Kneaded to Death

by Winnie Archer

  “Nice to meet you . . . or see you again, I guess, ma’am,” I said.

  She looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and said, “Enough of the ma’am stuff. You just call me Penny. I taught school for a million years, but not anymore. My days of ma’am are long gone.” She paused, taking in my hair, my eyes, my face. “You are the spitting image of your mother,” she said.

  Speechlessness was not usually one of my traits, but at this moment I could, quite literally, not think of anything to say. My mind felt slack. It was not that I hadn’t heard the sentiment before. I knew I looked like my mom, and I treasured that. But somehow Penny Branford expressing it cut something loose inside me.

  My dad came to the rescue. He cleared his throat and ran his fingers over his mustache. “She got all of Anna’s best qualities,” he said. I didn’t think most people would be able to detect it, but I heard the faint quiver in his voice. It had been nearly six months since my mom had died, and my dad was stoic, but the veneer cracked every now and then. This was one of those moments.

  I was stoic, too. Most of the time, anyway. I got that from my dad. He didn’t cry, and neither did I. Losing Mom had left a hole in both of our hearts, but we stuffed the empty space with bread and music and walks in the historic district, but deep down nothing could really shore up the hollowness we both felt. So, like I said, I was a tough cookie, managing my emotions on an expert level so that nobody would even know I’d lost my mom, who’d also been my best friend. But this elderly woman . . . this Mrs. Penny Branford . . . Her eight simple words had sliced into me like a blade, opening my grief like an old wound until the ache and sorrow spilled out like sand from an overturned bucket.

  “How did you know my mother?” I asked, my voice far more shaky than my dad’s had been.

  Mrs. Branford lifted her cane and pointed it at me. “How did I know her? Owen, does she know nothing?” My dad just shrugged, and she continued. “I taught your mother when she was knee high to a grasshopper, and when she went on to become a teacher herself? Why, I took that as a personal compliment.” She pressed one gnarled hand against her chest. “I am entirely sure that I am the reason she went into education, you see.”

  “What grade did you teach?” I asked, the hole inside me growing wider, a craving for information taking over. If I were pregnant, surely I’d be wanting pickles and ice cream, the feeling was that strong.

  “Ha. What grade didn’t I teach? That would be a better question, I reckon. But what you’re really asking is what grade did I teach when your mother was a girl. Am I right about that?”

  I gave a little laugh. “Yes, ma’am, er, Mrs. Branford, you are.”

  “Polite young woman,” she said, nodding with approval. She turned to my dad. “You and Anna did good with this one. Oh, don’t get me wrong. Billy’s a fine young man, too, but a sweet and polite young woman is a treasure. Anna’s smiling down this very minute. Of that I’m sure.”

  My smile faltered as each of her words fell over me like a blanket. I wasn’t sure if I felt stifled or comforted that this old woman, this Mrs. Branford, praised my parents’ raising of me and felt my mother was watching down on me. I crossed my arms, letting my right hand spread on my chest, as if it were pressing my beating heart back into submission. Mrs. Branford had stirred up emotions I’d successfully kept at bay, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to face them yet. The six months my mom had been gone felt like an eternity in some ways, but in others it felt as if it had been mere seconds, and I still couldn’t make sense of a world without her in it.

  “Your mother was beautiful. You look just like her. More importantly, she was the top student in my tenth grade honors English class,” Mrs. Branford said. “I convinced her to join the newspaper staff, which, of course, she did, and she went on to be the best staff photographer we had, and during her senior year, she was editor in chief. She could have been an investigative reporter, you know, as she was that good. A nose like a bloodhound’s, I’d venture to say.”

  “I can’t picture her as a sixteen-year-old.” My voice got a little dreamy, as I was trying to imagine her running around the high school, taking pictures, her ginger hair pulled up into a ponytail, her green eyes clear and excited, her skin freckled and fair. Sensing the emotion coursing through me, Agatha rubbed against my leg. “She was beautiful,” people said every time they told me I looked just like her. I had never internalized that sentence quite the way I had when Penny Branford said it.

