Baker's Blues

by Judith Ryan Hendricks

  Sounds lovely, except my body doesn’t work that way. Too many years of baker’s hours. Eating at 11 pm might be chic, but it gives me indigestion. And hanging around the café smacks of being the flavor of the month. The chef’s girlfriend, just like in Seattle I was the bartender’s girlfriend. He doesn’t really get that.

  Every afternoon when he goes to the café he says, “See you tonight?”

  Every day I remind myself that I have options. What if just once I said no. I could stay home and read. Watch a movie. Do my nails. Go to bed early. Hmmm. Not quite as compelling as watching Alex cook, eating the amazing dinner he makes for us and polishing off the vin du jour while we do the dishes…and then…well, then comes the part I’ve been waiting for all day while pretending to think about other stuff. The part where he looks at me and holds me and does interesting things with his hands and his mouth, things that make me feel like a lamp that’s been unplugged all day, waiting for a jolt of electric current.

  One night when I’m lying in his bed, completely spent, watching the moonlight through the blinds that we forgot to close, I suddenly remember the risqué parody two women performed at a party a few years ago—a riff on an old Arlo Guthrie song—You Can Get Anything You Want at Alex’s Restaurant. Something about it is vaguely disturbing, but before I can decide what it is, I’m asleep.

  “Let’s go out for breakfast,” he says in the morning.

  This is a departure from the norm, because he enjoys cooking breakfast. It’s the one thing he never gets to do at the café.

  Groggy and vaguely grouchy, I roll out of bed, slip on my jeans and a cotton turtleneck. He takes me to Evelene’s, a strange choice, I think, as we scoot into the Naugahyde booth. The coffee is okay, nothing to write home about, and the case is full of Danish drizzled with sticky white icing, shrink wrapped muffins, and scones that appear to be huge globs of overworked dough.

  The only thing that looks appealing are the sticky buns, which we both order. They’re surprisingly good, and the caramel has that true burnt sugar edge, not like those sugary blocks a lot of places melt in the microwave.

  “Alex, hi there.” A pretty woman in a denim jumper wanders out of the kitchen and heads for our table, pulling a scarf off her dark hair. “How’s it going?”

  He pulls up a chair for her. “Evie, this is my friend, Wyn Morrison.” She takes my hand in her warm, damp one. The hand of somebody who cooks for a living. She looks at the half eaten roll on my plate. “Evie Campbell. Everything okay?”

  “Great.” I smile. “It’s just so huge. I’m trying to pace myself.”

  “How’s Bea?” Alex asks.

  “Oh, you know…” She sighs. “Good days and bad days.” She looks at me. “My mom. She’s kind of losing the plot, if you know what I mean. I keep trying to get her to go to the doctor, but she’s stalling. I think she’s afraid of what they’re going to tell her. She lives on Lopez. All by herself, and I worry about her. When I try to talk to her, she makes a joke out of it. Says things like, well I guess you’ll be locking me in the attic here pretty soon.”

  “Bea used to own this place,” Alex says.

  “So it’s been handed down from mother to daughter,” Evie says. “I hate to give it up, but she isn’t about to leave her place, so one of these days I’m probably going to have to move over there.”

  Alex says, “Wyn’s a baker, too. She owns a great boulangerie in L.A.. They do the artisan type breads. I’ve been using her bread at the café.”

  “Oh, you’re the Bread Maven! Gosh, it’s great to finally meet you. I used to think that might be good here—the rustic type breads,” Evie says. “There’s only two places on the island you could call bakeries—us and Village House. They don’t do any kind of yeasted stuff. And we just do your basic French bread. And a whole wheat sandwich loaf. Seems like if somebody started doing really good bread it might go over. I just never got ambitious about it.”

  “I’m not sure there’s enough of a market here for bread that costs five bucks,” I say. “You’d have to be doing wholesale.”

  She shrugs. “Well, I don’t know. It does sound pricey, but you get a lot of traffic here from Seattle and Portland and California—at least in the summer. They probably wouldn’t think twice about it.”

