Bread Alone (33 page)

Tim Graebel syndrome. “That’s very nice of you.”

“No, really,” he says. “Just a friend. No expectations.”

I watch his face. For what, I have no idea. “Okay,” I tell him. “Thanks.”

Two weeks and one day after the wedding, my phone rings at nine in the morning and I know before I pick it up that it’s my mother.

“Hi, honey, I hope you weren’t asleep. I can never remember when you sleep in the mornings and when you sleep at night. We got home late last night.”

“No, I wasn’t in bed. How was Hawaii?” I assume this is proper etiquette for asking your mother about her honeymoon.

“It was so beautiful. We had the most wonderful time.” She sounds totally blissed out.

“Um, Mom … about the boxes …”

“I found them. Are you sure you want to throw all those pictures away, and all your wedding cards?”

“I’m sure. But I was talking about the other boxes. The ones with Richard’s things—”

“Not to worry. He’s getting everything out of your room. By the time you come home for your next visit, it’ll be just like you left it.”

“I mean the ones … in the foyer.”

“In the foyer?” She pauses. “There aren’t any boxes in the foyer.”

I can almost hear Rod Serling’s mellifluous baritone. “Wynter Morrison thinks she’s been on a trip to her mother’s house. But she’s been in … the Twilight Zone.”

“Oh. I guess … I meant to put the boxes from David down there, but I must have forgotten.”

“You’re absolutely certain you want to get rid of all that?”

“He came over the day after the wedding. He told me he’s going to marry Kelley. I got the papers.”

She sucks in a breath. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. That dirtbag! That—”

I laugh. “Mom, don’t waste your breath. I’ve got a good lawyer. I’ll do okay.”

“It’s not just the money, it’s the way he’s … He’d better hope he never runs into me again. Wait till Barbie finds out she’s just the flavor of the month. He’ll do the same thing to her, you mark my words.”

“You don’t look so good,” Linda says. “You sick again?”

I glare at her. “I can’t be sick again, since I was never sick before. I’m just depressed, that’s all.”

She snorts. “You got nothin’ to be depressed about.” I reach up on
the top shelf over the sink, pull down a stack of aluminum bowls. “Do ya?” I slide my hands into the heavy oven mitts, take the sheet pans out of the oven where the day crew left them to dry, put them on the cooling racks. “You ain’t gonna be bakin’ bread for long,” she persists. “Your husband’ll come sniffin’ around again pretty soon. Take it from me, they always do.”

I have a vision of David on all fours, sniffing my leg. “It so happens that he’s just filed for divorce,” I shoot at her.

She grins with all her stubby little teeth. “You can still make his life hell, even if you ain’t married. I did.” The note of pride in her voice is unmistakable.

“Exactly how did you do that?”

“Oh, there’s ways, missy. There’s ways. You get a lawyer and they can tell you all the ways. There’s child support and there’s visitation.” “I don’t have children.”

“There’s maintenance. Every time he got a raise, I hauled his ass into court.” Her features are smooth with satisfaction.

“But he got drunk. He hit you. I thought you didn’t want anything to do with him.”

“ ‘Course I didn’t.” She rolls her eyes like I’m an idiot. “But I wanted to make his life hell. And I did. From the time I kicked him out, he never had a moment’s peace.”

“But neither did you,” I point out.

She smiles with grim satisfaction. “It was worth every minute.”

Phone calls at the bakery between midnight and 6 A.M. are almost always wrong numbers. For the occasional heavy breather or bored soul who wants to know what kind of underwear we have on, Linda keeps a police whistle next to the phone, the better to shatter their eardrums with, my dear. I always worry that some pervert will sue the bakery for injuries that prevent him from practicing his profession, but that’s probably a California sensibility.

When she answers the phone about twelve-thirty that night, I brace
myself for the blast, but she adopts her habitual look of disgust and holds the receiver out to me. My stomach sinks. I have three options. My mother is deathly ill. CM’s been in a car accident. My house is on fire.

Instead, a man’s voice says, “Wyn! I can’t believe it. I’ve called every bakery in Seattle. I was beginning think you’d gone into the witness protection program.”

“Who is this?”

“Gary Travers. I’m at the Edgewater for a few days on business. I was wondering if I could take you to dinner tomorrow night.”

I hesitate, recalling our last and only encounter. Maybe he wants to take me to dinner so he can slip arsenic into my soup.

“Unless you’re still mad at me,” he adds.

The room has gone stone-silent. From the corner of my eye, I can see Linda walking on tiptoe. She fairly quivers with attention, like a dog with its ears up, whiskers twitching.

“Of course not. Dinner would be nice.”

“Tomorrow night, then? About seven?”

“Sure.” I give him directions to my house, hang up, and resume oiling pans for cinnamon-raisin bread. Linda’s about to have a fit.

“‘Zat your ex?”

“Nope.”

Silence except for the swish of the brush and the rhythmic lunging of the Hobarts. “You’re not s’posed to take personal calls at work, you know.”

I smile. “Sorry. Normally I wouldn’t, but it was my brother.”

“Your brother?”

“He lives in San Francisco and he’s up here on business. We haven’t seen each other since our parents got married …”

“Since your parents got married?”

“So we thought we’d have dinner tomorrow. Catch up on family news.” I push the tray of oiled pans across the table, pull out the black binder, and pretend to study the recipe for cheese bread.

Canlis is the kind of restaurant my father would have liked. Cantilevered over Lake Union at the south end of the Aurora Bridge, it simulates being inside a Christmas tree ornament, suspended in the dark, while lights that could as easily be candles or stars as headlights shimmer below. The place seems suspended in time as well, an old-style, expense-account watering hole, featuring hunter-gatherer slabs of red meat and premium cabernets. The servers all wear kimonos, which strikes me as odd, but they move easily in them, seeming to glide rather than walk.

