I sit up and reach for the phone, punch in the number of the direct line to my desk
“This is Tyler.”
“Hey, Ty. It’s me.”
“Hi, me. How are you?”
“Okay. Listen, I was wondering…what would you say if I didn’t come home?”
“Ever?”
“No, doofus, not ‘ever.’ Tomorrow. I just don’t think I’m ready—”
“Yay!”
“I can come home now if you need me, it’s just—”
“Perhaps you didn’t hear me? I said ‘Yay!’”
“I’m trying to have a serious discussion here. How’s everything going?”
“Fine. In fact I’m thinking of pulling the fire alarm just to liven things up a little.”
“How’s traffic?”
“We’re busy. You want the numbers?”
“Can you email them to me?”
“I can do that. I’ll send you the month to date.”
“What else is going on?”
“Not too much. I hired a new dishwasher.”
“What happened to Juan?”
“He said he had to go get his teeth fixed. In Guadalajara. And what’s her face… from the bookstore…”
“Lorna?”
“Right. They want to do a book signing over here for some cookbook author. They want us to make some of her recipes. It’s in September. I told her okay.”
“That’s good.” A short pause while I chew on my lower lip. “I don’t know…maybe I should just come home.”
“Why?”
“I feel sort of guilty. Like I shouldn’t be here having a good time while other people are doing my work.”
“Right. You should be here, having a miserable time, while other people are doing your work.”
“Ty…”
“Oh, come on. It’s not like we’re doing you a favor. We work here. You pay us, remember? Not nearly enough, of course…I’m worried about you,” she says. “You don’t usually feel the need to ask my permission to do things.”
“It’s just that I feel like I’ve dumped a lot of responsibility on you. I need to be sure you’re okay with that.”
“After all this time, don’t you think I’d tell you if I wasn’t? I hope you’re not going to start calling me every week to ask if you can stay another week. Stay as long as you want. The only permission you need to get is your own.”
“Okay, thanks for the input.”
“Please stop worrying about the Maven. Why don’t you worry about famine in Africa. Or the economy. Or space junk falling out of the sky.”
I hear another voice in the background, then she says, “Gotta go check in the Marigold delivery. I’ll email you that stuff tonight.”
Most people on the island use the tennis courts at Buck Park, but there’s one behind Smuggler’s Cove, a low-key resort on the north shore. Technically you have to be staying in one of the villas to use the pool or court, but the manager is a friend of Alex’s and Mac met him a few years ago and played tennis with him. He said we could just come use it if none of the guests were playing.
I find my way over there early on the morning of July 5th, before anyone else can claim the court.
My old wooden racquet needs re-stringing and the grip is slick from long hours in my sweaty hand. The can of balls, however, is brand new, left over from the last time Richard and my mother visited us here.
It takes a while to get into the rhythm, to adjust to the backboard’s return and the ball’s unpredictable bounces off cracks in the cement. Somewhere just outside my peripheral vision, my father leans against the fence, tan and smiling in his tennis whites. Watch the ball, Wyn. Don’t look where you want it to go; look where it is.
Mac and I used to hit without keeping score, just long, intense rallies that I found simultaneously energizing and calming. Today it’s a mere twenty minutes till I’m out of breath and dripping with sweat, knees creaking in protest, but I feel better. My mind is a complete and lovely blank.
I’m putting the balls back in the can when a voice that is definitely not my father’s says,
“You giving up baking to go out for the women’s tour?”
I use my racquet to flip out some old balls trapped in the net. “I was just working out some…negativity.”
Alex bursts out laughing. “You can take the girl out of L.A.…”
The balls are dead, so I toss them into a rusted trash can and give him an annoyed look, which he ignores.
“I thought you were going home Friday.”
“Changed my mind.” I blot my face with an old blue bandana.
“You look like a woman who could use a beer.”
I look at my watch. It’s 11:15 AM.
“You’re on vacation, remember?”
“Thanks, but I can’t. I’ve got things to do.”
“Like what? Clean out the lint trap? Come on, let’s put this stuff in your car and go sit on the Dancer.”
Actually a cold beer sounds pretty good.
Private Dancer is a thirty-foot sloop. Which means it has a single mast. That’s about all I know or care to know about it. He keeps it at Brandt’s Landing, a long, narrow cut between the villas and the airport runway with just enough room for three docks and a launch ramp. It’s not a particularly picturesque setting like Rosario or Deer Harbor, but it’s a coveted spot for locals because it’s a safe shelter against the winter storms that blow down from the North…or so I remember him saying once. People wave from other boats or call out greetings as we walk along the wooden dock, and it makes me feel weird. I duck my head, pretending to look for something in my shoulder bag.
“What are you looking for?” he says.
“Nothing. My sunglasses…”
“They’re on your head.” He climbs aboard first and then holds out his hand to me. Tide’s in,” he says. “Want to take her out for a while?”
“Oh…no, I don’t think so. I’m…”
His eyes crinkle just slightly. “That’s okay. If I thought you trusted me implicitly, I’d feel like I was losing my edge.”