  “Evie,” the girl at the cash register calls. “I tried to do a merchant’s discount and this thing’s locked up on me.”

  “Something to think about.” She stands up and smiles at both of us. “Nice to meet you, Wyn. Come back and see me.”

  When I’m not with Alex, I’m with Ferris.

  At first I just watched him fire the oven, then I helped him, then he watched me. Now on Friday mornings I come to the patio alone to build the warm-up fire.

  I love firing the oven in the early morning. It’s sort of like working the first shift at the bakery, but completely stripped of embellishments. No hissing espresso machine, no Vivaldi on the sound system, no sweet scent of pastry. Just the damp chill of fog, the crackling fire and the wood smoke.

  Ferris’ obsession with the fire, which at first struck me as a possible latent tendency to arson, is now totally comprehensible to me. He reminds me that sitting in front of a fireplace or around a campfire, you notice that after a while, everybody is just sort of watching the flames, mesmerized. With a wood burning oven, the effect is magnified because the fire is so much more intense, more contained.

  During the initial firing, the oven walls turn black with soot, but as the fire gets hotter, the soot burns off and the walls turn white. At about this point, the gasses sitting just below the oven’s dome become hot enough to ignite, creating a river of rolling flame that’s incredibly, hypnotically beautiful. Alex calls it the Plasma Beast, and it does seem to be alive.

  Ferris shows me how to check the oven temperature with the infrared thermometer and I graph the rise, and then the fall when the fire’s burned down. I learn how long it takes the oven to equilibrate once the coals and ash are swept out. I also learn—very quickly—not to grab the handle of the metal bucket that contains the coals and ash I’ve just swept out. And then I begin to work out how to coordinate the readiness of dough and oven.

  I sort of assumed that once I learned to build the fire and manage the oven, I’d be ready to start baking wonderful bread, but this is not the case. In fact, my first baking attempt produces six one-pound charcoal briquettes, an object lesson in the physics of brick oven baking.

  In an electric or gas oven, bread is essentially baked by heated air circulating around it. In a wood fired oven bread is baked by heated air and by radiant heat from hearth, walls and dome, all of which are upwards of fifty degrees hotter than the heated air. This means a loaf of bread that would take fifty minutes to an hour to bake in a conventional oven, is done after about twenty minutes in a properly fired wood oven. Done at twenty, overdone at thirty, napalmed at anything longer.

  Alex studies them, folds his arms and says, “So much for illiterate peasants with no internet access.”

  The next batch looks better, but the loaves are doughy inside. The third try yields something almost edible. By the following week, baking every morning, I bring forth some ciabatta that Alex is willing to use in the café. It’s not my finest effort, but people go nuts over it, ripping off chewy hunks and dipping them in the golden green olive oil and sea salt Alex has started putting on all the tables.

  On the menu he calls it pain d’autrefois or bread made the old way. I prefer the literal translation, bread of another time. It evokes the smell of the fire and the mark of the oven and the rustic taste of real bread—just flour, water, yeast and salt—baked in the most primitive, elemental way.

  seventeen

  “I talked to Sarah yesterday,” Alex says.

  It’s a lazy Monday morning, and we’re lying on his couch drinking coffee and reading the remains of the Sunday papers.

  “When did she get back from Houston?”

  He folds the paper and sets it on the coffee table. �
��She’s not.”

  I look up. “What do you mean—she’s still there?”

  “They found cancer in her other breast.”

  “Oh, no.” I sit up. “What did she say? How did she sound?”

  “She didn’t actually say too much. Just that she’d be going through chemo again. The worst part is her insurance company dumped her.”

  “How can they do that?”

  He shrugs. “I guess she reached their limits of coverage. She wanted to know if I could find a real estate broker and have them get in touch with her. Looks like she’s going to have to sell her place.”

  “Shit. Those assholes.” I stand up, then sit down again. “Surely there’s some way to do this without selling her house.”

