Baker's Blues

by Judith Ryan Hendricks

  In a few minutes she returns with two cups and a huge piece of shrink-wrapped coffee cake. She disposes of the shrink wrap and sets the cake between us.

  I swallow some of the gritty mocha and pinch off a piece of streusel topping. “So how was London?”

  “Cold. Rainy. I don’t know how they ever got so many people to live there. But the workshops went great. And…the weirdest thing happened…” She takes a huge forkful of cake into her mouth, chases it with the mocha and licks the sticky glaze off her lips. “I saw Nathan. At least I thought it was him.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “I was coming from a class and he was just getting in a taxi in front of my hotel.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You didn’t say hi?”

  “It probably wasn’t even him.” Another large piece of cake disappears into her mouth. “Anyway, I didn’t have time to think of anything clever to say.”

  “How about Hello, Nathan, Do you still want to get married?”

  She shrugs. “I heard a few years ago that he’d gotten married.”

  “People get divorced every day. You could’ve at least gotten on the waiting list.”

  She ignores me and looks longingly at the last bit of cake. “Don’t you want that?”

  “You go ahead.”

  She pops it into her mouth and finishes her drink just as the PA system crackles to life and a cheery voice announces our imminent landing on Orcas Island.

  There are still at least four hours of daylight, when the rental car clatters off the ferry ramp, heading north on Horseshoe Highway, but the shadows cast by the tall conifers make a dark tunnel over the road, giving the impression of twilight.

  We cruise through the village of Eastsound, skirt the oyster beds at Ship Bay, and head south on Olga Road. At the rustic former strawberry packing plant that houses Café Olga and the Orcas Island Artworks, we turn left onto Pt. Lawrence Road and wind our way another two and a half miles to a battered, rusty mailbox. We don’t actually get mail delivered here, but we leave the box up to mark the turn. At the end of a long, rutted driveway the house is waiting to welcome us. At least that’s how I always feel.

  I usually sit in the car for a minute, windows down, listening to the wind, breathing in the smells of the earthen-damp forest and the ocean just beyond the trees. But CM’s already scrambling out.

  “Ooooh, yes.” She sucks in a deep breath. “I’m never going back. I’m going to stay here forever, communing with nature. Hello, little birdies and beasties, Auntie CM is here.”

  Leaving suitcases by the stairs, we take the boombox, an Ella Fitzgerald CD, and a couple of gin & tonics out the French doors to the deck. After traveling all day it feels good to stand at the rail and peer between the Douglas fir and blue spruce at the bright waters of Rosario Strait and Doe Island, floating like a dream just out of reach.

  She flings one leg up on the railing and stretches out over it, sighing.

  “Look…” She points to a couple of sailboats skimming the water. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  I zip up my hoody against the fresh breeze. “I wish you could stay longer. We could probably get Alex to take us out on his boat.”

  “Who’s Alex?”

  “This guy Mac sails with. He also owns the best café on the island.”

  She says, “He sounds very close to being my Platonic ideal of a man. Do you think he’s read the Kama Sutra?”

  “There’s a rumor that he wrote the Kama Sutra.” I smile. “Wanna go out for dinner?”

  At eight-thirty Rafferty’s is packed with spillover from the Memorial Day weekend. People are milling around on the front deck, sipping drinks and squeezing in next to each other on the wooden benches. Even though the dining room is small, Alex could probably fit in another three or four tables if he wanted to. But he doesn’t. And nobody seems to mind waiting. Another new hostess from his seemingly endless supply of beautiful young women greets us with,

  “Do you ladies have a reservation?” When I tell her we don’t, she says cheerfully, “It’s probably going to be about an hour before I can seat you. Inside, outside, or first available?”

  “First available—wait…you have outside seating?”

  “Brand new last year.” She smiles and nods towards the back of the café. “Go take a look.”

  After a stop at the bar for two glasses of champagne, we maneuver between tables to the open French doors and when I step across the threshold I catch my breath.

