Stones for Bread (14 page)

It’s ten before Gretchen arrives—her normal time—because, as she rushes to explain, her cell phone is dead and lost, and she spent the night away from home. And Erika can’t be tracked down. So I work until the lunch crowd fades and we’ve run out of bread to sell. Then I leave Jude and Gretchen on their own and run upstairs to find the photos, and to escape the tornado around me.

It changes hands, at some point. The labor of milling grain, of baking it. Before it’s woman’s work, low to the ground and accomplished only with stone and sweat. After it becomes trade, an occupation, a man’s livelihood and a way to feed his children. Still with stone. Still with sweat.

And lower still.

The miller is an evil man
, the peasants whisper. What do they know of the soke forcing them to bring their wheat for grinding to the stranger who lives outside the gates of the city? Or that these laws compel the miller to spy into village homes to make sure no one is grinding their own grain at home?
It’s one thing to use four-legged beasts
to do his work
, the townsfolk say. But now the miller dares control the gods of water and wind, harnessing their power to turn the millstones. And as the rocks move against one another, they speak with the voices of demons, low, loud rumblings echoing through the belly of the earth. What do the peasants know, but that their freshly milled flour is returned to them mixed with sand? They accuse the miller of adding it to make it weigh more, make them pay more. Sometimes he doesn’t, as the grinding process produces the grit, the medieval conditions. Sometimes he does; after paying the lord of the manor his share, the miller has barely enough flour for his own family.

They’re in my bedroom closet, on the topmost shelf, in a manila envelope. My father must have given them to me, though I never asked for confirmation, and he never brought them up. I found the envelope in a box of measuring spoons and pot holders and other odds and ends I packed up from our own kitchen when I went away to college. There is no reason to the collection; it appears he grabbed and stuffed random handfuls into the package. He probably did because, for all my mother’s talents, keeping memories wasn’t one of them. Film canisters lingered on the counter for weeks or months before someone dropped them off at CVS to be developed. We’d look through the pictures together, laughing and pointing and smudging them, and then they’d make their journey to the attic, first perched on the bottom of the stairs waiting for someone to grab them on the way up, then on my mother’s dresser, then to a box in the dusty crawl space above the house, forgotten unless I needed one for a school project or special occasion. I marveled at my friends’ homes where photos decorated every wall, school pictures and family sessions from Olan Mills, and collage frames displaying candid shots, the remaining snapshots arranged in albums at the bottom of the bookcases and pawed through every Christmas or birthday.

I stand on a chair and take the envelope down, spread the contents over my bed. The photos with stray fingers accidentally in the frame, the blurry ones, the ones of tree branches and feet and cars parked along the side of the road, those I pile aside. And then I find it, the one I knew was here, a Polaroid of my mother. She wears a yellow apron with gathered sleeves, half turned toward the camera, toward my father, giving him a look that might find them in bed later. Her hands are deep in the dough trough, the sunlight from the window above the sink painting her brown hair gold. A streak of flour mars her cheek, so perfectly positioned that if this were a magazine advertisement, the whiteness would have been patted on with a makeup puff.

She is alive.

I sort through a few more. There’s one of my mother and me baking Christmas cookies, both of us licking dark icing from the beaters. One of Oma, pulling a loaf of German rye from her oven, hair swirled in a loose knot like grandmothers in storybooks, bread held in her terry-cloth mitts. And then one of me the same day, sitting at her table, eating a slice of the warm rye with butter and jam. I think I’m about five, in short pigtails that curl and ribbons. I loved ribbons then, wanted them in my hair all the time. I wear navy corduroy overalls and a white turtleneck, sturdy liver-colored shoes on my feet. The soles were so hard I limped until they finally broke in. But I loved the laces and called them my candy cane shoes because the two-tone cords reminded me of my favorite candy.

There are three black-and-white photos. One is my mother as an infant, posed and professional. Another is my mother somewhat older, maybe three, holding the hand of a man only captured from the waist down.
Opa
. I’ve seen so few pictures of him I can’t recall what he looks like. And then this one, of my grandmother in her wool peacoat and panty hose drooping at her ankles, one arm around my young mother’s shoulders, the other holding a paper sack of groceries,
three baguettes pointing from the top. I add this one to the others I have for Patrice Olsen. That’s five. That’s enough.

As I sweep the remaining pictures together, two more flip to the surface as if placed there intentionally by some invisible hand. My mother and me at the beach. Our Maine vacation. We’re laughing because the wind keeps blowing our hair across our eyes, into our open mouths, and my father is telling us we look better this way. Then taken moments later, another shot of all three of us, his arm over my mother’s shoulders, gently holding her hair in place. And mine too; he’s collected it in his fist, and I’m nestled against both of them, face upturned. My father whispers something into my mother’s ear and her eyes are scrunched in laughter. “Say cheese,” the stranger holding our camera instructs.
“Der Käse
,” we all say, and giggle as the man gives the camera back to my father and jogs down the sand with his dog.