  “Probably not.”

  “How can that happen? How can they just cut you off? What the hell is wrong with our goddamn health care system? Why can’t we do it like every other civilized country? This is insane.”

  “All true,” he says. “But it doesn’t change anything for Sarah.”

  “That’s why she didn’t answer my email.”

  We sit there for a while, not talking.

  Then I ask, “Did you know Bill? Her husband?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He’s an engineer. Kind of quiet. Seems like a good guy.”

  Then he notices I’m still watching him.

  “What do you want me to say? That he’s an asshole because he left?”

  “I don’t want you say anything in particular. I was just wondering—”

  “It’s nobody’s business but theirs,” he says abruptly.

  I pick up the Style section of the paper and stare at it till the words blur.

  He takes his cup to the kitchen. “You want some coffee?” he calls back.

  “No. Thank you.”

  When he comes back he doesn’t sit down. He stands beside the couch for a minute, then he takes the paper out of my hands and pulls me to my feet. He leads me through the kitchen, out the French doors to the small deck and stands behind me at the rail, arms around my shoulders.

  By island standards the term “view” implies water, or at least mountains, so technically Alex has no view—just a sunny slope where meadow grass ripples hypnotically in the wind and redwing blackbirds stand sentinel on fence posts. In the distance, a line of dark clouds spills over the top of the cool, green forest.

  “Maybe we’ll get some rain tonight,” I say.

  “Listen…Bill did the wrong thing, in my opinion. But he did some other things right. He’s been paying her insurance. He gave her the title to the house, free and clear.”

  “Good for him. But what about emotional—I mean, didn’t he care? Didn’t he want to hold her hand when she was sad or scared? Didn’t he—”

  “No. The answer to that is he didn’t.” He moves to stand beside me and brushes some hair away from my eyes. “I think everybody knows on some level what they can handle. I think Bill loved Sarah, and he just couldn’t deal with what was happening. And with what he was afraid was going to happen. Does that make him a bastard? I don’t know.”

  The following week we take the Dancer out. I’ve actually come to enjoy sailing with him, mainly because he doesn’t ask me to do anything other than tie off an occasional line. It amuses me that he’s as much a control freak as I am, doesn’t like anybody messing with his stuff. It makes me wonder how in the world he could sail with Mac. Maybe guys have some genetically encoded radar that tells them how far they can go without stepping in each other’s territory. Some line that’s invisible to women.

  We sail out to one of the tiny, uninhabited islands just offshore with the picnic he’s packed—grilled chicken sandwiches on my focaccia with pesto aioli, provolone, and roasted red peppers. My favorite Kettle blue corn chips and a wonderful Oregon dry Riesling.

  Afterwards, when he opens the thermos of coffee, I reach in my day pack and pull out a small plastic bag.

  “What’s that?”

  “Just a couple of butter tarts.”

  His eyes light up. “When did you have time to do that?”

  “The fact is I’ve got nothing but time.” I look past him, out to the blue open water and tiny dots of islands beyond. “I guess the free ride’s about over.”

  He frowns. “Which means what?”

  “It means I need to go home. Get back to work. Somebody else is running my business, and that’s not good for me or fair to her. Beside, she’s leaving in January.”

  “I’ve got a better idea.” He finishes the butter tart, wipes his hands on a napkin and takes a swig of coffee. “Stay here.”

  “Alex, I have to go back to work.”

  “Stay here and work.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Making bread. At the café. I’ll buy from you and you can sell at Evie’s.”

  “Why would she want to sell my bread?”

  “So you could see if there’s a market for it here, and if there is, you could buy her shop.”

  “I can’t buy her shop. I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “You could if you sold your place in L.A.”

  I don’t know if the goosebumps springing up on my arms are from the sudden breeze or from the fact that he’s just articulated something that’s probably been lurking unformed in the back of my mind. It’s a few minutes before I can trust my voice.