  The small gravel parking lot formerly relegated to garbage out/deliveries in has been replaced by a flagstone terrace shaded by a rustic ramada. Set among planters bursting with sunflowers and poppies, zinnias and geraniums, are ten French steel café tables with bistro chairs. The far wall is topped with sections of glass window to shield diners from the wind while showcasing the view. But the real focal point—at least for me—is on the left side of the dining area—a stone fireplace and magnificent wood burning oven.

  CM looks over at me and laughs. “You’re drooling.”

  “Oh my God, I want that oven.”

  “Hey Wyn. When did you guys get here?” CM and I turn towards the voice behind us.

  His face is damp from the heat of the kitchen, but even at the height of the dinner rush, Alex’s white jacket is relatively clean and you can still see the creases pressed in by the laundry.

  “Welcome back.” He barely kisses my cheek. “You like it?”

  “It’s amazing.”

  “Where’s Mac?” He’s looking at me, but I can tell that CM has registered in his consciousness.

  “At home chasing a deadline. This is my best friend, Christine Mayle. Alex Rafferty.”

  He holds her hand a few seconds longer than necessary, then drags his gaze back to me. “So who the hell’s going to crew for me?”

  “All I can tell you is, it probably won’t be Mac.”

  “Well, damn.” Then, “You guys have a reservation?”

  “No,” I say wistfully. “We just got in and I wanted to bring CM here for her first dinner on the island, but…”

  “The hostess said it would be an hour…” Right on cue, CM produces an impressive look of distress. “And we haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

  I look at my watch. “What we should probably do is just have an appetizer at the bar and make a reservation for later in the week.”

  “No way. It’s your first dinner on Orcas.” He grins. “Besides, I’m pretty sure you called earlier and I just forgot to write it in the book. Let me check with Celia.” He heads for the reception area, stopping to schmooze at several tables along the way.

  CM holds out her glass and I touch it with mine.

  “Two words,” she says. “Ooh. Wee.”

  Twenty minutes later we’re seated on the patio, sharing ahi tartare and shrimp-scallion potstickers. I slather salted butter on my sourdough bread while CM daintily dips hers in olive oil.

  At some point I set down my fork.

  “Okay. I want you to be brutally honest. Have I gotten sloppy? Have I been too focused on the bakery—?”

  For a second she looks blank, then she glares at me. “You know, sometimes I could just smack you. I don’t understand why you insist on taking responsibility for everything. No, actually I do understand. In that twisted little psyche of yours, you believe that if you can just figure out how you caused the problem, you’ll be able to fix it.”

  I twirl my glass and watch the light shimmer in the golden liquid. There’s a certain amount of truth in what she says.

  “I thought I sort of had things figured out. I mean, after all that shit with David I thought I’d learned something about relationships.”

  “Not to sound too much like your mother, but you know, this could just be a phase. I mean, he’s not bonking some literary chicklet—”

  “So he says.”

  “At this point why bother to lie?”

  “Who knows why men do
anything.”

  She picks up a small demi-lune of cucumber and nibbles it thoughtfully. “What do you think is really going on?”

  “To put it succinctly, you can’t get married and I can’t stay married.”

  “Let’s leave me out of the discussion,” she says testily. “It seems to me that you and writer-boy both have some issues to deal with—”

  “ME? Like what?”

  “Like his daughter, of course. And it’s got to be upsetting for him, too—”

  “Right. Here’s a check, kid. Have a nice flight home—”

  “Plus didn’t you say he’s having problems with the manuscript? Maybe a little breather is all you need.”

  A bus boy whisks away our empty plates and seconds later our server is setting down the featured attraction. Green garlic gnocchi with fava beans for her, Dungeness crab and avocado salad for me.

  She looks at mine. “That looks fabulous.”

  “So does yours. God, I love carbohydrates.”

  We switch plates.

  She folds her arms across her boobs. “I know you, baby. You crave resolution. But don’t do anything crazy. You need to learn to live with a little ambiguity.”