We’re early for our reservation, so we sit at the piano bar drinking vodka martinis and observing the salespeople and their clients, who seem to be the occupying majority. I don’t really like vodka, but I love the tunneling warmth of it going down. And the olives.

After a few sips, I gather the courage to say, “I have to know. What happened to the boxes of your dad’s stuff that I jettisoned down the stairs?”

Gary’s had a haircut since the wedding, and he looks older, in a pleasing way, less like a refugee from a
Partridge Family
rerun. “I closed them up and put them in the den.”

“You came all the way back to the house for that?”

He shrugs, almost embarrassed. “I thought it would be easier on everyone if they didn’t come home and find a mess.”

“That was a really nice thing to do. I guess it’s lucky I was too drunk to push them all down. I feel like such an idiot.”

“Don’t. I understand why it happened.” That makes him one up on me. He pushes a lock of thick brown hair off his forehead. He smiles. “Now it’s my turn. Why did you introduce me to that guy as ‘Howard’s son’?”

I suck the pimiento out of my olive, nearly choking on it. “I know your father’s a great guy, he just reminded me of—Did you ever read
The Fountainhead?”

His laugh explodes, startling the couple on his left. “Man of granite, buildings of steel. Or vice versa. Except Howard Roark had flaming-red hair.”

“I always thought that was a mistake.”

“Yeah. Men of granite shouldn’t be carrottops.” He finishes his drink and declines a refill. “So tell me, Wynter Morrison, what are you doing up here?”

“Making bread.” I stir the ice around and around in my glass.

“That’s not what I meant.” At this juncture, the hostess comes to seat us. After we’re settled and he’s ordered wine and people have ceased fluttering around us, he says, “Back to my question.”

I look over the menu at him. “Gary, knowing my mother as I do, I’m quite sure you’ve heard more about my life than you ever wanted to know.”

He gives me the sleepy-eyed smile. “I’ve heard a few things, but nowhere close to everything I want to know about you.”

“The short version is, I’m separated and my husband’s just filed for divorce. What about you? You live in San Francisco, right?”

“Larkspur. Marin. And don’t think I didn’t notice that extremely smooth transition. I’m divorced. One year tomorrow. But we’re good friends.”

“How very Marin.”

“I guess so. But we have two kids, so it makes things easier.”

“How old are they?”

“My son is eight. His name’s Andrew. My little girl Katie’s ten.”

“You’re not an architect, are you?”

“I park cars.”

“Where?”

He grins. “I have a small company. Contract valet parking for events and businesses.”

“So what are you doing up here?”

“Growing the business. I’ve been chasing some clients up here for about six months now. Seattle’s a funny town. They don’t much like out of towners.”

“Particularly Californians.” I smile.

“So I noticed. But it looks like a couple of them are finally coming around. I could be up here making a pest of myself every two or three weeks for a while.”

The kimonoed waitress is back to take our order. When she leaves, I arrange the silverware, lining all the handles up abutting the edge of the table.

“Wyn.” No choice now but to look at him. “I’m sorry if I’m making you uncomfortable. That’s not my intention at all.” His golden-brown eyes are looking very puppylike.

“You’re not.” The chain strap of my purse slips between my fingers and then back the other way. “I’m just … not used to this. I mean, I’m not even divorced yet. It all feels very strange.”

He touches my hand lightly with two fingers, then withdraws. “Believe me, I know exactly what you mean. I just went through it myself. At the same time, though—”

“Sir?” The sommelier presents the wine with great ceremony and we have to go through the sniffing-and-tasting ritual. Gary gives each step of the process his full attention, focused, unhurried, but never dropping the thread of his thoughts.

“At the same time, though, I have to tell you that I’m extremely attracted to you.” A pause. “I think it was the dominant way you ordered me back to the kitchen that day.”

A lot of the tension dissipates when I laugh. “That was my Hancock Park mistress-of-the-castle persona.”

“And you wear it well.”

“Not too well, I hope.”

Dinner is good, conversation pleasant, not overly intense, although there’s a purposefulness about him that makes me wary. This isn’t a man who does anything casually. By the time we’re finished, I’m relaxed enough to agree to a brandy at the piano bar.

He tells me about his kids; he and his ex share custody.

“How does that work?”

“They’re with me one week, then with Erica one week.”

“That seems like it would be difficult on them, shuttling back and forth. What about school?”

“They’re in private school, so that’s not a problem.” My brain is calculating the cost of private school in Marin for two children. “We’ve made their rooms as similar as possible in both houses so it’s not too jarring. Complete set of clothes at both places. We try to keep it as stress-free as possible for them.”

“What about for you and her?”

The laugh lines etched around his eyes and mouth are plainly not all from laughing. “We can deal with it easier than they can. Still, it’s hard. There’s no denying that. Sometimes when I’m driving all over the Bay Area I think it might be smarter if we shared a big house. Or got condos in the same building or something. But I guess that would have its own set of problems.”

We walk slowly up the gravel driveway. “I’m glad you called. I enjoyed seeing you.”

“Did you enjoy it enough to do it again Friday?” “Gary …”

“Too pushy? That’s a bad habit of mine.”

“No, it’s not that. I’m just … everything’s so tentative with me right now.”

“I understand.”

I fish the key out of my purse and insert it in the dead-bolt lock. I’m hyperaware of him standing right behind me, closer than necessary, closer than I want, but the heat radiating off his body tugs at me. I want to lean back against him. I know if I turn around now, he’ll kiss me. I do and he does.