any secrets. I know who's had plastic surgery, and who's survived a mastectomy. I know who had their appendix out and who had surgery for a double hernia. The person may have a scar, but it also means they have a story. And besides," he said, "that wasn't what I noticed when I first saw you."

  "Yeah, right."

  He put his hand on my shoulder. "I noticed," he said, "that you were pretty."

  He had sandy hair and honey-brown eyes. His palm was warm against my skin. I had never been beautiful, not before everything happened, and certainly not after. I shook my head, clearing it. "I didn't eat anything this morning . . ." I said. "I have to get back out there--"

  "Relax. I suggested that we take a fifteen-minute break before we start up again." Adam hesitated. "Maybe you'd like to borrow a playlist from my iPod instead."

  "I could have sworn I downloaded the right song. My sisters hate me."

  "I've seen worse," Adam replied.

  "I doubt it."

  "I once watched a drunk mistress climb into a coffin with the deceased, until the wife dragged her away and knocked her out cold."

  My eyes widened. "For real?"

  "Yeah. So this . . . ?" He shrugged. "Small potatoes."

  "But I laughed."

  "Lots of people laugh at funerals," Adam said. "It's because we're uncomfortable with death, and that's a reflex. Besides, I bet your mother would much rather know you were celebrating her life with a laugh than know she had you in tears."

  "My mother would have thought it was funny," I whispered.

  "There you go." Adam handed me the CD in its sleeve.

  I shook my head. "You can keep it. In case Naomi Campbell becomes a client."

  Adam grinned. "I bet your mom would have thought that was funny, too," he said.

  A week after the funeral, he called me to see how I was doing. I thought this was strange on two counts--because I'd never heard of that kind of customer service from a funeral home, and because Pepper had been the one to hire him, not me. I was so touched by his concern that I baked him a quick babka and took it to the funeral home one day on my way home from work. I'd hoped to drop it off without running into him, but as it turned out, he was there.

  He asked me if I had time for coffee.

  You should know that even that day, he was wearing his wedding ring. In other words, I knew what I was getting into. My only defense is that I never expected to be adored by a man, not after what had happened to me, and yet here was Adam--attractive and successful--doing just that. Every fiber of morality in me that said Adam belonged to someone else was being countermanded by the quiet whisper in my head: Beggars can't be choosers; take what you can get; who else would ever love someone like you?

  I knew it was wrong to get involved with a married man, but that didn't stop me from falling in love with him, or wishing he would fall in love with me. I had resigned myself to living alone, working alone, being alone for the rest of my life. Even if I had found someone who professed not to care about the weird puckering on the left side of my face, how would I ever know if he loved me, or pitied me? They looked so similar, and I had never been very good at reading people. The relationship between Adam and me was secretive, kept behind closed doors. In other words, it was squarely in my comfort zone.

  Before you go and say it's creepy to let someone who's been embalming people touch you, let me tell you how wrong you are. Anyone who's died--my mother included--would be lucky to have that last touch be as gentle as Adam's. I sometimes think that because he spends so much time with the dead, he is the only person who really appreciates the marvel of a living body. When we make love, he lingers over the pulse of my carotid, at my wrist, behind my knees--the spots where my blood beats.

  On the days when Adam comes to my place, I sacrifice an hour or two of sleep in order to be with him. He can pretty much sneak away anytime, thanks to the nature of his business, which requires him to be on call 24/7. It's also why his wife hasn't found it suspicious when he disappears.

  "I think Shannon knows," Adam says today, when I am lying in his arms.

  "Really?" I try to ignore how this makes me feel, as if I am at the top of the roller coaster hill, and I can no longer see the oncoming track.

  "There was a new bumper sticker on my car this morning. It says I MY WIFE."

  "How do you know she put it there?"

  "Because I didn't," Adam says.

  I consider this for a moment. "The bumper sticker might not be sarcastic. It could just be blissfully ignorant."

  Adam married his high school girlfriend, whom he'd dated through college. The funeral home where he works is his wife's family business and has been for fifty years. At least twice a week he tells me he is going to leave Shannon, but I know this isn't true. First, he'd be walking away from his career. Second, it is not just Shannon he'd be leaving, but also Grace and Bryan, his twins. When he talks about them, his voice sounds different. It sounds the way I hope it sounds when he talks about me.

  He probably doesn't talk about me, though. I mean, who would he tell that he's having an affair? The only person I've told is Mary, and in spite of the fact that we are both at fault for getting involved, she acts as if he was the one to seduce me.

