Friendship Bread

by Darien Gee

  The immediate neighbor to her right, Marion Krum, is a frazzled mother of toddler twin boys. She mistakes Hannah for a high school student selling candy bars. A high school student selling candy bars? Hannah is almost thirty! She knows her Asian genes make her look young, but still. It takes all of Hannah’s willpower to keep a straight face as she explains about the bread.

  Next is Joseph Sokolowski, the part-time car mechanic whose hallways are lined with old hubcaps and license plates polished to a shine. He kindly invites her in and fixes her a cup of espresso that tastes a bit like sludge.

  The woman living next door to him flatly refuses the starter before Hannah even has a chance to explain what it is. Henry Tinklenberg, the last neighbor, is an elderly African-American baggage handler who recently retired from United Airlines. Hannah likes the way his eyes crinkle when he considers the bag of starter and then decides to give it a try for his grandkids who’ll be coming to visit next week.

  When Hannah returns home, she doesn’t even blink when she sees she has another message on the machine. She hits DELETE and then takes her time cleaning the house from top to bottom. By the time she’s finished, the house smells like lemons. The afternoon sun has filled the house with light and contrary to feeling tired, Hannah is ready to go.

  The CLOSED sign is up when she arrives at Madeline’s, but the door isn’t locked. She knocks gently before letting herself inside and calling out her name. Madeline comes out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a dish towel.

  “Hannah!” she exclaims. She hurries over to give her a hug. “I’m almost done straightening up. I just have a few more things to do in the kitchen—I’ll only be a minute.”

  “I can help,” Hannah insists, and it doesn’t take much persuading. She follows Madeline into the kitchen where a large cooking pot is on the stove. She washes her hands as Madeline fishes around for an apron.

  “Halve and quarter these,” Madeline says, handing Hannah some yellow onions. “Then quarter them again. I want them about a half an inch thick. You can grab a knife from the knife block over there.”

  “Er …” Hannah stares at the onion. An inch thick in which direction? She peels off the papery onion skin then hesitates as she’s about to make the first slice.

  Madeline liberally drizzles the pot with olive oil then grabs an onion and knife for herself. “Like this.” She demonstrates, slicing straight through the root to the other side. “Once you cut it in half, it’s easier to peel off the outer skin. Then you can use the root to keep the onion together as you cut.”

  Hannah mimics her, following Madeline’s directions as they lay the onion halves flat on the wooden cutting boards. They trim one end and then begin to make thin parallel cuts across the onion. Madeline shows Hannah how to curl her fingers over the onion, letting her knuckles hit the side of the knife so that she doesn’t risk losing a finger.

  Madeline glances at the clock as she tosses the onions into the pot, leaving Hannah to finish the rest. “I do hope Julia will still be able to come by,” Madeline says. She takes a block of butter and cuts it into rough chunks, adding them into the pot.

  Hannah hopes so, too. Even though Julia is older, she isn’t condescending, doesn’t treat Hannah as if she doesn’t know any better. She’s secretly added Julia to the speed dial on her phone—Madeline, too—but she won’t admit this out loud because it seems premature and a bit needy. “What are we making?” Hannah asks.

  “Tomorrow’s special: French onion soup with Gruyère cheese croutons.” Madeline gives the onions a quick stir in the pot, adds a generous pinch of salt. “We’ll pop this into the oven and give the onions a chance to brown. Come, you’ve done enough. Let’s take our tea in the back parlor.”

  The back parlor is in Madeline’s private quarters overlooking the gardens. “Oh,” Hannah breathes when she sees the yard through the large bay window. It’s still bare from winter, like her yard, but there’s just so much more of it.

  “It’s about an acre.” Madeline gazes outside. “I’ve let it go, I’m afraid. It used to be beautiful but the upkeep is expensive when you have negative cashflow. When it was the Belleweather the owners managed the grounds themselves, but it’s too much for one person. I don’t really use it with the tea salon so it doesn’t make sense to hire a gardener, though it would be lovely to have some tables outside during the summer.” The expression on her face is wistful. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. I want to know about you, Hannah. What on earth are you doing in Avalon?”

