Then she would press against him and wind her legs through his and he could forget everything except the feel of her skin, and the scent of bread in her hair and the sound of her breath in his ear.
But that year, his fortieth, there was a party. The house was dark when he came in and he thought she might still be at the bakery. They hadn’t made any definite plans for the evening and he was hoping to keep it simple. Maybe go to the Asian noodle place in the village.
When he pushed through the swinging door to the dining room, fumbling for the switch, lights flashed in his eyes and people started shouting. He froze. He looked around the room. There was her mother and Richard. CM and some guy he didn’t know. Tyler. Alan and Sylvia. Jean and Wyatt, their neighbors…he just stared. Suddenly Wyn was beside him, laughing, putting her arms around his waist.
“Happy birthday, old dude.”
He tried very hard to produce an appropriate response.
“Wow,” he said.
It was stupid, but he couldn’t think of anything else. And he did not hug her back.
He stumbled through the evening in a slow, cold burn of fury. The edges of his vision seemed bordered with a white glare. He tried to be polite, to talk to everyone, laugh at the gag gifts, the cane, the vitamin organizer, the support socks. He thought he was doing okay until he looked up at one point into Sylvia’s gaze.
There was something about Sylvia. Maybe the melancholy that seemed as natural to her as the thick, iron gray hair, the expression that haunted her face, even when she smiled. It could be a physical thing, the way her dark, almond shaped eyes turned down slightly at the outer corners, but he preferred to believe that it was wisdom, born of intelligence and honed by years of hearing people’s worst impulses, their most hopeless tragedies.
They’d never actually exchanged much more than casual conversation, but he had the feeling that nothing would offend or even surprise her. That she could somehow absorb the shock waves, neutralize the poison the way a tree takes in carbon dioxide and gives back oxygen.
She would understand that he felt utterly betrayed. How could Wyn have done this to him? He didn’t want a party. All he wanted was to just get to the other side, to get past this day. In all fairness, he never actually said that to her, but why did he have to? Why didn’t she know? How could she possibly not know?
The cake, shaped like a book. She’d had Tyler or Rafael or somebody decorate it to look like his collection of short stories that had come out that spring and promptly tanked. Not only was it a reminder of the day, it was a symbol of all those boxes of books in the guest room closet. The ones he’d gotten from the publisher when they remaindered the book. The cake was his favorite—caramel with burnt sugar frosting, but it tasted like sawdust.
He’d never been that angry at her before. The intensity of it terrified him. If he loosened his grip, let the slightest edge of it show, it would surely overwhelm him, spew out of him like venom. He would do and say unspeakable things. And so he said nothing.
When she came upstairs later, carrying the remains of the champagne and two glasses, he pretended to be asleep and in the morning she poured out the flat and lifeless wine.
He turns off the light and pulls the door to the kitchen closed behind him, waiting. Leaning against it, shaking slightly, arms crossed over his chest.
He’s made too many mistakes. Mistakes so huge that they dwarf everything else he does. So wide, so deep, so wrong, that everything that follows becomes wrong. Like a song that starts off in the wrong key.
He leaves abruptly, out through the garage where her old beast of a station wagon crouches. He doesn’t reset the security system or lock the front door. He drives away too fast. West on Sunset, then north on PCH. Dark waves melt soundlessly against the beach. East on Topanga Canyon. Headlights burrow into the blackness and he rolls down the window to smell the night, the eucalyptus, the Pacific. He inhales deeply, pushing back against the seat. He loves this road, loves the rhythmic winding back and forth. Loves the darkness. The speed. The wind.
Without another thought, his left hand gropes towards the instrument panel and switches off the headlights.
fourteen
August, Wyn
It’s four-thirty and about ninety five in the shade. The air looks like the brown scum that floats on top of the rinse water at the carwash. SuperShuttle deposits me and my bag in front of the house and disappears while I’m digging for the key.
