Bread Alone: A Novel

by Judith R. Hendricks

  I’m especially curious at this moment because, while my own intent becomes instantly clear, I don’t recall having given the matter any previous thought. No internal debate, no dividing a piece of paper into two columns labeled “Pros” and “Cons.” It doesn’t feel as if there’s any other recourse open to me. When you’re forced to fight, you use whatever weapons come to hand.

  I tell Elizabeth that I’ve received papers from David’s attorney, and she asks if I’m coming back to L.A.

  “I hadn’t planned to. Is that a problem?”

  “It makes things slightly more complicated, but we can work around it. What is it you like so much up there?”

  “My best friend lives here. And my mother doesn’t.”

  This is the first time I’ve heard her laugh outright. “I thought maybe it was the weather.”

  I must be starting to think like a native Northwesterner, because it irritates me the way people are always ragging on about our weather. When I don’t respond, she becomes all business again.

  “All right, Wynter, here’s what I want you to do. Read over the papers, sign them where it’s indicated. It’s pretty straightforward, but if you have any questions, call me. If I’m not here, Charlene can help you. Make photocopies of everything and start a file for yourself. Then overnight the originals to me and I’ll send you a response form to fill out. And just remember, the sooner you get things back to me, the sooner I can—”

  “How long could the whole process take? Worst-case scenario.”

  “Everything depends on how cooperative your husband and his lawyer want to be. My hope is that we can put it to bed by this time next year, but it could take two or three years. Longer if we have to go to trial.”

  “Elizabeth, I want to drag this thing out as long as we possibly can.”

  She barely hesitates. “You know, I think we can have it over fairly quickly, and still mop up the floor with him—financially speaking. But the longer it takes, the less money there will be for you as well as for him.”

  “Its not about the money. I want him to understand very clearly what it’s going to take to marry her. I want him to have a good, long time to decide if she was worth it.”

  “There’s a saying, Wynter: ‘She who seeks revenge should dig two graves, one for her victim and one for herself.’ “

  “I’m willing to accept that possibility.”

  “This isn’t the way I usually work.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m telling you up front. I’d like to work with you, and I’d rather give the money to you than to someone else. But if you don’t want to handle it, I’ll respect your decision.”

  An audible sigh. “Very well. But there are limits to what I can do.”

  I was so preoccupied in rehashing my conversation with Elizabeth when I left for work last night that I forgot to take my pillowcase full of dirty clothes to work with me, so now I have to visit Launderland in the afternoon. Kids running around like it’s a big, sudsy theme park, screaming, slopping Cokes on the floor. Mothers deep into paperback romance novels or balancing the checkbook or sketching their next tattoo.

  And Mac, bent over his notebook, oblivious to the pandemonium in progress all around him.

  I divide my clothes into three piles, carefully measure detergent, and feed in my quarters. Then I flop down in the orange molded plastic chair next to him.

  He immediately closes his notebook.

  “Nuclear secrets?”

  “Just stuff.”

  My face heats up. Maybe he has no interest whatsoever in conversation with me. What if I’m presuming too much? We had dinner once, spent an afternoon on the water. What does that mean?

  I pull out my copy of Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth.

  “Great book,” he says.

  “You’ve read it?” I don’t mean to sound astonished.

  He laughs. “Yeah. Right after I finished Vampire Lesbian Cheerleaders.”

  “I didn’t mean …” My voice sounds stiffer than cardboard. I open the book, shuffle past the introduction to the first page, where God sits on his throne, thinking.

  “I’ve never been to California,” he says. “What’s it like?”

  I look at him, first from the corner of my eye, then straight on. “It’s not like anyplace else.”

  “No place is like anyplace else,” he says. “Even the most boring, dusty hole in the middle of the prairie is different from all the other boring, dusty holes.”

  I close the book. “It’s big. A lot of it I’ve never seen.”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “Mostly L.A. The central coast. The High Sierra.”