  “Is that the secret to your sensational love life?”

  We laugh in tandem, a laugh drawn from deep in our long history.

  “Why can’t I be like you?” I say around a mouthful of the rich pasta.

  “Why on earth would you want to?”

  “Because you’re self-reliant. You like men, but you don’t need one underfoot everyday. Why can’t I be like that? I’m so damned needy.”

  “You think I’m not needy?” She smiles and reaches over to spear one of my gnocchi. “If having to perform for the approval of strangers in hopes that they’ll like me enough to clap politely isn’t needy, I don’t know what is. Everybody’s needy. We just all need different things.”

  “That and the fact that you eat like a longshoreman and never get fat.”

  She gives my hand a BFF squeeze. “Please don’t die before me.”

  We cram summer into the following five days—lazy mornings of coffee and toast, walks in the woods and along the north shore, foggy evenings by the wood stove. We do the pedal boats in Cascade Lake and try a swim, but it’s too early. The water’s freezing. Afterwards we lie on a big warm rock in the sun like two lizards. One morning we get up early and take the water taxi over to Friday Harbor, spend the day shopping and visiting galleries. In the evenings we cook and drink wine. Out on the deck we sing along with Motown’s Greatest Hits on the boombox. We talk about all the men we’ve loved and hated and the one or two we’ve liked.

  For five blissful days I don’t think about the bakery or obsess about Mac—well, not too much. And I especially don’t think about what it’s going to be like after CM leaves. Which she does, on Saturday, despite my reminder that she said she was going to stay here forever, communing with the birdies and beasties.

  Official start time for the Eastsound Farmers’ Market is 9 AM, but like everything else on the island, “start time” is a fluid concept. Because I’m out early I have no trouble getting a parking spot in front of the green where the growers are drinking coffee and exchanging news and gossip while arranging their wares into artful displays.

  The market is small but primo, and in high season it becomes an exercise in competitive shopping not unlike Filene’s basement. Not only do you have to contend with year-round residents, vacation renters and the boat crowd, but most of the cafés brag that they buy local as well, so that burly guy who swipes the last carton of sugar snap peas out from under your hand could end up cooking them for you tonight.

  By-passing the tables of handmade jewelry and scarves, I head for the Waterman Farm table for a bag of their beautiful salad mix. I can’t resist the slender white-tipped French breakfast radishes and the sweet baby carrots. I don’t like beets but I love beet greens, so Mrs. Waterman gives me the ones that other customers don’t want.

  I add goat cheese to my bag, raw honey, a half-dozen brown eggs in a cardboard carton, then stash my purchases in the trunk of the car. It’s still early, and I’m loath to give up my parking space, but undecided what to do next. While I’m debating between the bookstore and the resale shop, my feet are carrying me down to Main Street. To the quiet, shady patio at Rafferty’s.

  Alex’s oven reminds me of the old fours banaux or communal ovens I saw in France, some of them built during the Middle Ages. Every week the women of the village would bring their loaves for baking, each with its maker’s mark cut into the dough for identification. I touch the oven’s mossy slate roof and find to my surprise that it’s warm.

  “I found a guy used to work for Alan Scott in Petaluma.” Alex’s disembodied voice is coming from behind the kitchen screen door. “He came up from Seattle to build the oven, and a couple of local stonemasons did the rest.”

  “So you’re making your own bread now?”

  He steps outside and comes over to stand beside me. “Pizza. Actually it’s Ferris’ baby. Wednesday to Saturday night.”

  “Seems like a waste to have this beautiful oven sitting here and not be making bread. How big is the baking chamber?”

  “About six by eight.”

  I’m doing the math. “Probably about fifty pan loaves…maybe thirty-five or forty hearth loaves.”

  “You could always try it and see.”

  I laugh. “What would I do with forty loaves of bread?”

  “Sell them to me.”

  “Besides, I don’t know anything about baking in a wood fired oven.”

