Baker's Apprentice

by Judith Ryan Hendricks

  Thanks for being such great tenants and best wishes for a happy holiday and prosperous new year.

  Sincerely,

  Nathan and Elizabeth Walsenberg

  part three

  eighteen

  Now in the morning when we get home, instead of watering, I’m out picking off slugs and snails, watching them fizz when I drop them into my little bucket of saltwater. Josh and Turbo come out to watch.

  “Having escargots for dinner?” he asks. I laugh, thinking of my first dinner in Toulouse, les gros gris, as Jean-Marc called them. “Why don’t you just get some of those pellets?”

  “Because those are toxic to birds. And other animals.” I look at Turbo.

  “Really?” He looks alarmed. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Besides, killing them this way gratifies some latent sadistic tendencies of mine. I pretend they’re my slimy ex and his beach blanket bimbo.”

  The house is quiet, so I assume Tyler’s asleep, and since it looks like we might actually have a day without rain on our hands, I make a provisioning run to Thriftway, buying everything I can carry. The bus stop is three blocks from our house, and by the time I get home, the bags feel as if they’re full of rocks.

  As I come around the corner of Josh’s house, the sight of Tyler on her hands and knees in the garden brings me up short. She’s gingerly harvesting slugs, depositing them in my slug bucket.

  “Tyler,” I call out. Don’t make a big deal out of it. She turns, looking sheepish. “Give me a hand with these groceries?”

  She runs over and takes one of the bags but doesn’t look at me directly. “I just thought I should bust some slugs. Since you weren’t here. I didn’t want ’em to—you know—eat everything before you got back.”

  I put the groceries away and take a cup of coffee out on the porch. She’s still kneeling in the garden, nose and ears red from the cold, breath escaping from her mouth in little puffs. I look at my watch.

  “Aren’t you having coffee with Felice today?”

  She yanks at some little blades of grass that have sprouted up in the wake of the rain, and squints up at me.

  “She told me she wanted DeeDee to come with us, and I said I didn’t. She said it would be more fun with the three of us. Like it used to be.” A tear rolls down her cheek, and she breathes deeply. “I told her, in case you forgot, it’s never gonna be like it used to be. And she just said there’s nothing we can do about Bart—Barton. Life goes on. ‘Oo blah di oo blah da.’ So I said”—another big breath—“then why don’t you just have lunch with DeeDee yourself.”

  We’re both kneeling in the mud, yanking at the marauding horsetails, when it occurs to me that it’s time to show her the plaque. She doesn’t look up when I go in the house, but when I come back with the brown grocery bag, she says, “What’s that?”

  “Something Josh gave me. To give to you.” She stands up, wiping sweat off her face with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Her hair has grown out in dark, spiky bristles and she’s stopped wearing the pale makeup and black eyeliner. She looks…cute—although it feels strange thinking of her that way—sort of elfin and vulnerable. “And I don’t want to hear anything nasty about it,” I warn.

  She pulls off one glove, reaches into the bag and finds the plaque. Dead silence. Her eyes brim.

  “I know it’s hokey, but he was so proud of it…”

  Then her head falls back and she erupts into a lunatic cackle.

  “Shut up before he hears you.”

  “It’s perfect!” she shrills.

  “What?”

  She howls with laughter again. “This is so Barton. He was totally into that cutesy bird and butterfly shit!” She hugs it to her chest. “Oh God, he would love this!”

  One gloved finger smears mud across her cheek, and she turns quickly, jabbing the stake between two clumps of lamb’s ears. Then she’s back on her knees, furiously ripping weeds out of the damp black earth.

  I’m still watching her in amazement when she looks up. “Are you gonna help with these frigging weeds or what?”

  On the night of December fifteenth, CM picks me up to take me out to dinner at Chez Shea for my birthday. Tyler’s sulking because she’s not invited. We get all the way down to the Denny regrade and she says, “Oh shit. I forgot my purse. Did I have it when I came to pick you up?”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “Well, it must be at your place.” She does a U-turn in the middle of First Avenue, while I watch anxiously for the flashing lights of a patrol car. When we get back to the house, I hand her my key and she disappears inside. In a few minutes she’s back. “I can’t find it. And Tyler’s gone. You’d better come help me look for it. I don’t want to be driving around without my license.”