  "Let's go away this weekend," I suggest.

  On Sundays, I don't work; the bakery is closed on Mondays. We could disappear for twenty-four glorious hours, instead of hiding in my bedroom with the shades drawn against the sunlight and his car--with its new bumper sticker--parked around the corner at a Chinese restaurant.

  Once Shannon came into the bakery. I saw her through the open window between the kitchen and the shop. I knew it was her, because I've seen pictures on Adam's Facebook page. I was certain she had come to ream me out, but she just bought some pumpernickel rolls and left. Afterward, Mary found me sitting on the floor of the kitchen, weak with relief. When I told her about Adam, she asked me one question: Do you love him?

  Yes, I told her.

  No you don't, Mary said. You love that he needs to hide as much as you do.

  Adam's fingers graze my scar. Even after all this time, although it's not medically possible, the skin tingles. "You want to go away," he repeats. "You want to walk down the street in broad daylight with me, so everyone can see us together."

  When he puts it like that, I realize it's not what I want at all. I want to squirrel away with him behind the closed doors of a luxury hotel in the White Mountains, or in a cottage in Montana. But I don't want him to be right, so I say, "Maybe I do."

  "Okay," Adam says, twisting my curls around his fingers. "The Maldives."

  I come up on an elbow. "I'm being serious."

  Adam looks at me. "Sage," he says, "you won't even look in a mirror."

  "I Googled Southwest flights. For forty-nine dollars we could get to Kansas City."

  Adam strokes his finger down the xylophone of my rib cage. "Why would we want to go to Kansas City?"

  I push his hand away. "Stop distracting me," I say. "Because it's not here."

  He rolls on top of me. "Book the flights."

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  "What if you're paged?" I ask.

  "They're not going to get any deader if they have to wait," Adam points out.

  My heart starts to beat erratically. It's tantalizing, this thought of going public. If I walk arou
nd holding the hand of a handsome man who obviously wants to be with me, does that make me normal, by association? "What are you going to tell Shannon?"

  "That I'm crazy about you."

  I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I'd met Adam when I was younger. We went to the same high school, but ten years apart. We both wound up back in our hometown. We work alone, at odd hours, doing jobs most ordinary people would never consider for a career.

  "That I can't stop thinking about you," Adam adds, his teeth raking my earlobe. "That I'm hopelessly in love."

  I have to say, the thing I adore most about Adam is exactly what's keeping him from being with me all the time: that when he loves you, he loves you unerringly, completely, overwhelmingly. It's how he feels about his twins, which is why he is home every night to hear how the biology test went for Grace or to see Bryan score the first home run of the baseball season.

  "Do you know Josef Weber?" I ask, suddenly remembering what Mary said.

  Adam rolls onto his back. "I'm hopelessly in love," he repeats. "Do you know Josef Weber? Yeah, that's a normal response . . ."

  "I think he worked at the high school? He taught German."

  "The twins take French . . ." Suddenly he snaps his fingers. "He was a Little League umpire. I think Bryan was six or seven at the time. I remember thinking that the guy must have been pushing ninety even back then, and that the rec department was off its rocker, but it turned out he was pretty damn spry."

  "What do you know about him?" I ask, turning on my side.

  Adam folds his arms around me. "Weber? He was a nice guy. He knew the game backward and forward and he never made a bad call. That's all I remember. Why?"

  A smile plays over my face. "I'm leaving you for him."

  He kisses me, slow and lovely. "Is there anything I can do to change your mind?"

  "I'm sure you'll think of something," I say, and I wrap my arms around his neck.

  *

  In a town the size of Westerbrook, which was derived of Yankee Mayflower stock, being Jewish made my sisters and me anomalies, as different from our classmates as if our skin happened to be bright blue. "Rounding out the bell curve," my father used to say, when I asked him why we had to stop eating bread for a week roughly the same time everyone else in my school was bringing hard-boiled Easter eggs in their lunch boxes. I wasn't picked on--to the contrary, when our elementary school teachers taught holiday alternatives to Christmas, I became a virtual celebrity, along with Julius, the only African-American kid in my school, whose grandmother celebrated Kwanzaa. I went to Hebrew school because my sisters did, but when the time came to be bat mitzvahed, I begged to drop out. When I wasn't allowed, I went on a hunger strike. It was enough that my family didn't match other families; I had no desire to call attention to myself any more than I had to.