Leaves

by Michael Baron

  Deborah stood and shook their hands. In reality, though, she had already made her decision, but it didn’t seem polite to turn them down flat. The River Edge Café was a fine restaurant and it did have a sensational kitchen. The more time she spent there, however, she realized there wasn’t anything about this place that felt like home.

  She drove through downtown Oldham on the way back to the inn. Waiting for a couple of pedestrians to cross Hickory, she noticed the sign for Sage, the gourmet shop that had opened a couple of weeks earlier. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t visited it yet. When a car pulled out of the parking space across from the store, she decided the time was right.

  The store was in a moderately large space between a music store and a bookstore. Deborah had a hard time remembering what was in the space before (there had been several shops there over the past few years), but the new owner had done a great job of remodeling it. Lots of blond wood fixtures, warm lighting, and handwritten signage. There was a refrigerator case housing artisanal cheeses and sausages in understated, small-production packages.

  Deborah liked being here immediately. Maybe it was the slack-key guitar music coming from the sound system or that one of the front tables was dedicated to the small Tuscan pasta manufacturer she had “discovered” a couple of years ago and had used exclusively at the inn ever since. Deborah knew this would be a place she’d visit often. She’d been to all the gourmet shops in the area, and was frustrated by the sameness of them. It was almost as though some food rep came along and set each one up based on some model. This place had a decidedly individual point of view, though. The shelf of spices was an asymmetrical jumble of bottles and tins of different sizes. Next to it was a card that read:

  This might not be the prettiest display of spices you’ve ever seen, but it’s hopefully the best. I’ve compared everything on this shelf to the competition and only carry the ones I love the most.

  Deborah agreed about the mustard seed, the za’atar, and the smoked paprika, but she would have chosen a different Telicherry peppercorn.

  A man walked up to her while she was standing at the display. “Find anything you like?”

  She turned to look at him. He was a little over six feet and lean. And he had very expressive eyes. “Krendahl has better peppercorns,” she said.

  “You’re right, but they only sell from their catalog. I tried, believe me. They also import this fabulous five-spice powder, but again, I couldn’t get it. Think I should change the card in the spirit of full disclosure?”

  Deborah laughed. “Your secret is safe with me. You’re the owner?”

  He extended his hand and Deborah took it. “Sage Mixon.”

  “Deborah Gold. So the store is named after you and not after” – she reached for a bottle – “Brookfield’s hand-rubbed Albanian.”

  He smiled. “You obviously know your spices. Are you in the food business?”

  “I’m the chef at the Sugar Maple Inn – at least I am until the end of the month.”

  “Moving on to bigger and better things?”

  Deborah rolled her eyes. “That part isn’t at all certain at the moment.” She turned toward another display. “I’ve never seen these preserves before.”

  “They’re incredible. They’re all made by a single dad out of a barn in New Hampshire. He sweetens them with a ‘proprietary blend’ of fruit juices and balances each with some kind of spice or infusion. The lemon marmalade is mind-boggling.” He picked up a jar and handed it to her. “He adds a touch of Thai basil. It’s amazing what happens.”

  Deborah examined the jar in her hand. If nothing else, Sage was an excellent salesperson. Of course she would buy this. Before she did, though, she spent another half hour in the store walking from display to display. Sage stayed with her when he wasn’t helping other customers, and it became obvious that there was a story behind everything he carried. She hoped the visitors who flitted in and out appreciated the thought that went into every selection in this store. More important, she hoped that – appreciative or not – the visitors were plentiful. Oldham needed more places like this one.

  By the time she’d finished shopping, Deborah had the marmalade, a salsa from Nogales, a bottle of raspberry thyme vinegar made a half-hour away, and a package of stroopwafels made in Montana, of all places. She didn’t need any of it. She certainly had access to just about everything she wanted from the network of suppliers she’d developed over the years. But it was fun buying here and she definitely wanted to support the establishment.

  “Come again soon,” Sage said as he packaged her purchases.