  “Oh.” Hannah is suddenly shy. She finds a comfortable place to sit on the couch and curls up, tucking her feet under her. “My husband, Philippe, wanted us to get a place outside of the city. So we did.”

  “I see.” Madeline doesn’t press for details and Hannah doesn’t offer any. What exactly would she say? Madeline walks over to close the window, but it’s stuck and refusing to budge. Hannah’s about to get up and help when Madeline puts her weight on it and it closes with a reluctant groan. “There,” she says, satisfied as she flips the latch to lock it in place.

  The sun begins its slow descent. The sky is filled with dark yellows and warm oranges, but there’s a tinge of gray clouds multiplying and filling the sky. There’s a slight chill in the air. Madeline passes a soft wool afghan to Hannah, who thankfully wraps herself in it. “What about the cello? Are you still playing?”

  “Not lately.” Not since the day Philippe told her he wasn’t coming home. “I used to play for three hours in the morning.”

  “Really?” Madeline arches an eyebrow, impressed, but three hours is nothing compared to Hannah’s once-rigorous schedule.

  “I’d play more but then my back starts to hurt or the tendonitis in my shoulder flares up and I have to stop.”

  Madeline winces. “It must be difficult.”

  “It was. I’m used to it now.”

  “Do you miss performing?”

  Hannah smiles. She misses the heady rush before a concert, the sound of the orchestra tuning up. The lit stage, the darkened auditorium. The applause. “I do.”

  “So what now?”

  Good question. Hannah has never done anything other than play the cello. She knows it’s an impressive accomplishment to many people, but to her it’s just part of who she is. Her parents started her playing at five and she had relentless two-hour practices every day until middle school, when she doubled her practice time. By the end of her first year at Juilliard, Hannah had logged in more than ten thousand hours of practice and performing time. And while she doesn’t regret a moment of it (well, not usually), she does wish she’d had a chance to try different things, to learn some different skills, to experiment, to dabble.

  “I don’t know,” Hannah admits. It hadn’t been a pressing issue before, because she had Philippe. Hannah had assumed they would figure out the future together. Now that the decision is hers alone to make, Hannah doesn’t know where to begin. “I’m not sure where to go or what to do, Madeline.” Her voice wavers, full of uncertainty.

  “The world is your oyster, in other words.” The smile on Madeline’s face is expansive, contagious, and Hannah feels a small smile tugging at the corners of her own mouth despite her anxiety.

  “I hadn’t quite looked at it that way,” Hannah concedes, “but I suppose that’s true.”

  “It absolutely is true,” Madeline says.

  “I know,” Hannah says even though it doesn’t feel like the great adventure that Madeline is making it out to be. “It’s just that I always thought my life would be about the cello.”

  “And it still might be,” Madeline says. “Who knows how things will work out?”

  “Who knows,” Hannah echoes. But instead of feeling encouraged, she feels awash with despair. It would take a miracle for her to be able to play professionally again, and she’s not even sure she wants that. She doesn’t know what she wants.

  Madeline seems to notice this and her face softens. “You know, Hannah, it’s the unexpected turns that make life r
ich. You have already accomplished so much that I have to admit I’m curious to see what comes next. I just know good things are in store for you.”

  “I wish I knew for sure.”

  “Well, of course. And you will, Hannah, when it’s time. But for now try to get comfortable with the unknowing. Plans are an illusion anyway. Goodness, if I had followed my plan to go back to Chicago, I wouldn’t be here now. Blame it on my poor circulation!” She chuckles.

  “Your circulation?”

  “If I hadn’t needed to stretch I wouldn’t have pulled over when I did.” Madeline gives her legs an affectionate pat. “So really, I should be thanking this old body.”

  This Hannah understands. “I feel that way about my body, too. It gave me many good years when I played professionally.”

  “Was it always your dream to play the cello?”