  “Alex, how would you feel about selling Rafferty’s and moving down to L.A. and opening up a new place?”

  He smiles a rueful half smile. “I really wanted it to be a good idea.”

  “It is a good idea, it’s just…”

  “Don’t say no yet.” His voice is as quiet as I’ve ever heard it. “Think about it a little bit first. Anyway, you don’t have to leave yet.”

  This is the closest we’ve ever come to talking about the “situation.”

  I say, “The week before Thanksgiving is the start of our busiest—”

  “You’ll be back by then. Look, I’m closing the café November 1. We could go up to Vancouver for a few days. We could see a play. I’ll take you to a couple of my favorite restaurants. There’s a great little B & B there, right near Stanley Park. We can do some Christmas shopping—”

  “It sounds perfect, but—”

  “I know you have to go home. You say you might not come back. I don’t believe that, but just in case…Let’s do this one thing. Then we’ll just deal with whatever happens after that. Okay?”

  He looks straight into my eyes and runs his index finger down the length of my arm, producing another set of goosebumps for a whole different reason.

  By the time we get back into the berth at Brandt’s Landing, the wind is gusting and dark clouds are gathering to the west. I run between the dock and the car carrying gear, jackets, trash and the picnic leftovers while he takes in the sails and secures the boat. It’s sprinkling as we come into the village. Only a few businesses are open and he drives slowly through the empty streets.

  I’m lost in a memory of Seattle, rainy afternoons spent at Mac’s apartment listening to music, reading, making love. Is this just the way things go? You walk and laugh and touch and argue and go to movies and drink coffee and you stare at each other and wonder how you ever existed without this other person…and this is how it ends up?

  “You want to get a movie?” Alex’s voice draws me back through that tunnel into the present.

  “Okay.”

  He pulls into the Island Market parking lot and turns off the car. We sit there for a minute, listening to the rain, watching the windows fog up.

  “Any preferences?”

  “No, get whatever you want.”

  “So…RoboCop?”

  I attempt a laugh. “Maybe something more culturally enriching.”

  He’s looking straight ahead. “Wyn, I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Remember a long time ago when I told you sometimes I see what I’m doing, but I just b
lunder on through and fuck everything up?”

  “You didn’t fuck anything up.” I smile. “And it wasn’t a long time ago. Fifth of July, if my memory serves me.”

  “Just seems like a long time, I guess. In a good way.”

  “In the best possible way,” I say.

  He gets out of the car.

  In a few minutes he’s back, tossing a DVD of The Big Chill in my lap. “How’s that?”

  “You did good.”

  “Hey, I had an idea. About Sarah.” He shuts the car door. “I was standing there looking at the movies and I just thought, shit…why not do a fund raiser. At the café.”

  “That’s a really great idea.”

  “I usually have a Halloween party, so this year, it’ll just be a really big one, and all the proceeds go to Sarah.” He looks over at me. “We’ll have to push our Vancouver trip back a day.”

  “That’s okay.”

  Gears I don’t even recall having are creaking to rusty life in my head.

  We sit in his kitchen drinking wine, making notes and lists for the party, The Big Chill at least temporarily forgotten.

  “Six weeks isn’t much time to make this happen,” I say.

  He looks surprised. “Why not? What do we need to do besides plan the menu, order the food, hire some extra help and send out invitations?”

  I can’t help laughing. “Oh, Alex…you’re obviously an event virgin.”

  “I do stuff like this all the time.”

  “Fund raisers? Benefits?”

  “No…but, you know…parties.”

  “Big difference. Hand me that ruler.” I start marking off columns and lines on my piece of paper. “In my former career as an executive wife, I was on all kinds of committees to raise money for various good causes. Most people have no idea what goes into planning one of these things.”

  “Wyn, this is Orcas, not L.A.…”

  “Are you saying you want to give Sarah a check for two hundred dollars? Two-fifty? Because if you just throw a nice party and ask people to kick in a few bucks, that’s about what you’re going to get.”