Why didn’t you stay?
I squeeze the photo, smudging it.
Why couldn’t you have stayed with us?

I sense then I’m not alone. I turn, and it’s Seamus in the doorway.

“I . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.” He peers down at me. “You’re crying.”

I sniffle, touch my face. Tears stick in my eyelashes, dangle at my jawbone. “I didn’t know.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, maybe. I guess.” I wipe my chin again. “What are you doing here?”

“They told me downstairs you were up here.”

“Is Cecelia with you?”

“No.” He tightens his thumb and forefinger around his clump of beard and tries to shrink his massive frame into something smaller and less present. “I haven’t picked her up yet. I was going to, but I thought, it’s early, and, well, I’ve been thinking about you, I mean about everything going on here, and I thought maybe I could help with something or . . . something.”

“The producer asked for pictures,” I tell him, and hold one out to him. “My mother. She killed herself when I was twelve. She was bipolar.”

“I’m sorry.”

And I step into him then, because he’s there, because I need something solid and he’s nothing if not that. I lean my head against his chest and he hesitates only a flicker before tightening his arms around me, both firm and mindful. Even my father—who hugged me as much as I needed or wanted—couldn’t provide that. He wasn’t solid, not after my mother died. Her death ate away at his sturdy parts, his bony parts, his armor, leaving him spongy despite his best efforts to be strong for me.

I’m so comfortable here.
Too comfortable
. And I sway backward with the smallest hint of pressure against his arms. As soon as he feels it, he releases me and moves away.

“I have to meet with the producer now,” I say.

“Right, then.” He swings his arms, fist slapping his open palm. “I think I’ll go pick up Cecelia.”

“See you Saturday, I guess?”

“We’re on the list, I’ve been reminded by a very excited little girl. Many, many,
many
times.”

I walk him to the door and watch him as he descends the stairs in front of me, a sasquatch in this narrow corridor, hair at the nape of his neck matted with July’s heat. I wait for him to turn out of the doorway, then I run back through the apartment grabbing the
Bake-Off
binder and the photographs and go downstairs myself. Seamus is there at the bottom, sitting in the passenger seat of his truck with the door open. As soon as he sees me, he jumps out, slams the door. “I’m not stalking you, really,” he says. “I just forgot to tell you that your hair looks really beautiful.” And he walks around to the other side of the truck, dodging a few passing cars, and drives away.

Inside Wild Rise, Patrice Olsen sits at a table, waiting for me.
Gretchen gives me an arched eyebrow look as I join the producer and then continues to sweep the floor. I slip the photos across to her. Silently she looks at them. Nods. “These will be fine.”

Her words sting me with their compassion, and I know Xavier has told her everything.

Nine

Sometime later my father arrives home. It’s dark. No lights have been switched on. I hear the crinkle of paper bags, his elbow fumbling against the wall, and then a burst of incandescence from the overhead bulb. bulb.

Liesl?
he says.

I find enough voice to answer,
The garage
.

Only sounds now. My father’s parcels and keys crashing to the floor. His heavy footfalls behind me, to the kitchen. A moan.
No, no, no
. The door from kitchen to garage swinging open, banging into the wall.
Claudia. No. Oh, God, Claudia
. His voice on the phone, calling the emergency number, explaining, pleading. Another call, angry, to the doctor.

Red flashes outside the living room picture window, muted by sheer umber drapes. More pounding and scampering and heavy feet. Voices, so many of them. If my eyes are open they trace the mortar lines between the fireplace bricks. Mostly I keep them closed.

Finally, someone speaks to me. It’s not my father. I still cannot
recall who, only that it is a man, his voice soft and low and indecipherable to my traumatized ears. He puts a hand on my arm, his pale blue shirtsleeve folded to his elbow, his watch white-faced with a fat black band. With gentle pressure he lifts me from the couch, the back of my pants damp from sitting so long, from my soul sweating out, and the coolness of the air against me is startling. I’m led upstairs, to my bedroom. The arm peels down the quilt and blanket from my bed but not the top sheet. I’m helped into it, covered. The hand touches my hair.
Rest now
.

In the days following I look at arms. I don’t find his again.

We wait for Jonathan Scott to make his entrance.

I see the cameras outside, following him down the sidewalk. He’s talking, and then suddenly laughs, along with the cameraman, and he makes his way back down the street to try the take again.

Yesterday Wild Rise was transformed for filming. All the tables were removed. Lights strategically placed. Two work spaces—one for the celebrity chef, one for me—were placed toward the back of the room. I’ve claimed my station already with my baguette dough; it proofs in my mother’s dough trough, my couches folded beside it.

Patrice Olsen motions to us and holds a mini megaphone to her lips. “Ready? Here he comes.”

The crowd follows her earlier instructions. When Jonathan Scott opens the door, they cheer.