  “Swear to God, Mayle. The house isn’t that big. How many places could it be?” I get out of the car, slam the door, and stomp back up the path.

  When we walk into the living room, the lights go on and a bunch of voices are shouting “Surprise!” and “Happy Birthday!” I stare at the assembly. Kenny and Roz. Josh and Turbo. Ellen and Lloyd, Jen and Misha and Maggie—even the Mazurka Mavens.

  Before I’m through sputtering my astonishment, Kenny and Josh have popped a few bottles of champagne and Tyler’s got a Bob Marley tape on the boom box.

  There’s food—not exactly Chez Shea fare, of course—a Crock-Pot of white-bean chili, focaccia, corn muffins, cheeses, chips and salsa, veggies. When I see the cake, I know Tyler made it. It’s a chocolate, buttercream-frosted replica of a loaf of bread. I look at her, but she’s looking somewhere else.

  The coffee table is covered with packages. I pick up the biggest, heaviest one first. It’s from CM. I shred the wrapping off a two-foot-tall terra-cotta pig, dressed like a baker. “You have to give him a name,” she says.

  I clutch the pig in a torrid embrace while Tyler takes a picture with my camera. “Jean-Marc, bien sûr.” There’s a baker’s apron with my monogram on it, some lavender bubble bath and body lotion. Goat-skin gardening gloves from Josh. A little date book called The Baker’s Book of Days from the Mazurka Mavens, a silver bread charm from Ellen.

  Tyler’s gift is last. She hands me a flat package. Under the gift wrap there’s bubble wrap and uncountable layers of newspaper. When I finally peel everything away, I’m holding a watercolor in a simple wooden frame—a perfect rendering of the Queen Street Bakery. Two figures stand by the door, too tiny for a positive ID, but one is short with dark hair and the other tall with wild, frizzy brown hair.

  Tyler graciously accepts my hug for about one second before shrugging me off. “Shit, don’t go getting all misty on me.”

  Just then, CM changes the music to Motown’s Greatest Hits and the furniture gets pushed back against the walls and Turbo points his nose to the ceiling and howls.

  Now the weather turns unseasonably warm. Some days the sun shines in a sky so blue and cloudless that I feel like I’m back in southern California. With all the unpleasant memories attendant on that scenario.

  My divorce, for example, which should have been a historical footnote by this time last year, is still, incomprehensibly, stumbling through the halls of the L.A. superior court. Actually, the divorce itself is a done deal. My mother told me that David and Kelley got married in September.

  It’s the financial settlement that’s bogged down. Elizabeth has given me all the reasons: I dragged my heels for the first year. David changed lawyers in mid-proceedings. Then he and his new counsel embarked on a whole different game plan, patterned after the siege of Leningrad. Paperwork creeps back and forth between attorneys, between L.A. and Seattle. Documents that Elizabeth subpoenaed from the mortgage company got lost. We had a trial date set for August till Adele King decided she was unavailable. This woman must have a scrapbook containing pictures of judges in compromising positions with barnyard animals. She seems to get everything she wants. And I’m beginning to detect whiffs of disinterest on Elizabeth’s part.

  Well, who could bl
ame her? I’m bored out of my gourd, too. She says that’s what they’re aiming for: boredom, impatience, desperation, capitulation. It pisses me off just enough to keep me hanging on. Mac didn’t approve. He told me in one of his infrequent advice offering moods that as long as I was entangled in the legal battle, I might as well still be married to David. At first I thought he just didn’t get it; now I’m beginning to wonder.

  Other days, a hazy, anemic light is filtered through a gray and seamless marine layer that hovers along the coast. Those days are the worst. Not exactly warm, not exactly cold. Just moist and dim. The lines between daylight and darkness blur. Trees and shrubs drip incessantly. Not surprisingly, the flu is rampant.