  “I will. Definitely. Hey, come by the inn for dinner sometime in the next month.”

  “I might just do that. I mean if you know this much about food, you might actually be able to cook.”

  Deborah laughed. “Yeah, it’s a possibility.”

  He smiled and his eyes danced. Deborah would definitely be back soon.

  **^^^**

  Maria couldn’t remember the last time she was in McGarrigle’s Music Center. She figured it was at least a whole McGarrigle ago. When she was seven, she came here every Wednesday and Saturday for guitar lessons. The elder McGarrigle seemed like an old man to her then, though at that point he was probably only a few years older than she was now. With his closely cropped grey hair, thick waistline, and fascination with old jazz tunes, she would have guessed him to be sixty, if not a hundred. He gave her the lessons himself for the first six months, talking to her like she was a baby and making her play inane songs. It was a real chore to get through the sessions and even more of a chore to practice this music that seemed so pointless to her at home. As much as she loved the sound of the guitar and enjoyed picking out her own rudimentary melodies, she probably would have quit if Roger hadn’t become her teacher. He went to Yale, and he had gorgeous long golden hair, and he taught her how to play the Beatles, and Joni Mitchell, and James Taylor. From that point on, Maria practiced at least an hour a day, more than that on Tuesdays and Fridays because she wanted Roger to keep telling her how much better she was getting.

  It always seemed funny to her that Loudon McGarrigle’s youngest child Martha was the one to take over the family business. Martha was a year ahead of Maria in school and she constantly complained about how “dead” her father was. Yet when it was time for him to retire and everyone thought he was going to sell the store, Martha stepped in and did her old man proud.

  The store had an utterly different vibe now than it had when Maria was a kid. Back then, everyone came here to get their school instruments, and Mr. McGarrigle drove the point home by featuring a large display of brass and woodwinds up front. Now Maria needed to peer all the way into the back of the store to find those things. Up front were keyboards, guitars, amplifiers, and quite a bit of the kinds of electronic equipment that Maria often saw on television but still barely understood.

  In addition, of course, there was the DJ stuff. This was a business that hadn’t even existed for McGarrigle’s Music Center when Maria was growing up. Now, though, if you were having a party and you wanted dance music, this was where you came. Martha could even provide dancers to motivate your guests onto the floor if you wanted that sort of thing.

  Maria tried to remember when they started having a DJ at the Halloween party. Somewhere along the line, it stopped being enough to simply play music from a portable stereo, even though there was no official dance floor. “It’s more exciting, don’t you think?” she remembered her mother saying. Of course she was right, and another frivolity became a necessity. Now it was Maria’s job to make the arrangements – and as Corrina so succinctly reminded her, time was getting tight. So she came to see Martha, a woman she’d barely seen in the past few decades. As it turned out, she wasn’t going to see her today, either. Business had taken her out of the store and Martha’s manager was going to handle the meeting instead. The only issue was that the guy was with a suppli
er. He asked if Maria could wait a few minutes. It was a few minutes that stretched to nearly a half-hour.

  To entertain herself, Maria walked over to the guitars and picked up a Martin acoustic. A sign said this was the “Eric Clapton Model.” She positioned the guitar on her propped-up leg and wrapped her left fingers around the fret board. The act made her think of the music store scene in the movie Wayne’s World and she halfway expected to turn to see a poster demanding “No Stairway Allowed,” a joke about amateur guitarists’ propensity for playing the opening chords from “Stairway to Heaven” when trying out an instrument.

  Now that this was in her head, she couldn’t think of anything to play, and she just plucked a D chord randomly for a moment. She hadn’t picked up a guitar since Olivia was in fifth grade and lost interest in hearing a song at bedtime. Finally, Maria started playing Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game,” botching the third chord change a couple of times before remembering it. There was no question she was out of practice, but she felt comfortable with the instrument. Whether Eric Clapton ever played one of these or not, she could see why he’d lent his name to it. When someone came up to her to tell her that the manager could see her now, Maria stopped the song, but she did a couple of runs before putting the guitar down. She flubbed them, of course, but it felt good to use her fingers this way, to have the sound and sensation come back to her. Her fingers tingled from the friction of the strings. It was like the excitement of running into a sorority sister after a decade apart.