  He turns a little bit in his chair. “Actually, I’ve been in southern California once, the L.A. airport. It looked pretty brown. What’s the central coast like?”

  I settle down, letting the chair cup my body. Memory kicks in. “It smells so good, the fog, the eucalyptus. The hills are golden all summer, green in the winter, when it rains. That’s where William Randolph Hearst built his castle …” I look at the book in my lap. “You’ll probably go there sometime. Everyone goes to California eventually.”

  “Mostly San Francisco and L.A.”

  “And that’s a good thing. Keeps them away from my spot.”

  “Where’s your spot?”

  “Pismo Beach.”

  “What’s there?”

  “Dunes. Huge sand dunes. My father used to tell me how Cecil B. DeMille had thousands of workers build an Egyptian city there for the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments. Hundred-foot walls, even a boulevard lined with statues of sphinxes and pharoahs. Then, after they finished filming, they just left it there, and now the whole thing’s buried somewhere under the sand. I always used to think I’d be walking along the ridge someday and I’d drop down and disappear into another world.”

  “Like standing on top of the ocean,” he says softly.

  He gets to his feet and starts yanking laundry out of a washer, blue jeans, flannel shirts, and dark socks in with the towels and white clothes. Typical guy. Throwing it into the nearest dryer without turning around, he says, “No, I don’t care if my underwear’s gray or if the towels get lint on my socks.”

  “I didn’t say a word.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  I open my book again.

  When the dryers stop, he hauls his stuff out, jams it into a green army duffel, and watches with obvious amusement while I fold everything and pack it carefully in the pillowcase. I turn to say good-bye, but he says, “You want a ride? I’ll try not to emit too many fluorocarbons between here and your place.”

  “Hydrocarbons.”

  He throws the duffel into the truck bed, my bag into the front seat. After two false starts, the truck grumbles to life, and we roll heavily down Queen in the afternoon gloom, Crosby, Stills and Nash on the radio.

  He turns up the volume. My breath makes a little circle of fog on the window. It reminds me of some movie where they hold a mirror in front of a guy’s mouth to see if he’s still alive. I guess I pass the test. Mac’s talking to me.

  “Sorry, I zoned out.”

  “Coming to Bailey’s tonight?”

  “I’m kind of tired.”

  “Is that a no?”

  When he turns on Fourth, a string of blinking lights draws my eye. “I can’t believe they still have their Christmas lights up.”

  He follows my gaze. “Some people have a hard time letting go of things.”

  I fold my arms. “Pure laziness.”

  “Sometimes it’s one and the same.”

  We pull up in front of the gray Victorian. He puts it in park, but doesn’t turn the engine off.

  “Been inside that place yet?” he asks.

  “It’s all locked up. I’m sure they don’t want anybody wandering around—”

  He laughs. “Somebody did a great job of socializing you.”

  My left hand tightens around the pillowcase while my right fumbles for the door ha
ndle. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “Wyn …” His eyes change color constantly, like the ocean on a cloudy day. Right now the pale irises are amber-flecked. “Listen, I know things are kind of weird for you …” Fingers drum the gearshift knob. “If you need a friend, I’m around.”

  Tim Graebel syndrome. “That’s very nice of you.”

  “No, really,” he says. “Just a friend. No expectations.”

  I watch his face. For what, I have no idea. “Okay,” I tell him. “Thanks.”

  Two weeks and one day after the wedding, my phone rings at nine in the morning and I know before I pick it up that it’s my mother.

  “Hi, honey, I hope you weren’t asleep. I can never remember when you sleep in the mornings and when you sleep at night. We got home late last night.”

  “No, I wasn’t in bed. How was Hawaii?” I assume this is proper etiquette for asking your mother about her honeymoon.

  “It was so beautiful. We had the most wonderful time.” She sounds totally blissed out.

  “Um, Mom … about the boxes …”

  “I found them. Are you sure you want to throw all those pictures away, and all your wedding cards?”