  At first Ellen avoids it by dint of her Wonder Woman constitution and dosing herself with echinacea and vitamin C and zinc. But eventually even she succumbs. When she shows up Tuesday morning with her eyes dark and hollow, her cheeks flushed, and the rest of her skin a whiter shade of pale, I send her home, and she doesn’t argue.

  Thank God for Rose. She’s like those angel women who moved serenely among the sick during the bubonic plague, smiling, just doing whatever needs to be done. Misha comes back from her bout of illness, but Jen goes out. Kristen of the Mavens comes in, but Susan’s gone for the holidays and Barb is sick. We’ve got orders piling up in back, one of the Traulsens has a Freon leak, and the repair service says most of their techs are out sick, so Saturday morning at the earliest. We stack and cram as much as possible into the other refrigerator.

  On Wednesday CM goes home to L.A. for the holidays and I miss her comforting presence. My mother and Richard have planned to spend Christmas in Marin with Gary and Erica. I haven’t heard from Mac in months and I don’t even know where he is. I’ve given up looking at the mail. It feels too pathetic, shuffling through Christmas sale fliers, garish catalogs and magazines, searching for the envelope with a Canadian stamp.

  Friday morning Maggie comes in early to finish decorating sugar cookies and a Christmas wedding cake. I give Rose a pile of orders and put her to work calling people and asking them to please come pick up their cookies and bûches de Noël and pumpkin pies and loaves of challah.

  We started out the morning with a huge coffee urn full of hot, spiced apple cider so people could help themselves while they waited in line, but that ran out before noon and we were all so busy, nobody even noticed, much less had time to refill it. Suddenly an acrid, burning smell finds my nose, and I look up to see black smoke rising from the coffee urn.

  Maggie sees it at the same time and runs over to jerk the plug out of the wall.

  “I’m glad that wasn’t my order I smelled,” says an old man standing in line. He’s joking of course, but we all just stare blankly at him, and his grin fades.

  “I’m going to put this out back,” Maggie says.

  “Better get an oven mitt—” I start to say, but it’s too late. She grabs the handles and lets out a shriek.

  “The fucking thing’s melted!” She shakes her left hand and looks around sheepishly at the people in line. “Sorry.”

  “Put some butter on that hand,” says a woman in a flannel jumpsuit and UGG boots.

  “Do not put butter on that!” A woman in a nurse’s uniform rushes over to take charge, marching her to the sink and running cool water on her fingers. Then a smartly dressed grandma and a guy in a hard hat start talking about Unguentine. Pretty soon half the people in line are having a medical consultation about Maggie’s hand. The nurse wraps the burn in gauze from our first-aid kit while the hard hat guy borrows two oven mitts, picks up the smoking urn, and carries it out the front door and around to the alley.

  “You should get that looked at today,” the nurse admonishes as she heads out, balancing a bag of apple-cardamom muffins and a box containing a cranberry-apple tart.

  “Oh, I’ll be okay,” Maggie says.

  I watch her for a few minutes, clearing tables, restocking the counter, wincing every time she touches anything with her left hand.

  “Why don’t you go down to the urgent-care clinic,” I say. “We can hold the fort till you get back.”

  She shoots me a grateful look. “Okay. I won’t be long.”

  By one-thirty we’re getting slammed again and Maggie hasn’t returned. If she’s decided to go have lunch or do some last-minute shopping before she comes back, I swear I’ll stuff an apple in her mouth and roast her. Rose is back on the register, I’m boxing up cakes and pies, and Tyler’s restocking the case when the back door opens and Maggie’s standing there, hand bandaged, holding two large pizza boxes from Olympia.

  “I’ve got one house special and one vegetarian!” she sings out. “Mangia!”

  We pull a couple of tables together and sit down to eat, rest weary legs and aching backs. Everyone has that glazed look of fatigue, and Tyler’s eyelids are at half-mast. She’s even too tired to needle Maggie.

  “Girlfriend, I think it’s time for you to go home and get some sleep.”

  She lets herself be persuaded.

  Misha and Kristen toss their paper plates in the trash and plod back to the work area. When I can make myself stand up again, I open the register and ask Maggie how much the pizza cost. She looks flustered. “No, I didn’t mean for you—it’s my treat.”