  Later, when she was back at home, the DJ arrangements made, the contracts signed, Maria went to the closet in the guest room and pulled out her old guitar and songbooks. The Paul Simon and the Dan Fogelberg. The Suzanne Vega and the Sarah McLachlan. And of course the spiral-bounds. The guitar’s strings were creaky and brittle and she was certain one would snap when she tuned it. But they held, and she strummed a few chords to get a feel for the instrument again. The tingling in her fingers became more uncomfortable as she played. Her hands had gone soft over the years, and she was going to pay the price for that now. But sitting there on the guest bed, the Paul Simon book open next to her, it didn’t matter.

  She played the chords to “American Tune” and “Duncan” and then decided to sing along on “Something So Right.” She always sang – around the house, to the iPod in the car, to Muzak in stores – but singing to her own accompaniment was still a journey back for her, like visiting her old high school or reentering the house she and Doug had rented just after Olivia was born. She moved on to “Leader of the Band” and “Same Auld Lang Syne” from Dan Fogelberg and then “Marlene on the Wall” and “Gypsy” and “Luka” from Suzanne Vega and “Ice Cream” and “I Will Not Forget You” from Sarah McLachlan. She laughed when she forgot how to play a chord, and laughed even louder in triumph when she remembered how to make an Fdim. This was so completely not like riding a bicycle, but she was amazed at how much she retained and at how the simple performance of these songs drew her back to another stage in her life. Olivia smiling at her sleepily. Doug sitting on the couch, head tilted, wineglass in hand, desire brimming from his eyes. Family gatherings where she provided the entertainment, at first embarrassed and then proud when someone requested an encore.

  With some trepidation, she opened one of the spiral-bound notebooks. Her original songs were here, lyrics with chords written above the words. She knew from the memory of these songs that they weren’t entirely awful, but she also knew that some of them were simply terrible. She turned to a protest song about baby seals and cringed at the clichés and the indignation. There was the fragment of a lyric that stopped dead because Maria couldn’t think of a word to rhyme with “orange.” Here too was a song that was a blatant rip-off of The Police and yet another that was a laughable attempt to infuse her work with “soul.”

  Some of the stuff was good, though. There was “Paradox,” the song she wrote a week after Jimmy Jilson said he would call her and didn’t. And there was “Mumbledy Man,” which she wrote about her father’s habit of muttering incomprehensibly when he didn’t want to do something. She found the newest notebook, which started with the poem she’d written while still in the hospital after having Olivia. She ultimately worked it into a song, but the refrain was never as strong as she wanted it to be and it made for better reading than singing.

  The last song in the book was “What Can I Say?” which she wrote about Olivia growing up a month after she’d stopped singing for her at night. It was the last song Maria had written and she remembered that, as she composed it, she pondered how two phases of her life were ending simultaneously. At the time, it was the most vulnerable moment in her life. She sang the first verse, but choked up on the chorus and decided maybe this wasn’t the right time to play this particular tune.

  She put down the guitar and got ready to get up from the bed. Enough of this little diversion. But then she flipped through some of the songbooks and picked up the guitar again. It wasn’t until the darkening room made it difficult to read the pages that she realized how much time had passed. She looked at her watch, laughed, and flipped on a lamp. Then she bent toward the guitar again and improvised a bit.

  I guess Doug is taking me out to dinner tonight.

  Four

  Sunday, October 10

  Twenty-one days before the party

  Because their two-year-old son Joey was a relentless early riser, Maxwell and Annie had a deal. Annie could sleep in on Saturdays and Maxwell got to do it on Sundays. Though the challenge of keeping the increasingly boisterous child quiet while one of them slept was considerable, the system seemed to work. They each got one morning every week to try to catch up on all the sleep they’d been denied the previous six days.