  “I’m sure. But I was talking about the other boxes. The ones with Richard’s things—”

  “Not to worry. He’s getting everything out of your room. By the time you come home for your next visit, it’ll be just like you left it.”

  “I mean the ones … in the foyer.”

  “In the foyer?” She pauses. “There aren’t any boxes in the foyer.”

  I can almost hear Rod Serling’s mellifluous baritone. “Wynter Morrison thinks she’s been on a trip to her mother’s house. But she’s been in … the Twilight Zone.”

  “Oh. I guess … I meant to put the boxes from David down there, but I must have forgotten.”

  “You’re absolutely certain you want to get rid of all that?”

  “He came over the day after the wedding. He told me he’s going to marry Kelley. I got the papers.”

  She sucks in a breath. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. That dirtbag! That—”

  I laugh. “Mom, don’t waste your breath. I’ve got a good lawyer. I’ll do okay.”

  “It’s not just the money, it’s the way he’s … He’d better hope he never runs into me again. Wait till Barbie finds out she’s just the flavor of the month. He’ll do the same thing to her, you mark my words.”

  “You don’t look so good,” Linda says. “You sick again?”

  I glare at her. “I can’t be sick again, since I was never sick before. I’m just depressed, that’s all.”

  She snorts. “You got nothin’ to be depressed about.” I reach up on the top shelf over the sink, pull down a stack of aluminum bowls. “Do ya?” I slide my hands into the heavy oven mitts, take the sheet pans out of the oven where the day crew left them to dry, put them on the cooling racks. “You ain’t gonna be bakin’ bread for long,” she persists. “Your husband’ll come sniffin’ around again pretty soon. Take it from me, they always do.”

  I have a vision of David on all fours, sniffing my leg. “It so happens that he’s just filed for divorce,” I shoot at her.

  She grins with all her stubby little teeth. “You can still make his life hell, even if you ain’t married. I did.” The note of pride in her voice is unmistakable.

  “Exactly how did you do that?”

  “Oh, there’s ways, missy. There’s ways. You get a lawyer and they can tell you all the ways. There’s child support and there’s visitation.” “I don’t have children.”

  “There’s maintenance. Every time he got a raise, I hauled his ass into court.” Her features are smooth with satisfaction.

  “But he got drunk. He hit you. I thought you didn’t want anything to do with him.”

  “ ‘Course I didn’t.” She rolls her eyes like I’m an idiot. “But I wanted to make his life hell. And I did. From the time I kicked him out, he never had a moment’s peace.”

  “But neither did you,” I point out.

  She smiles with grim satisfaction. “It was worth every minute.”

  Phone calls at the bakery between midnight and 6 A.M. are almost always wrong numbers. For the occasional heavy breather or bored soul who wants to know what kind of underwear we have on, Linda keeps a police whistle next to the phone, the better to shatter their eardrums with, my dear. I always worry that some pervert will sue the bakery for injuries that prevent him from practicing his profession, but that’s probably a California sensibility.

  When she answers the phone about twelve-thirty that night, I brace myself for the blast, but she adopts her habitual look of disgust and holds the receiver out to me. My stomach sinks. I have three options. My mother is deathly ill. CM’s been in a car accident. My house is on fire.

  Instead, a man’s voice says, “Wyn! I can’t believe it. I’ve called every bakery in Seattle. I was beginning think you’d gone into the witness protection program.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Gary Travers. I’m at the Edgewater for a few days on business. I was wondering if I could take you to dinner tomorrow night.”

  I hesitate, recalling our last and only encounter. Maybe he wants to take me to dinner so he can slip arsenic into my soup.

  “Unless you’re still mad at me,” he adds.

  The room has gone stone-silent. From the corner of my eye, I can see Linda walking on tiptoe. She fairly quivers with attention, like a dog with its ears up, whiskers twitching.

  “Of course not. Dinner would be nice.”

  “Tomorrow night, then? About seven?”