  “Maggie, you don’t have to do that.”

  “I know,” she says quickly. “I just wanted to.”

  I try to see behind the shadowed smile in her dark eyes, but it’s impossible, so I just say, “Well, thanks. It was a really nice thing to do.”

  We lock the doors at three P.M. sharp. I take the cash drawer and checkbook over to a corner table, while everyone else begins the long afternoon of checking orders for tomorrow and cleaning up the chaos of today.

  Rose says, “Wyn, do you have my check ready?”

  I look up. “Are you leaving?”

  “Yeah, don’t you remember? I’ve got to take my mom down to pick up her car from the shop.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Sorry. I totally spaced.” I quickly add up the hours on her time card, scribble a check, and put it in an envelope with her name on it. “See you in the morning.”

  I collect the rest of the time cards and write checks out for everyone else. I separate the twenties, tens, fives, ones, banding them together. Then I count out the quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies, coating my fingers with black grime and that awful metallic smell. I have to sit for a minute, absently rubbing grime all over my forehead, picturing my mental list of what still needs to be done. I’ve now been awake for twenty-four hours, at work for sixteen of them, and I feel that little buzzy sensation I used to get when I pulled an all-nighter to study for a test.

  I really need to get some sleep before Tyler and I have to come back at eleven tonight. I count out an extra-large till for tomorrow, since it’s the Saturday before Christmas, fill out the bank-deposit slip, and put everything in the cash box.

  “Wyn,” Kristen hollers from the back. “I think we’ve got a problem with the bottom oven.”

  “Be right there.” I drop the cash box off in the storeroom in its usual place behind the baking powder and go out to see Kristen. She has one hand in the lower oven.

  I stick my hand in. Probably not even 300 degrees. “What’s it set for?”

  “I’ve been turning it up all afternoon. Right now it’s…” She peers at the black knob. It’s so old that the numbers are pretty well worn off, and today it’s encrusted with dough and batter, so it’s really hard to read. “It’s set on four hundred.”

  “Shit. Well, it isn’t anywhere close to that. What else have we got left to do?”

  “Gingerbread cookies, shortbread, sesame cookies.”

  “Just do what you can before five. If you can just shape the rest and put them on cookie sheets in the fridge, I’ll try to bake them off tonight between breads.”

  I pick up the inventory clipboard. “Maggie, can you start cleaning up in the café? I need to check the supplies for tomorrow.”

 
; She blots her nose and forehead with her sleeve. “Sure, Wyn.”

  “Or…actually, Maggie, why don’t you inventory the storeroom, since you can’t use your hand very well. Just put in this column what we have on hand, and in this column what we need for tomorrow, and then—”

  She takes the clipboard out of my hands. “I know how it works. I did it at Booker’s all the time.” I stare at her as she disappears into the hallway. I want to like her. Really. I just can’t.

  I bus the tables in a daze, separating the recycle stuff from wet garbage, piling cups and saucers, glasses, forks, and spoons in a plastic tub. At some point I look up to see Tyler at the door. She’s grinning broadly and holding something up, pressing it against the glass. I move closer. It’s an envelope.

  It has a Canadian stamp.

  nineteen

  Dear Wyn,

  I know this won’t get there in time for your birthday, but I did remember it—the fifteenth, right? I hope CM was there to help you celebrate.

  Right now you’re probably wondering what the hell I’m doing up here, still in Beaverton, four months after I said I’d be back. I’m wondering that, too. All I can tell you is, I wasn’t ready to leave. If you’re still speaking to me when I come back to Seattle, I’ll try to explain everything. I know you’ve heard it before, and you probably didn’t believe it then, but I’ll tell you again anyway. All of this has nothing to do with you. Or how I feel about you. Or how I feel about us. This is starting to sound somewhat convoluted, but that’s what living in a very long, very cold night has done to my brain.

  I thought I was psychologically ready for the winter up here, but nothing can prepare you for this. I read in a book of essays about Alaska that up north, winter inhabits you. It’s as good an explanation as I’ve heard. In some ways, winter is incredibly beautiful; it’s also terrifying and depressing and boring and exhilarating. Often all at once.