  “She was smart as a whip and as strong willed a young woman as you’d ever meet. Girls from her generation, why, they had the good fortune of growing up after the sexual revolution, you know. Women’s equality had a good foothold, and she took advantage of it. Went to college. First in her family, if I remember correctly.”

  “That’s right,” my dad said. I could tell he was choked up. His eyes glistened, and his chin quivered slightly. This was a conversation I knew he wanted to have. If he didn’t, he’d have already made up some excuse and we’d have been out of here. But wanting to hear what Mrs. Branford had to say didn’t mean it was easy. I knew he felt the loss just as keenly as I did. More so. They’d shared a life for almost forty years. “She wasn’t supposed to go first,” my dad had told me through his tears after she died. “She wasn’t supposed to go first.”

  “Now you,” Mrs. Branford said, pointing her cane directly at me. “You went to college, right? Your mother told me as much, but with this old mind, I’m not sure if I’m remembering that right.”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s right. University of Texas in Austin, but I’m back home now.”

  “Penny,” she scolded, and I felt myself blush.

  “Penny.” I said the name, but it felt wrong. Presumptuous. Intimate. This woman had life experience. Wisdom. I needed the formality of her surname. She was Mrs. Branford, plain and simple.

  “And what are you doing now that you’re back in Santa Sofia? Because let me tell you something. It doesn’t do you a whip of good to come back here and wallow in your sorrow. Your mother would not have wanted that. Would she have, Owen?” She dropped the end of her cane back to the ground, the rubber-cupped base making a loud thump on the porch, and looked at my dad.

  “No. Mrs. Branford, you have that exactly right. She wouldn’t want any of us to wallow.” He wrapped his arm around me and pulled me next to him. “But I’m awful glad to have Ivy home, even if it is because Anna’s gone from us now.”

  His voice quavered, sinking into the deepest part of me, and just like that, a tear dislodged from where it had been tucked away for half a year. It fell down my cheek, a lone symbol of the love I would always have for my mom and of the sadness that seeped through me.

  “What’s going on with the Rabels’ house, Mrs. Branford?” My dad’s change of subject was the opposite of subtle, but it worked, and I squeezed his hand. Our emotions were raw and on the surface, and we’d both had enough for today.

  Mrs. Branford turned her body slowly, like a music box dancer whose tune was coming to a halt, until she faced the yellow house under construction across the street. “Nothing’s changed, Owen. As long as that Buck Masterson is next door, the Rabels are going to suffer. He’s done it to everyone on the street, one by one by one.”

  “Done what?” I asked, curious about the historic district gossip and politics.

  “Buck Masterson is a piece of work,” Mrs. Branford said. “Think of him like a virus, slowly infiltrating until he takes hold and knocks you flat on your back. He’s alienated most of the people of the neighborhood with his reports to the city. His own house is a mess, but he holds everyone else to some impossible standard, proclaiming himself to be the king of the street. The ones he hasn’t alienated are just like him. Oh, he starts out as Mr. Jovial, all peaches and cream. But underneath that smile—and it’s a smarmy smile, if you ask me—there’s arsenic. Goes with all that old lace in that eyesore of a house of his. Ha! Arsenic and old lace. That about sums it up.”

  My dad and I turned to
look at the Mastersons’ house, and I found myself agreeing with Mrs. Branford’s assessment. It was a bit of an eyesore. Old, yes. But well kept and appealing? Not so much. The faded pink color looked like watered-down Pepto-Bismol. The paint was peeling along the windowsills, and scaffolding balanced precariously on the upper-story roofline. From the looks of it, the Mastersons complaining about the Rabels’ renovation was definitely irony at its finest.

  I looked up and down the street. The sunlight beamed down on the old historic houses. No cars passed by, and the green canopies of trees rustled in the light breeze. I was struck by what it must have been like to live here when the street was young and new. This was the type of street I wanted to live on. Maybe even this street specifically. It was the place I belonged.

  “I hear you were at the bread shop when Jackie Makers died,” Mrs. Branford said. She clearly wasn’t one to beat around the bush. I liked that about her and immediately thought that Olaya Solis and Penny Branford needed to meet. They were two peas in a pod.