I sit on the deck, my back against the wheel housing. The breeze helps the late morning sun dry the sweat on my face. Snatches of conversation, laughter, the hum of motors as boats leave their slips, chug out into open water. I watch one just beyond the marina; sails opening to catch the wind like huge wings. For a minute, I’m tempted to change my mind about going out.
He disappears below and comes back with two beers. The bottle is icy and I take a long swallow.
“Did you see the fireworks?” he asks.
“No. I didn’t feel like fighting the crowd.”
He laughs. “Compared to what you’re used to, it wasn’t much of a crowd. Shit, if I’d known you were here, you could’ve come to the party at the café.”
“That’s okay. I had a relaxing evening on my own little deck.” And then I hear my voice saying, “I was actually going to call you this afternoon…I was wondering if maybe you still wanted me to make some bread for the café.”
He’s almost as surprised as I am. “Absolutely. What made you change your mind? Free dinners? My company? I hope it wasn’t the 401K and health insurance.”
“None of the above. It’s just that ever since I taught that class, I’ve been waking up at 3 AM wanting to work.”
“Does that mean you’re staying for a while?”
“To be honest, I don’t know what the hell it means.”
He looks at me and for a few seconds, it feels questioning, like he’s walking around, looking at different angles, scouting vulnerable places, pushing buttons, seeing what happens.
I take another swallow of beer. “Do you play tennis?”
“I play Neanderthal tennis. Every ball goes over the fence. No finesse.”
“Don’t be silly. You’re a chef. That’s all about finesse.”
“I figure you can only do a couple of things really well. I cook and I sail. That’s it for me.”
“H
ow did you end up getting into food?”
“Well…both my parents worked. My grandmother took care of us, but then she died. Since I was the oldest I was in charge of my brothers. By the time I was ten or eleven, I was sick of frozen pizza and peanut butter sandwiches.”
“So you just walked into the kitchen one day and whipped up a soufflé.”
“No. I walked into the kitchen one day and started reading my mother’s Joy of Cooking. I figured I couldn’t do any worse than she did.”
“I thought maybe you learned from her.”
“Shit, no. She was a bookkeeper. Good with numbers, but no food sense. No imagination. No passion for it. Anyway, I got interested in all the different ways you could cook the same stuff. Like chicken. Pretty soon I was making up my own recipes. By the time I was fourteen I was working after school in a restaurant. After that I never thought about doing anything else.”
“Did you go to cooking school?”
“No. I never went anywhere after high school. Just straight to the kitchen. My dad was okay with it.” He gives me a funny little grin. “To my mother, it was the same as if I said I wanted to be a hairdresser. Took her a while to get over it.”
“And your brothers? Where are they now?”
“Tommy—the middle one—he’s in New York. Making shitloads of money as a financial analyst. He was always the brainy one. Frank—the baby—he was a cop in Seattle. Killed in the line of duty, as they say.”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Some things you never—”
“What about you? What did your parents think about having a baker in the family?”
“My father died when I was 15, so I don’t know what he would have thought. But people in my family went to college. They worked in offices. They didn’t get their hands dirty. My mother…” I smile, remembering. “Of course, this was all before bread baking became sort of an artisan thing. Back then it was just manual labor. She couldn’t understand why I wanted to do something like that.’”
“And why did you?”
“I did this work/study gig in a bakery in France my junior year in college. It was mainly supposed to pay my room and board with the baker and his family while I studied French. But then, the baking, the bread…it was like…I don’t know…like someone turned on the lights. I came home at the end of the semester and went back to UCLA, but nothing was ever the same after that.”
“So you started working in a bakery?”
“No. I wasn’t brave enough. That came later.”
He leans against the gunwale and clears his throat. “Can I ask what…’negativity’ you were smashing tennis balls about? Or is it none of my business?”
“Nothing interesting. I was just in a bad mood.” I close my eyes against the sun. With only a piece of toast in my stomach the beer’s going straight to my head.
“My guess would be Mac. My next guess would be that’s why you’re here and he’s not.”
At the sound of his name, all that negativity comes rushing back on stage for an encore.
“You feel like talking about it? Sometimes it helps. Even without all the gory details.”
I don’t know why he’s interested. Or even if he’s interested. Maybe he feels sorry for me. Maybe he thinks I’ll sleep with him. At the moment I really don’t know or care and my defenses are so far down they’re around my ankles.
“It’s hard to talk about.”
“That’s okay. I just thought if you wanted to—”
“No, I mean, I can’t explain it when I don’t understand it myself. All I can tell you is things were good for a long time. And then they weren’t. Now…he’s this other person.” I bite the inside of my cheek. “And I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Sometimes there’s nothing you can do.”
“Thanks for the encouraging words.”
He shrugs. “It’s true, though. Isn’t it? Something I finally learned between marriage number two and three.”
“So what do you do—just give up?”
“The first thing you do is quit blaming yourself.”
I smile involuntarily. “CM says I think I can fix everything because I always believe I’m the one who screwed it up.”
He turns the amber bottle around, wipes the condensation on his faded T-shirt. “Mac’s been a good friend. I always felt like I could count on him, you know? When you sail with somebody, that’s important. But nothing you could tell me about him would surprise me.”