Eventually I find it in the bottom of my bag, and then stand there for a minute, bracing myself for whatever’s waiting inside. Or not. No Brown Dog. Just all her food and bedding and toys. No husband. Just a marriage unraveling faster than an old sweater.
When I fit my key in the lock, it turns easily. Too easily. The door isn’t locked.
I turn the knob and push. Nothing happens. I push harder and it gives just a little—not like the frame is swollen or the mechanism is jammed, but more like someone is blocking it from the other side. I put my back against it, pushing with my legs, and it gives way, sending me ass over teakettle into the front hall. I’m sitting in the middle of a huge pile of mail that’s accumulated under the door slot. It looks like Mac hasn’t been here since the day I left.
I push it all to one side, take my suitcase upstairs. The air is stale and breathtakingly overheated. I go room to room, opening windows. Dust covers everything like a fine snow. Obviously Carmen hasn’t come to clean recently. In the kitchen, ants are having a fiesta on a dirty spoon in the sink. The plants are brown and crispy. The screen that I asked him to fix has been removed and left leaning against the fence. The pool is filthy, the water cloudy. The garden is choked with weeds.
Because it’s summer and the house has been closed up for weeks, those little pantry moths are everywhere. For some reason this enrages me more than all the rest of it. I begin to take great satisfaction, not just in swatting them, but in smearing the brown dust of their wings on the white walls.
Two hours later, I’ve changed into shorts and a T-shirt, rinsed the ant party down the drain, put a load of clothes in the washer, sorted out all the mail, called the pool service, the gardener, and Carmen.
“Mrs. Wyn. I am happy to hear you,” she says.
“Carmen, when was the last time you cleaned?”
“In June. Mr., he does not leave money, so my husband say I cannot go no more.”
“I’m really sorry. Can you come next week? Any day? I’ll pay you what we owe you plus a month in advance.” She agrees to come on Tuesday.
The refrigerator is empty except for a container of yogurt with a green crust growing on it. I throw it out, hang a charcoal deodorant packet inside and make a grocery list. When I go out to the garage, I realize there is no way in hell that my Volvo is going to start after sitting idle for almost two months. A turn of the key produces only a hollow ticking noise. I decide to deal with that in the morning. I’m not hungry anyway.
I’m even less hungry when I start opening the mail and realize that Mac hasn’t paid any bills since I left. We’ve got overdue notices from everyone, threats that our phone service, water and power will soon be history, warnings from American Express that a good credit rating is a terrible thing to lose, and a polite letter from the mortgage company offering free credit counseling.
I think about my mom and Richard, rolling through the Canadian Rockies on a train bound for Nova Scotia, and I wish I could talk to them. For comfort’s sake more than anything else. In another way, though, I’m sort of glad they’re not here. My mother would worry needlessly and Richard would be full of good advice.
He’s a great guy, Richard. He treats my mother like a queen, and he’s always been more than generous to me, but in some hidden corner of my heart, there’s still a pissed off girl who wants her real father, not this reasonable facsimile.
Just before bed I call CM and I’m not surprised when her machine picks up. “Hi. This is the right number but you called at the wrong time. Leave a message and I’ll get back to yo
u.” I smile. She’s had the same message for twenty years.
“It’s me. Well, I’m home and I wish I weren’t. I can’t remember if you’re in town or out, so call me when you can.”
Friday morning I call Triple A and in twenty minutes there’s a guy in the garage putting a new battery in my car. I roll down to the closest station for gas, air in the tires and a run through the wash. I get a double espresso, stock up on groceries and head back to the house. When I get there, the pool service is hard at work.
“Hi, Mrs. McLeod. Pool’s in pretty bad shape. We’ll have to shock it, so don’t try to use it till Sunday. You need some chemicals?”
“Wyn! Hi!” My next door neighbor, Beth Halloran, peers over the fence. She has to be standing on a step ladder. “Gosh, where have you been? I’ve seen Mac a few times…”
I grit my teeth and smile. “Hi, Beth. I’ve been up on the island.” I hurry into the house before she can ask any more questions.