  “I was,” I said, nodding my confirmation.

  “I heard it was”—she lowered her voice to an ominous whisper—“murder.”

  “That’s what I heard, too.” I looked over my shoulder, as if someone might be there listening. Someone like the murderer.

  Next to me, Agatha pulled on her leash. She growled, recoiled, and then let out a high-pitched bark. She scooted back slightly, drew in a hoarse breath, then let loose a barrage of barks aimed at the street.

  “Speak of the devil,” Mrs. Branford said, notching her chin in the direction of Agatha’s attention. I turned all the way around and saw a square-faced, stocky man standing in the middle of his yard, blatantly staring at us.

  Penny Branford raised her lavender velour arm and waved. “Afternoon, Buck,” she said over Agatha’s yowling.

  His upper lip flared in what I imagined he thought was a smile. He flipped a hand up in the barest semblance of a wave before turning and disappearing around the side of his pale pink house.

  Mrs. Branford grimaced as she looked back at me and lowered her voice. “I don’t know how,” she said, “but he probably did it. He probably killed that poor woman.”

  My dad and I both stared at her. “Do you really think so?” I asked her.

  Mrs. Branford tapped her cane on her slanted porch. “Most definitely,” she said. “I think it is quite possible. Probable even. Quite probable.”

  Chapter Five

  Jackie Makers’s funeral took place a few days later at Liberty Methodist Church, which was down the street from the bakery and catty-corner to the old antique mini-mall. The pews were filled. Tears streamed down faces. Tissues dabbed eyes. Low sobs filled the sanctuary. It was an all too familiar scene, and one that I didn’t relish reliving. But I’d felt obligated to come given that I was one of the last few people to see her alive.

  “She was born and bred here,” Olaya said through her own swallowed sorrow. She looked at the townspeople all around us and pointed out folks, as if she were introducing me to the who’s who of Santa Sofia. My dad sat in one of the back pews. In the very front and on the opposite side of the church were Consuelo and Martina. “That’s Jasmine next to Martina,” Olaya said. All I could see was a close crop of black hair and a long, elegant neck with skin the color of a latte, warm and rich. “She is—was—Jackie’s daughter.”

  Jasmine was clearly a mix of her mother’s fair white skin and her father’s presumably black skin. When she turned, I caught a glimpse of her profile. She was beautiful, with a refined nose and high and defined cheekbones. From the way Olaya and her sisters had reacted to the phone call Jackie had taken from her, I’d thought she was a teenager, but now, looking at her, I placed her in her early to mid-twenties. She was one of those lucky women who would age well, with beautiful, clear skin that would keep her looking young.

  “They were talking on the phone during the class,” I recalled, not mentioning that the conversation had seemed less than amiable.

  Olaya pursed her lips. Her eyes were red rimmed, and the tip of her nose was chapped. She had cried herself out and now seemed determined to focus on anything but her grief. “They’ve had a strained relationship for a while now. More than a year. Jackie and I were good friends. Best friends, even. But she had not been telling me everything lately. She would never say anything against Jasmine, just that things were not good.”

  A stab of sorrow for Jasmine sliced my chest. No matter what their issues were about, I knew from experience that she’d never forget her last conversation with her mother. If she was anything like me, it would haunt her for the rest of her life. The last conversation I’d had with my mom wasn’t bad or drama filled. On the contrary, it was banal. Ordinary. Boring, even. It had been a normal conversation, just like the one we’d had every week since I’d moved away from Santa Sofia. I’d played the last conversation over and over and over, wishing I’d been sweeter, or that I’d apologized for the teenage years. Or that I’d told her I loved her and that she was my best friend.

  But I’d said none of those things, and it was a huge regret.

  “Have you talked to her?” I asked Olaya.

  “To Jasmine?” She shook her head. “She won’t take my calls.”

  Before I could ask her why she thought Jackie’s daughter wasn’t responding, Olaya pointed to a man I recognized. “That’s Randy Russell.”

  I’d never be able to erase Randy Russell’s face from my memory. It was seared there, right alongside Miguel Baptista’s, although for different reasons. “He’s the one Miguel was trying to talk down the day Jackie . . . died.”