I look at him over the tops of my sunglasses. “What do you mean?”
“I mean there’s some parts of Mac that I bet nobody knows. Not even him.”
I draw my knees up and rest my forehead on them. Alex doesn’t move. Or speak. Or sigh. None of the little tics people seem to use…small sounds or movements to fill up a break in conversation. He just sits.
Finally he says, “About three years ago…you remember that time he and I sailed up to Vancouver for the boat show? We were just coming around the buoy at the entrance to the harbor. It was a great day, wind was up and we were heeled over pretty good, and he looks over at me and says, ‘So, Rafferty, are you fucking my wife?’”
The neck of the bottle slips between my fingers.
I never would have imagined Mac saying anything remotely like that, and yet I don’t doubt the truth of it. Not anymore.
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Not yet.’ We both laughed and that was the end of it.”
“Why did you tell me that?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have,” he says after a minute. “I think it’s always sort of bothered me…like your friend says…the way you take responsibility for everything.”
“Am I that bad?”
“I should talk.” He drinks the last of his beer and lays the empty bottle in a cardboard box. “You’re a lot like me, Wyn—a borderline control freak. I think it’s a requirement for the kind of work we do. You pretty much have to know what’s going on with everything 24/7. That’s good in a business, but it doesn’t always work in a relationship. Sometimes we can get people in a corner...”
“Okay.” I hand him my empty and he lays it next to his. “What do you do when you notice you’re getting somebody in a corner?”
“Depends. Sometimes I take a deep breath, step back and look at what I’m doing.” He smiles. “Other times I just blunder on through and fuck everything up.”
We both laugh then, and it’s full of recognition, one of those times when something’s understood, and so true that no words are required.
“I should go. Thanks for the beer.”
When I get to my feet I feel the movement and see it at the same time. The tide is changing and the Dancer is tugging gently at the ropes that hold her in the slip.
twelve
Alex has arranged a work station for me in the kitchen at Rafferty’s. A marble pastry slab tucked into a corner with flour bins, scale, utensils, sheet pans, loaf pans, parchment, misters, a peel—all within easy reach. His mixers—two bench Hobarts—12 and 20 quarts—look like doll furniture compared to our floor models at the bakery.
I unload my bag. A file folder of recipes and notes, one of my own aprons. A cup of my chef to use as a seed for levain. I open the file and scan the recipes I know by heart.
Oblivious to the screen door’s click, I only look up when a woman’s voice says, “Oh, hi, Wynter.”
She’s gray-haired, tall and slim, wearing a khaki shirt, jeans and work boots, carrying a colorful market basket. I know her. I just can’t think from where.
“Sarah,” she reminds me. “From the baking class. What are you doing here? Are you working for Alex?”
“Just for a week or two.” I lay down my pen. “What are you doing out so early?”
“Delivering eggs.” She lifts a pink Styrofoam egg carton out of the basket, sets it on the worktable and lays back the top to reveal a mosaic of white, ivory, brown, and a delicate shade of bl
ue-green.
I pick up a blue-green one and cradle it in my palm. “These are gorgeous. What chickens lay these?”
“Araucana.” She smiles. “Great little birds. They’re like dogs. They follow me around, jump up in my lap when I sit down…and their eggs always remind me of that Dr. Seuss book.”
The egg is warm and smooth and it rocks gently in my palm. “It feels alive.”
“That’s because it is.” She smiles. “Remember this?
“In the garden there was nothing which did not understand the wonderfulness of what was happening, the immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity of Eggs.”
“The Secret Garden! I loved that book. I haven’t thought about it in forever.”
“I re-read it every spring. It makes me happy.”
I replace the egg gently in the carton. “Do you sell at the farmer’s market?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve got enough regulars that I don’t really need to, but I love being there.” She eases herself up on a stool. “What are you making?”
“Pain de campagne…” I nod at the covered bowl. “That’s for tomorrow—and for tonight, some buttermilk dinner rolls. My grandmother’s recipe. Ferris can bake them off this afternoon.”
“Mind if I watch for awhile?”
“Feel free. It’s not very exciting.”
“Not to you, maybe. I was totally fascinated with that class you gave. There were so many things I wanted to know that I didn’t get to ask.”
“Like what?”
“For one thing, I really like whole grain bread, but I can’t get it to rise as well as the white flour stuff. Plus it seems drier. Is there any way to fix that, or is it just the nature of the beast?”
“Yes and yes.” I rip off a corner of a paper, scribble VWG on it and hand it to her. “The main reason whole wheat doesn’t rise as well as white flour is because the bran and natural oil in the flour make it impossible to get really good gluten development. One thing you can do is use half whole grain and half white bread flour. If you want to use all whole grain flour, you can add some vital wheat gluten…about a half tablespoon for each cup of flour. The dryness can be fixed with a little more water. Also you need to remember that any dough with more than half whole grains is going to absorb water more slowly, so after you mix the dough, let it rest for about thirty minutes before you knead it. That lets the moisture content even out.”
Baker's Blues Page 13