  “Sure.” I give him directions to my house, hang up, and resume oiling pans for cinnamon-raisin bread. Linda’s about to have a fit.

  “‘Zat your ex?”

  “Nope.”

  Silence except for the swish of the brush and the rhythmic lunging of the Hobarts. “You’re not s’posed to take personal calls at work, you know.”

  I smile. “Sorry. Normally I wouldn’t, but it was my brother.”

  “Your brother?”

  “He lives in San Francisco and he’s up here on business. We haven’t seen each other since our parents got married …”

  “Since your parents got married?”

  “So we thought we’d have dinner tomorrow. Catch up on family news.” I push the tray of oiled pans across the table, pull out the black binder, and pretend to study the recipe for cheese bread.

  Canlis is the kind of restaurant my father would have liked. Cantilevered over Lake Union at the south end of the Aurora Bridge, it simulates being inside a Christmas tree ornament, suspended in the dark, while lights that could as easily be candles or stars as headlights shimmer below. The place seems suspended in time as well, an old-style, expense-account watering hole, featuring hunter-gatherer slabs of red meat and premium cabernets. The servers all wear kimonos, which strikes me as odd, but they move easily in them, seeming to glide rather than walk.

  We’re early for our reservation, so we sit at the piano bar drinking vodka martinis and observing the salespeople and their clients, who seem to be the occupying majority. I don’t really like vodka, but I love the tunneling warmth of it going down. And the olives.

  After a few sips, I gather the courage to say, “I have to know. What happened to the boxes of your dad’s stuff that I jettisoned down the stairs?”

  Gary’s had a haircut since the wedding, and he looks older, in a pleasing way, less like a refugee from a Partridge Family rerun. “I closed them up and put them in the den.”

  “You came all the way back to the house for that?”

  He shrugs, almost embarrassed. “I thought it would be easier on everyone if they didn’t come home and find a mess.”

  “That was a really nice thing to do. I guess it’s lucky I was too drunk to push them all down. I feel like such an idiot.”

  “Don’t. I understand why it happened.” That makes him one up on me. He pushes a lock of thick brown hair of
f his forehead. He smiles. “Now it’s my turn. Why did you introduce me to that guy as ‘Howard’s son’?”

  I suck the pimiento out of my olive, nearly choking on it. “I know your father’s a great guy, he just reminded me of—Did you ever read The Fountainhead?”

  His laugh explodes, startling the couple on his left. “Man of granite, buildings of steel. Or vice versa. Except Howard Roark had flaming-red hair.”

  “I always thought that was a mistake.”

  “Yeah. Men of granite shouldn’t be carrottops.” He finishes his drink and declines a refill. “So tell me, Wynter Morrison, what are you doing up here?”

  “Making bread.” I stir the ice around and around in my glass.

  “That’s not what I meant.” At this juncture, the hostess comes to seat us. After we’re settled and he’s ordered wine and people have ceased fluttering around us, he says, “Back to my question.”

  I look over the menu at him. “Gary, knowing my mother as I do, I’m quite sure you’ve heard more about my life than you ever wanted to know.”

  He gives me the sleepy-eyed smile. “I’ve heard a few things, but nowhere close to everything I want to know about you.”

  “The short version is, I’m separated and my husband’s just filed for divorce. What about you? You live in San Francisco, right?”

  “Larkspur. Marin. And don’t think I didn’t notice that extremely smooth transition. I’m divorced. One year tomorrow. But we’re good friends.”

  “How very Marin.”

  “I guess so. But we have two kids, so it makes things easier.”

  “How old are they?”

  “My son is eight. His name’s Andrew. My little girl Katie’s ten.”

  “You’re not an architect, are you?”

  “I park cars.”

  “Where?”

  He grins. “I have a small company. Contract valet parking for events and businesses.”

  “So what are you doing up here?”

  “Growing the business. I’ve been chasing some clients up here for about six months now. Seattle’s a funny town. They don’t much like out of towners.”