I stood back and surveyed my decorating project: refurbishing the dining alcove. “Dining” was too rich a word to describe the kind of eating I would do at the rickety faux-maple table anyway, so I disbursed all the equally-as-unstable chairs but one, filled a Daily Bread coffee mug with pens and pencils, and set up my laptop facing Puget Sound. It was now my office.
I tapped the touch pad on the computer and brought my “work” to light: The List. It was all I had to do—and that fact sank onto me like the mist hanging stubbornly over the sound.
I jittered my fingers on the surfaces of the keys and missed the clacky sound my nails used to make. I’d gnawed them down to the tips of my fingers. I’d also taken to hauling on the same pair of sweat-pants every day and skipping the eyebrow tweezing and the teeth whitening. In three weeks I had become someone I hardly recognized in the mirror. I woke up every day on the window seat, faced with nothing.
Except The List.
I drew myself up in the chair and took on my professorial posture and created a new page. GET RICH BACK went at the top. Under it, I typed
a. SEE DR. SULLIVAN CRISP
b. DO WHAT HE SAYS
I read the list again, and my eyes swam. Getting Rich back was the most important work I would ever do.
All right. Next page. I typed FOCUS ON KIDS.
CALL JAYNE
CALL CHRISTOPHER
Good grief. Here was a woman who wrote a doctoral dissertation on the role of story in spiritual growth, and yet the sight of those four words left me limp in the chair. All I had to do was pick up the phone. And all they had to do was—what? Hang up?
I reached for my cell phone, set in its charger, perfectly parallel to the laptop. I had to take this step, no matter what I might hear on the other end. At least it would be a voice I loved—even if it didn’t love me back.
As the line rang I rehearsed. Hey, Jay. It’s still early—how ’bout I take you to school and we can get caught up—
“Hello?”
For a shocked second I thought the voice belonged to Rich. It was quick and brusque and sounded as if it were in charge of the house. But it was Christopher.
“Hi!” I said.
Ugh. Too bright. Too rise-and-shine.
“Look, Demitria,” he said, “I don’t have anything to say to you.”
Demitria? Had my son called me Demitria?
“What about Jayne?” I said.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you either.”
“No, I mean is she there?”
“She already left. Did you forget her schedule—or did you ever know it?”
My throat tightened. “I know her schedule, Christopher,” I said. “She has dress rehearsal tonight, and I’d like to pick her up afterwards, so tell your dad—”
“I’m picking her up,” he said. “It would be too weird for her anyway.”
“Weird?” I said.
“Look, do you want to make her tell you to your face that she doesn’t want you around?”
I squeezed the cell phone and charged across the apartment, the other hand clamped to the back of my neck.
“What are you talking about, Christopher? Come right out and say it.”
“Okay. She doesn’t want you coming to her play.”
My neck muscles hardened beneath my fingers.
“After all this stuff that’s been in the papers, she thinks everybody knows about your ‘thing,’ and she doesn’t want a bunch of people gossiping about it when they see you there. Seriously—it would be weird for her to have to tell you to your face.”
So you’re more than happy to do it for her. I wanted to say that, and I would have, if my throat hadn’t closed over the words.
“I need to go,” Christopher said. “Anything else?”
Yes, I wanted to cry out when we hung up. Everything else.
Panic rose as I looked at the list again.
FOCUS ON KIDS
How was I supposed to focus on my daughter when I couldn’t even see her? When Christopher was sheilding her from me like a firewall? I realized I was still holding the phone—covered in my palm sweat.
I wanted to throw it across the room. It was an alien feeling, yet not as foreign as the one that came behind it: that if my son walked into the path of the flying phone, it wouldn’t bother me a bit.
Yeah. It was time to get out of there. And there was really only one place to go.
Christopher worked part time at The Good Word, a Christian bookstore in Bremerton, one of the myriad small towns that fit together into the puzzle of Kitsap County. The store, shaped like a castle turret, beckoned largely female buyers looking for the latest in Christian romance or a nice plaque for the Sunday school teacher. Christopher’s job, as I’d witnessed myself with mouth twitching, was to make them feel as if they were making such wise choices they might possibly want to expand their horizons even further.
He was in that very act when I pulled into a parking space at the gingerbread-trimmed window and watched through the drizzle on my windshield. He smiled over the top of the cash register at a middle-aged woman with a flattened perm who gazed at him as if her faith in the younger generation had been restored by his just-washed hair and the sincere nodding of his head.