While I’m putting the groceries away the gardener comes.
“Sorry things got so out of shape, Mrs. McLeod. Your husband said you wouldn’t be needing us to do anything but the front lawn this summer. I thought you was upset. Maybe we done something wrong?”
“No, Toby, not at all. We’ve been gone for awhile, so you can start coming again.”
“Uh, yes ma’m…..” He looks uncomfortable. “I was wondering if we could get something on the account.” He fishes in his pocket for an invoice covered with dirty fingerprints.
“Of course. I’ll write you a check right now..”
“Uh, Mrs. McLeod. Would it be possible for you to pay us cash?”
“Well, it would, except I don’t have the cash right now. If you want to stop by tomorrow…”
His face is now very red and he can hardly look at me. “Mr. Monroe, he says we can’t do the work unless I get cash up front.”
“Why not?”
He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “Well, the last two checks Mr. McLeod give me, they got returned by the bank.”
“Oh.”
“I’m real sorry, ma’m..”
“Toby, it’s not your fault. Look, if you want to go ahead and get started, I’ll go to the bank now and get some cash and I’ll be right back.”
He escapes to the garden, plainly relieved, and I run for my car. At the ATM, I insert my card and punch in five hundred dollars. A cheery sign blinks on the screen to say our balance is not sufficient. At this time we only have two hundred and seventy one dollars plus change in our joint checking account. Where the hell is our money?
People are lined up behind me waiting to use the teller, so I get a hundred dollars and transfer a thousand from savings and go back to my car. I sit there sweating in the heat, too stunned to put down the windows. Where is our money?
Back at the house I give Toby the hundred dollars, swearing on my oma’s grave to pay him the rest in cash next Friday. Then I go to my business bank and open a checking account for myself with money from the bakery’s account.
At home I sit down in the kitchen with a large wine spritzer and an even larger pile of bills. I call all the creditors and assure them the checks are in the mail, then I write checks from our brokerage account to cover everything. It’s scary—the thought of what might have happened if we hadn’t had the island house rented for the next two weeks. What if I hadn’t come home yesterday?
I skim the items on the credit card bills. Nothing totally outrageous. Nothing that would explain the sudden drop in our balance. I turn on my laptop and sign into our on-line checking, sucking on an ice cube and scrolling down through the transactions, suddenly I see it and I nearly swallow the ice cube. On July 12th a withdrawal of seven thousand dollars was made from the account. For a few minutes I sit, reading that line over and over, trying to imagine what he’d do with seven thousand dollars in cash.
It’s a mistake. A bank error. Or else somebody’s hacked our account.
I sit back in the chair, take a long drink, and let my eyes go out of focus on the soothing blue of the bank website.
Saturday morning at 9:30 the bakery is packed and noisy, but the line is moving well and people seem happy. Under the voices and laughter I can just hear BB King. Tyler spots me before I can sneak into my office.
“Wyn!” She comes running out from behind the counter to give me a brief hug.
After we’ve reviewed the financials for the last two months and I’ve gone around and talked to everyone, she suggests lunch at The Shire in Topanga Canyon, an old unreconstructed hippie hangout where all the menu items have names from The Lord of the Rings.
We sit on the deck in the shade of huge Eucalyptus trees and order fat sandwiches with sprouts on their nine-grain Middle Earth rolls.
“The Maven looks great,” I say. “I notice you’ve got a new coffeecake.”
She grins. “It’s like that one Diane used to make at Queen Street. Remember?”
I nod absently, sipping my iced hibiscus tea. “The cardamom. Yeah, that was the best. How’s it selling?”
“We only make it on weekends, but it’s been selling out. I always loved how that cake smelled when it was baking. “Hey, remember that little old broad who always came in asking for doughnuts?”
I smile. “How could I forget Mrs. Gunnerson?”
The server sets down our orders with a flourish. “One Galadriel, one Frodo—my tuna salad, her grilled veggie sandwich with goat cheese.
Her eyes follow him as he walks away. “Nice buns.”