  She acknowledged the connection with the faintest nod and then moved on to the man next to the ruddy-cheeked Randy. He was black, his head was bald, and his build lean and muscular. “That’s his business partner, Augustus Makers. They own the antique mini-mall across from the bread shop. Jackie and Gus were married for twenty-five years or so. They divorced about a year ago now. In case you haven’t noticed,” she added wryly, “Santa Sofia is like a soap opera. Everybody is connected to everybody.”

  I remembered that about the town where I’d grown up. The idea that it takes a village had taken root here long before Hillary Clinton wrote a book about it. Everyone was in everyone else’s business. That was just the way it was. My mom had taken the idea to heart. As a teacher, she’d been involved in all her students’ lives. As a kid, I’d been oblivious, but now I saw the benefit—and the detriment—of being too connected with your neighbors and townsfolk.

  “What were Randy and Miguel fighting about the other night? Why was he even there?” I followed the first two questions with another. “I think he should be in jail, don’t you?”

  “Randy is just a hothead,” she said, as if that explained and excused everything.

  “But what was the whole thing about?” I pressed.

  So far, Olaya had been pretty forthcoming, but this time she lifted her shoulders dismissively and her voice lowered. “I do not pretend to know what goes on in Randy’s head. We are not exactly on good terms.”

  I let my voice match hers. “Why not? What happened between you?”

  She looked over her shoulder, the silver spikes in her hair catching the light in the church. She dropped her voice a smidge more. “Randy is a . . . What is the word? A bodybusy?”

  I grinned. “A busybody.”

  “Right. Yes. A busybody. He is in everybody’s business, when none of it concerns him. Yeast of Eden is a strong business. Many tourists. Many local customers. A good reputation. The antique mini-mall, on the other hand, is hit and miss. People, especially the tourists, ask me about it when they are in the bread shop. ‘Should I stop by? Do they have authentic antiques? Is it good quality?’ I am always honest. I tell them that if they have time to poke around and search through the rubbish, then it is certainly worth a visit. It is consignment, so I cannot speak to the authenticity or quality of anything there. That is the truth, and that is what I say.”


  “And Randy got wind of that?”

  “He’s convinced it is a personal vendetta I have against him, which could not be further from the truth.”

  A thought struck me suddenly, and I drew in a sharp breath. “That night, when he was in the back parking lot, was he there to see you? Is he . . . Oh my God, Olaya. Is he off the rails? Had he come to threaten you with that billy club?”

  A look of utter disbelief crossed her face. “No. No,” she repeated firmly. She sounded convinced, but she trained her eyes on Randy Russell, sitting in the pews, and nodded once. “And yet . . .”

  He must have felt the intensity of her stare, because he turned around in his seat, his gaze met hers, and an electric charge seemed to spark between them. And not a smoldering, romantic one. No, this was more like a battle of wills, with one powerful superhero vying for power over another.

  She didn’t break her gaze with him as she spoke to me. “What had he been planning?” she mused.

  My question exactly. That antique club he’d been wielding came to mind again, and my first thought was, Thank God he hadn’t seen Olaya. But it was my second thought that made me pause. Thank God Miguel Baptista had been passing by to stop Randy Russell from inflicting harm on anyone.

  With my peripheral vision, I saw a hand come down on Olaya’s shoulder. At the same time a man said, “Ms. Solis?”

  The current connecting Olaya and Randy Russell was severed as Olaya jumped and turned around. I turned, too, and, speak of the devil, there stood Miguel Baptista.

  “Miguel,” she said. “Cómo estás?”

  “Bien, señora. Y tu?”

  “Así así,” she said, waggling one hand to show how she was feeling.

  He hadn’t looked at me yet, and I took a step backward to avoid an awkward encounter and let him say whatever it was he needed to tell Olaya, but, damn him, he was a gentleman. Slowly, a polite and slightly crooked smile graced his face. He always had been chivalrous, even back in high school. He moved to the side as he looked at me; he hesitated, as if working to place my familiar face. Something in his expression changed, his smile dropped, and his face seemed to tighten.