My heart pounded again with the sickening urge to run from something I couldn’t escape. I fumbled feverishly with the door handle, launched myself out of the Jeep, and tore unseeingly across the parking lot.
By the time I got onto the porch of the Victorian Teahouse, across from the bookstore, I could breathe again. In came the smells of strawberry-rhubarb pie and scent-saturated candles and the perfume of women who could sit calmly sipping tea and chatting about things that only a few weeks of my lifetime ago I had cared about too. Normal things.
I longed for a little bit of normal. So with a cup of chamomile and a finely chiseled slice of raspberry cheesecake, I sat at a table in a corner and fingered the lace on the tablecloth and watched. Watched until my son emerged from The Good Word, shrugging into his Northface jacket and slinging his backpack across slim shoulders that had not yet formed into manhood. He still had that walk—stalky and forward lurching, just as it had been at ten when he’d worked so hard not to be a little boy.
He stopped abruptly, and I realized as I followed his gaze that he’d spotted the Jeep. He lurched toward it and peered inside, hands on the hood, and then straightened to scan the parking lot.
Who was this bristling slice of man-child who searched for me as if I were invading his life?
I shrank from the window. I had no idea. And I didn’t know when I’d stopped knowing who he was.
I didn’t leave the apartment for the next two days. The List was still on the computer, though it went into hibernation just like I did. The only time I emerged was Sunday morning, when I went out to empty the trash that overflowed with Mickey’s take-out containers from the refrigerator. Almost the minute I cracked the door open, she pounced as if she’d been staked out at the bottom of the steps leading up to her porch for hours. She was almost lost in a huge sweatshirt with a stand-up collar that reached her cheeks.
“I said I wasn’t going to bug you—but that doesn’t rule out checking to see if my tenant has died in her apartment.”
Her eyes slid over me, and I surprised myself with a rusty laugh. “I guess you can’t rule that out, can you?”
Mickey smiled like a wise elf, so that her eyes were sad. “Look, I don’t know what you’ve got going on—and you don’t have to tell me—”
She paused slightly, and I knew she hoped I would anyway. It made me laugh again. I sagged against the wall and folded my arms across the sweatshirt I hadn’t taken off in three days.
She peered at me intently, between two strands of the mushroom cap that separated over her eyebrows. “I’m going to go ahead and get this out,” she said. “Are you unemployed? Seriously, is that why you’re holed up in the basement?”
Hers was not a face you lied to.
“Yes,” I said.
Saying it was surprisingly like chipping off a piece of plaque from my brain. It left a breathing piece of freedom. So I added, “I had to resign.”
“Meaning you would have been canned if you hadn’t quit first,” she said. “I hate that for you.”
“I brought it on myself.” Another chunk came loose. “I had to do the right thing.”
“Which doesn’t pay the bills or get you off the couch.” She drew her neck up from the stand-up collar. “Here’s the deal. Oscar and I have been talking, and we want to offer you a job at the restaurant.”
What I did then gave new meaning to the phrase “burst into tears.”
Her smile wavered. “Is that a yes?”
“I don’t know what it is,” I said.
“It’s a step out that door. You can try it for a day or two, and if you hate it, no hard feelings. After I put you on a guilt trip, of course.”
A mischievous laugh lurked in her throat, making me nod.
“Cool,” she said, and picked up a handled bag from the step and offered it to me. “We’ll see you at seven tomorrow morning. And, uh, charming as that outfit is, we’d rather you wore the uniform. This ought to be about your size.”
She surveyed me in her open, hang-lipped, kid-staring-at-you-in-a-restaurant way. “Although I think you’ve gone down a size already since you’ve lived here. You’re required to eat whatever lunch I fix you on the job. Otherwise you’re fired.”
“Yes, Boss,” I said. Another chunk loosened itself from the hard place, and I actually felt myself smile. “This isn’t a pair of micro-shorts, is it?”
“We don’t do hooker wear,” she said.
I’d passed the Daily Bread on Main Street in Port Orchard probably a hundred times, but I had only an inkling of what it was about. The fact that it still showed a certain degree of class in spite of the paint job on Main was a point in its favor.
In the nineties, during a downtown renovation project, the design-challenged city council hadn’t been able to make up its mind how to redecorate Main Street. One night, after the petty infighting had gone on for months, a dentist and his son had painted all the balconies and storefronts the most hideous shade of bilious blue known to man.