“Sandwich looks good, too.”
She laughs and I pour some roasted garlic vinaigrette on the greens piled on my plate. We eat quietly for a few minutes, enjoying the aromatic breeze. Then she sets down her sandwich and fiddles with the carrot curl garnish on the plate.
“How are you?” she says. “Really.”
I stir my iced tea with the brown bio-degradable straw. “Pretty good.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means better than two months ago, with room for improvement.”
“What do you do all day up there?”
“I walk a lot. Ride my bike. Bake. I went to a chamber music recital. And I’ve actually been making bread for a café in Eastsound.”
“So you’re not, like, sitting around listening to sad music and crying or anything.”
“I think I’m beyond that.”
“Okay. Just checking. You think you’ll go back for a while?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She picks up the second half of her sandwich, takes one bite, and puts it down again. “Have you talked to Mac?”
I decide not to tell her about my five unreturned voicemails. “I’m working up to it—but let’s talk soap opera later. First of all, I want to say thanks for everything you’ve done…”
She looks embarrassed. “It’s just my job—”
“It’s a lot more than that—”
“Wyn, I need to talk to you.”
“I’m pulling rank here, kid. Me first, then you can say whatever you want. I’m sure the last two months haven’t been easy; it’s a stressful job, and you’ve done it superbly and never complained or—”
“I’ve been happy. Don’t you know that?” Her voice quivers.
I impale a piece of lettuce and twirl it around with the fork. “What I’m trying to say is, I appreciate you so much, and I don’t want you to think I’m just going to pat you on the head and say, Good job, thanks. I’ve been debating for a while about what I could do that would be meaningful for both of us, and here’s what I’ve come up with…I want to make you my partner. I’m going to call my lawyer on Monday and—”
It starts quietly, just a trickle or two, but then the flood gates open. For a minute I sit there like a dim bulb, telling myself she’s crying because she’s so happy, but some part of me knows it’s not true.
“Ty…” I say it gently but loud enough so she can hear me over the Donovan soundtrack. “What’s wrong?”
She just shakes her head and cries.
“Now you’re scaring me. Tell me what it is. I’m sure it’s nothing we can’t work out.”
“I wanted to tell you before you left…but I was worried because of Mac…and everything…” She stops and holds the napkin up over her face. I can hear her forcing herself to breathe slowly. She lowers the napkin. “And stuff kept happening and we kept getting interrupted. Wyn, I’m leaving. I didn’t want to talk about it today, but…” She takes a deep gulp of air. “I applied to pastry school. And I’m accepted. And my loan was approved.”
“Oh…” Now it’s my turn. Tears pool in my eyes and start splashing on the table.
Then she starts crying again. “I’m sorry. I’m…just sorry.” Her voice squeaks on the last word, making us both laugh. Naturally the server chooses this moment to see if we’ve saved room for Bilbo Baggins’ chocolate cake.
“Excuse me,” he says, “I’ll come back.”
“It’s okay,” I tell him between blowing my nose and drying my eyes. I hand him my plate. “Bring us one piece and two forks.” I turn back to her. “So tell me. Where are you going?”
“Greystone.”
I can’t prevent a small gasp. “Greystone? Oh, my God, Ty. That’s incredible. Really. I’m so proud of you.”
She sniffles and tries to smile. “Better save it till we see if I wash out.”
On some level I must have known this was coming, because while I’m feeling like I’ve been carpet bombed, I can’t honestly say I’m shocked. She’s an artist, after all. She should be creating beautiful pastries, not mucking around with production sheets and inventory print-outs.
But where is it written that everything must happen at once? Why hasn’t the concept of queuing up been tried? If I were God I would have it set up like a deli. Things would not be allowed to just happen. They’d have to take a number. You’d stand behind the counter and call out the numbers and then take the shit and deal with it. It would still be the same shit, but you could take care of your dog dying and your husband’s meltdown before you had to handle your manager bailing to the CIA.
Baker's Blues Page 15