  Hannah can’t think of life without her cello being a major part of it. “I think I was too young when I started to really understand what it meant. But it was my parents’ dream. My father’s especially.” She can still remember the stunned silence on the other end of the phone when she told him she couldn’t play professionally anymore. “He moved back to Taiwan when my mother died a few years ago. We don’t talk much.”

  “No?”

  “There’s the time difference, but really it’s because we don’t have anything to talk about. It used to be about my music, my schedule, certain performances. Now that’s gone, so there’s not much else. It’s like that with my brother, too.” Hannah thinks about the first time Philippe left, how she had called Albert under the guise of saying hello when really she wanted him to tell her that everything would be okay, or that Philippe was a creep and she could stay with them. He’d said neither. She’d been stunned when his reply was exactly something her father would have said, that she needed to figure it out and make it work. Was there anything else?

  “What was it like when your mother was alive?” Madeline asks. “Was it any different then?”

  Hannah gives a faint smile. “Oh yes. My father was still strict—she was, too, in her own way—but she tried to give us a normal childhood, an American childhood. Like once she let us take a break from practice to get a Popsicle from the neighborhood ice cream truck. My father was furious, of course, because he considered it both a waste of time and money. But my mother stood her ground and he eventually backed down. She was the only one who could do that with him—the rest of us were too scared. But not my mom.” Hannah doesn’t add that she misses her, even though it’s been more than ten years since her mother died. She doesn’t have to. Madeline seems to understand this.

  Hannah burrows deeper into the afghan and shivers, tucking her legs under her. She admires the perfectly crocheted rows, her slender fingers running along the pattern. “Did you make this?”

  Madeline shakes her head. “I have a gift in the kitchen, but that’s pretty much it. I bought it at a small gift shop in town that sells lovely items made by fellow Avalonians.” She pulls a worn fleece throw over her own legs.

  Hannah admires Madeline, admires what she’s done. She’s all alone from what Hannah can see and it doesn’t seem to bother her. Hannah hopes that she’ll someday be as comfortable with her independence as Madeline is, but right now she can’t imagine it.

  “How do you do it?” She gestures around her. “The tea salon, all the cooking and baking. How do you manage?”

  Madeline ponders the question. “I guess I don’t really think about it like that. Like I said, when I came through this town, I just knew this was going to be my home. I hadn’t thought beyond that. After a couple of days, it seemed like a waste to be rattling around in such a big house by myself. I didn’t want to do a bed-and-breakfast—I like my nights quiet and I need my privacy—but I did like the idea of serving people food. There was already a food and beverage permit for the property, so that helped me make up my mind. I guess I thought it would be a fun thing to do, so that’s what I did.” Madeline shakes her head and Hannah can see that Madeline’s amused by her own folly. “Little did I know it would be so much work. I’m getting the hang of it now, which is good. For a while there I was afraid I’d have to sell everything and move on.”

  “Oh, you can’t!” Hannah’s own vehemence surprises her. Madeline and Julia are the only things that anchor Hannah to Avalon.

  “Oh, I’m not going anywhere,” Madeline assures her. “At least not anytime soon. I like the people too much.” She leans over to give Hannah’s hand an encouraging squeeze, and Hannah smiles.

  They spend the next hour talking about music, art, books. Madeline and her husband, Steven, were widely traveled, true patrons of the arts. Fat copies of the Sunday New York Times are piled up in a corner of the parlor, along with literary magazines and sophisticated academic journals. Madeline is a true learner, and Hannah envies this.

  “Pah, I’m just bored,” Madeline says when Hannah points this out. She sips her tea. “When business was slow, I had nothing but time. I’m not much of a TV person, so I read. And bake.”

  “Philippe never cared much for my cooking,” Hannah says. Not that she blamed him—she burned pudding once, for God’s sake. “I’ve never been very good at anything other than playing the cello. We just ate out a lot and whenever I did cook, it was either alarmingly simple or a complete disaster.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with simple,” Madeline says. “I enjoy simple cooking tremendously. So much is overprepared or over-thought these days.” Madeline gets up to peruse a stack of books. “The previous owners had a lot of cookbooks—these came with the house when I bought it. There are some real classics here.” She selects a book and brings it to Hannah, wiping off a thin layer of dust.