Nothing could erase the graceful loveliness of the hill that streamed straight down to the water, but the juxtaposition of every-one-its-own-character buildings and the decorating-gone-wrong color scheme was jarring—if not a little bit embarrassing to the 8,650 of us who lived there.
But according to the city council, it was clean and done—and they were once again speaking to each other.
The Daily Bread rose above. The neat, simply penned signs that hung by hemp ropes from the main one proclaimed it to be Beyond Probiotic and Foods Prepared As Our Maker Intended. The only visions I had previously conjured up were ones of lava lamps and endlessly chanted tunes and too many wind chimes. So I wasn’t prepared for the exquisitely real simplicity that waited inside.
The walls were a soft textured yellow, exuding health. The round tables, set in uncrowded fashion, each had its own Himalayan salt lamp, which, Mickey told me a few minutes after I walked in, provided negative ions that neutralized the harmful effects of electronics such as fluorescent lighting. The minute I breathed an air that breathed with me—an air of potted rosemary and drying basil and the zest of grated lemons—I believed her.
Mickey ordered my coat off and took me on a tour.
Only tea steeped in the pots on the uncluttered sideboard, each a different color for its matching brew.
“Coffee can totally tax the adrenal glands,” Mickey told me. “We refuse to serve something that can injure the stomach and the esophagus with all that hydrochloric acid splashing up when the sphincter muscle between them relaxes too much.”
I stared at her back as she led me into the beverage area. “This is Washington,” I said. “How can you stay open without serving coffee?”
“Because people innately want to be healthy. And when they find out you don’t have to eat what looks like the weeds somebody pulled out of their garden to do it, they go ahead and try.” She turned to me in the doorway and smiled, eyes closed, so that she looked more marvelously gnome-like than ever. She opened her eyes and grinned at me. “Now, I’m starting you in beverages because I’ve already figured out you haven’t waited tables before. I’m right, aren’t I?”
I grinned back—and wondered what else she had figured out about me. My heart reached for her, yearned to tell her what was eating away at me. A woman who cared about the esophageal sphincter muscles of complete strangers might actually understand me. Even when I didn’t. I ached to get it out—like the toxins she and Oscar were so eager to purge from their customers.
I didn’t meet Oscar Gwynne until I’d made my first batch of carrot juice “cocktails,” which people, amazingly, bought and, even more amazingly, drank. I stood at the sink—trying to scrub an impressionistic-style splatter off the organic cotton T-shirt that served as the top half of the Daily Bread uniform—when he emerged from the kitchen like a fuzzy bear. A pellet of frizzy grizzly-colored hair tumbled down his neck and seemed to continue into the quarter-inch beard that filled every crevice of his dimpled, clefted, chubby face. More hair peeked out of the neck of his T-shirt and rippled on the sizable arm that stretched out to me.
“You must be Demi,” he said.
“And you’re Oscar,” I said, hand lost in his paw.
“Yes, and thank you for not adding ‘the Grouch.’” He laughed soundlessly, shoulders shaking. “Mick always does.”
“Are you?” I said.
“Absolutely not.” He reached to an upper shelf, revealing yet another generous tuft of hair on his underarm. I wanted to scratch behind his ears.
“Grouch is Mick’s MO,” he said, bringing down a half-gallon bottle of olive oil in one hand.
“I heard that.” Mickey appeared with a handful of paper slips and clipped them deftly to the revolving order holder. “Here’s a demonstration— get back in the kitchen where you belong. I need two Synergy Smoothies and a Walla-Walla Omelet with a side of sauerkraut.”
I felt my eyes widen. “Sauerkraut for breakfast?”
Mickey nodded. “Most of our regulars eat—”
“—lacto-fermented vegetables—”
“—with every meal.”
“Great for the digestion,” they said together.
A long, sparky look circuited back and forth between them. Mickey punched one of his furry arms. “So why don’t you go in there and make it happen?” she said.
“Maybe I will.” Oscar grinned hairily at me and lumbered toward the kitchen.
“Big lunk,” Mickey said.
She disappeared back into the dining room, and I knew I had just watched a couple make love.
How did you do it? I wanted to cry after her. How did you make it stay?
One thing I was certain of: Mickey Gwynne had never been unfaithful to the big lunk. And she wouldn’t be, no matter what he did.
Shoving my hair behind my ears, I went back to the juicer, turning it up high and loud so I wouldn’t have to hear the thoughts that came next. My only hope was that this Dr. Sullivan Crisp could help me shout them down for good.