  This was the first thing that surprised Maxwell about Annie walking into the bedroom at seven forty to throw on some workout clothes. The second surprising thing was the way she sat down on the bed, plopped Joey next to him and said, “I’ve just gotta get out of the house for a while.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s a quarter to eight. I’m sorry, but I’ve just gotta get out.” She stood up and headed through the bedroom door. Within seconds, he heard the front door close.

  Maxwell wasn’t processing things very efficiently yet this morning, and he certainly couldn’t process Annie’s attitude. Did something happen this morning while he was sleeping? Was Joey being impossible? He’d find out later when his wife finally explained her cut-and-run to him.

  He rolled over to find his son’s face inches from his own and bearing a huge smile. “I don’t suppose I could convince you to go back to sleep with Daddy for a while, huh?”

  In response, Joey, who still didn’t speak much, scrambled up and began jumping on the bed.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Maxwell pulled down the covers and made his way into the bathroom. It wasn’t all that early – he was up by six fifteen during the week – but his head was a little foggy. He probably shouldn’t have stayed awake until one in the morning watching Sleepless in Seattle on Comedy Central. Annie had gone to bed early and he had planned to do so himself, but he made the mistake of flipping through the channels and then he was hooked.

  “Hey Pinball, shower time.” Maxwell came up with the nickname for his son not long after Joey started walking (and within days running) and showed a strong tendency to bounce off things, most notably walls and furniture. Maxwell stood in the doorway and motioned for his son, who was still jumping. Joey did an awkwardly executed seat drop and then hopped off the bed.

  Maxwell and Joey showered together most mornings these days. It wasn’t exactly the same experience as the showers he’d taken with Annie before the kid was born, but it was usually entertaining. This morning, Joey was occupying himself drawing on the shower walls with soap. The little bar slipped from the boy’s hand in the process and he thought this was hilarious, so he repeated the act over and over again.

&n
bsp; Eventually, Maxwell took his own soap (it was beyond pointless to share a bar with the kid) and cleaned him off.

  “No hair,” Joey said as Maxwell positioned him under the showerhead to rinse off.

  “Yes, hair.”

  “No hair,” his son said more emphatically.

  “You haven’t washed your hair in something like three days. We’re washing it today.” For someone who approached life with utter abandon, Joey was unusually skittish about getting shampoo in his eyes. “We’ll do that thing where you tilt your head back like I taught you.” Of course Joey was incapable of maintaining that posture through the entire process and grew frantic when any suds touched his face. Maxwell rinsed him off quickly, after which the boy, forgetting the torture of moments past, resumed drawing on the walls.

  Once they were dressed – yet another adventure, as Joey chose to dance away from his father after putting on each article of clothing – they headed into the kitchen for breakfast. Maxwell spent some time staring into the refrigerator and trying to come up with something to eat, but what he really wanted was some of Carmen Twillie’s coffee cake.

  “Pinball, come on. We’re going into town.”

  Downtown Oldham was a half-hour walk from their house, and keeping Joey in his stroller that long would make alligator wrestling seem relaxing. Still, it was such a gorgeous morning that it seemed silly to drive. For the first half of the walk, Joey sat contentedly, pointing to leaves and squirrels and some things Maxwell couldn’t pick out. He got antsy after that, though, and when he turned completely around in the stroller, tangling himself up in the straps, Maxwell carried him on his shoulders the rest of the way.

  Carmen Twillie’s bakery, The Open Hearth, had been turning out world-class breads and pastries since 1970. Ever since he was a boy, Maxwell maintained an absolute passion for her coffee cake. Moist and spongy underneath and topped with dense, cinnamon-laced crumbs, it was an unparalleled morning starter. When he lived in Manhattan, he woke up some mornings longing for it. Even after Maxwell entered his thirties and realized he needed to be more careful about what he put into his body, he still stopped here at least once a week.