  “I heard somewhere that illiterate peasants with no internet access learned how to bake in them. I think you could probably figure it out.” He looks around. “Where’s your buddy?”

  “She had to leave this morning. I just took her to the ferry.”

  “Too bad. So when’s Mac coming up? I was hoping he’d be here for the two-hand race.”

  “Hard to say.”

  The open space in the conversation is filled by a pre-pubescent whine.

  “Da-ad, Dustin won’t let me turn the handle.”

  I remember being vaguely aware that Alex had kids…two boys from one of his marriages.

  “He’s doing it wrong,” comes another voice, pitched somewhat lower. “He ripped a hole in this one.”

  Alex turns to yell over his shoulder. “It’s okay. Let him try. We can fix the hole.” He turns back to me, laughing. “We’re making pasta.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Come in and meet the guys.”

  “I don’t want to interrupt.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  In the café’s kitchen two small flour covered humans are struggling for control of a piece of metal. The tussle stops long enough for them to give me the once-over.

  “Dustin. Jesse.” He points at them in turn. “This is Mrs. McLeod.”

  “Hi, guys.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” says Dustin. He looks twelve, maybe thirteen, slight and fair, dark eyes. While he’s busy being polite, the younger one, an eight-year-old Alex clone with spiky hair, seizes the opportunity to jerk the handle away from his brother. Then he turns to me.

  “Are you the new girlfriend?”

  “Uh…no. Actually, I—”

  “Jesse, chill, okay? I want you to apologize to Mrs. McLeod.” Alex shoots him a look that has been known to paralyze grown men who work in his kitchen.

  Jesse remains unfazed. “For what?”

  “For being rude.”

  “I was just asking.”

  “Now.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No problem. A simple case of mistaken identity.”

  Alex pulls a stool up for me and hands me a cup of coffee and for a few minutes I watch him demonstrate how to fold the portions of dough in thirds and feed it into the machine while the kids argue about who gets to turn the crank and who has to catch it when it comes out the bottom. Dustin is charge of t
urning the dial to gradually close down the space between rollers, making the dough thinner with each pass.

  When the café phone rings. Alex says, “Excuse me just a minute,” and disappears into his office, shutting the door behind him.

  “That’s probably the new girlfriend,” Jesse says. The way he rolls his eyes to the ceiling makes me laugh.

  His brother sighs. “Jesse, shut up.”

  “Shut up yourself, propeller butt.”

  “Propeller butt?” I set down my coffee. “There’s an interesting image.”

  Dustin laughs, a dry little chuckle that would seem more appropriate to a middle-aged college professor in a short-sleeved shirt with a pocket protector.

  “Are you going to be a chef like your dad?”

  They both explode with laughter and various unintelligible expressions of disgust.

  Dustin informs me that he’s interested in astrophysics.

  Jesse says, “I’m gonna skate like Tony Hawk.”

  Since it’s obvious I have no idea who Tony Hawk is, he condescends to explain that Tony Hawk is the best and most famous skateboarder of all time.

  “But you don’t call him that. You say he’s a skater.”

  “I’ll try to remember,” I say.

  “Ever heard of a 900? Tony Hawk’s the only one who ever landed a 900—”

  Dustin says, “Technically he was past regulation time and his hand touched—”

  “Did. NOT!”

  “Here’s an idea, guys. Why don’t we get some pasta underway here before your dad comes back. We can surprise him.”

  “What do you know from pasta?” Jesse demands.

  “Well, I don’t do it a lot, but it’s dough, right? And I’m baker, so I should be able to handle it.”

  “Really?” A glimmer of interest.

  “Yeah.”

  “You bake cakes and cookies and shit?”

  “You’re not supposed to say shit.”

  “You just said it.”

  “I didn’t say it to be saying it. I was saying what you said.”

  “I bake mostly bread.”

  I’ve just lost whatever traction I was gaining.

  “And cupcakes,” I add lamely.

  Dustin is working a piece of dough, flattening it, stretching it, folding it.