  Hannah accepts the book. It’s a heavy, intimidating tome with a simple cover and three words.

  “Joy of Cooking,” Hannah reads. She recognizes the cover and of course has heard of it, but this is her first time actually looking through it.

  “It’s the backbone of many a kitchen,” Madeline says. “Restaurants, too. The author, Irma Rombauer, wrote it back in the 1930s right after the stock market crash.”

  Hannah flips through the book and comes across a recipe for turtle soup. She’s way out of her league here, plus there’s no way she’s going to cook a turtle. She’s about to close the book and hand it back to Madeline when she comes across instructions for how to boil an egg.

  Boiling an egg has always been a point of contention between Hannah and Philippe. He likes his eggs soft-boiled, runny on the inside, whereas Hannah likes hers hard-boiled. And in all the years they were together, Hannah has never been able to get it right.

  She’d overcook his egg even if she left it in for the prescribed three minutes. And now, as she reads the instructions for how to do it, she realizes that she should have reduced the heat the minute the water hit a boil, and then let it simmer for three minutes. She didn’t know that. And Philippe, for all his complaining about how she couldn’t do it right, never bothered to figure it out himself.

  Hannah’s eyes skim the rest of the page, and she suddenly understands why her eggs are sometimes hard to peel. Fresher eggs don’t peel as easily.

  It’s not until Madeline lets out a dainty cough that Hannah realizes she’s been engrossed in the book for almost ten minutes. The sun has slipped past the trees on the horizon, the sky dark and moody now.

  Hannah blushes, embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Madeline. It’s just all so interesting. Would it be all right if I borrowed this?”

  “Hannah, you can have it,” Madeline says graciously. “And you know, Joy of Cooking was initially self-published. Irma was just a simple homemaker struggling to make ends meet after her husband committed suicide the year before. She was fifty-four, I believe.”

  Hannah definitely wants the book now. If Irma Rombauer can write a book at fifty-four, Hannah can certainly find a way to pull her life together. She clutches it to her chest. “Thank you, Madeline.”

  There’s a low r
umble of thunder. Both women look out the window as fat drops of rain begin to pelt the side of the house.

  Well, that came out of nowhere. Madeline is starting to see how she’s been spoiled living on the sunny west coast, plentiful with its bright sun and blue skies. She’s forgotten how the weather here is much less forgiving, how it can be dry and sunny one moment then pouring down rain the next.

  She leaves Hannah with Joy of Cooking and goes to check on the onions. She cracks the oven door open and the most divine aroma fills the kitchen. Perfect. She carefully eases the pot out of the oven and places it on the stove over medium heat. The onions are a beautiful golden brown. She stirs them, watching the liquid reduce until a light crust has formed on the bottom of the pot.

  She adds water and then gives it another good stir, mixing the crusty pieces back into the onions. She’ll need to do this a few more times until the onions are dark brown. As she waits for the liquid to evaporate, she takes a thin baguette from the bread basket and slices it, lining up the pieces on a baking sheet. She’ll bake them for ten minutes until they’re crisp and golden. Tomorrow when they serve the soup she’ll put a slice on top, sprinkle it with Gruyère cheese, and set it under the broiler before serving. It’s one of her favorite recipes from Cooks Illustrated and she can’t wait to eat it again herself.

  A clap of thunder shakes the walls of the house, causing her to start.

  “Did you hear that?” Hannah asks as she comes into the kitchen. She has the afghan wrapped around her body, the book cradled in her arms.

  Madeline nods her head. “I did. Cats and dogs. I suppose we have two more months of this.”

  “No, I mean I think someone is at the door.”

  The two women look at each other for a moment. Madeline listens intently, her ears alert. At first she thinks it’s a branch hitting the house but then she hears it again. A definite knock.

  “Perhaps it’s Julia,” she says, and Hannah nods though she doesn’t look convinced. There’s hardly any crime in Avalon so Madeline isn’t worried about that.