The Walking Bread

After my conversation with Emmaline, I needed a change.

Since the moment I’d seen Laura’s husband on a daddy date with their daughter, I’d wanted to call my father. I hadn’t seen him since Em had asked me to be her eyes and ears within the Art Car Show and Ball. The event itself was still days away. In the meantime I was thinking about what to do next with the information in my head. I didn’t know how to figure out who the investors in Max’s condo scheme were, so I couldn’t do anything there. I didn’t like that Dixie had not told me where she’d worked, but that didn’t mean the omission was deliberate or calculated. She may not have seen a connection between Max and her employer. I had to remind myself that not everything had a sinister intention behind it.

But pursuing information about Vanessa was a different story. What, exactly, was a spiritual advisor, and in what capacity had she advised Max? Learning more about her was doable. Of the three possible doors I could walk through, digging into Vanessa’s background was the logical choice.

But first, ice cream.

A surprise visit to the city planner’s office and a midday sit-down with my dad was exactly what I needed. It was also what he needed, although hell would freeze over before he admitted it. Owen Culpepper always gave 100% to his job; since my mother had died, however, he’d thrown himself into his work even deeper than before. He woke up early, often heading to the office before it was light outside. He’d come home late, well after the dinner hour, well after the time when he might run into neighbors out watering their lawns or walking their dogs. He avoided people these days, and since I’d bought my own house and moved out, he came home to no one. There was nothing I could do about those things, but I could drag him out in the middle of the day.

The Santa Sofia city offices were in a nondescript flat-roofed building on the west side of town. There were no tourists here; no souvenir shops where you could buy trinkets printed with SANTA SOFIA, CALIFORNIA or LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE IN SANTA SOFIA; no crab shacks on the beach. This was where the cogs of our town turned. My dad was one of those cogs.

There were a few annexes, but the city manager’s office was in the main building. So many in similar jobs had short tenures, but my dad had been moved up through the ranks over the years, landing the top job ten years ago. He was half politician and have administrator, balancing the needs and fickleness of an ever-changing city council. He’d managed to have longevity in his job, something that was almost unheard of. He was smart and politically savvy, and knew how to function within the system, something that had served him well.

Because my dad had worked for the city for his entire career in one capacity or another, I’d been around this place hundreds of times. Even after my time in college and years spent in Austin, the clerks and assistants still knew me. The office manager, Sally O’Brien, had worked with my father for as long as I could remember. She had a good ten years on him and had always looked it, but after losing my mom, he’d caught up with her. His hair had turned to salt and pepper right before our eyes. He had melted away from his loss of appetite. Eventually he started to bounce back. We owed part of his recovery to Sally. She’d anticipated his needs, stayed by his side, and helped to ease him through the worst of it by providing normalcy to his days. She kept my dad’s office running, even when he had been unable to. There was a lot to be said for loyalty.

She had her head down as she shuffled through a stack of papers, but glanced up as I approached. I lifted my hand in a quick wave and smiled. It took her a beat before recognition set in, but when it did, she was out of her seat in a split second, her papers forgotten. She rushed around her desk, sweeping me into a hearty embrace. “Ivy, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes! I’ve been wondering when we’d see you around here again.”

She was a robust woman, several inches shorter than me—and strong as a horse. She’d had enough strength to carry my dad through his grief, and she’d done her share of helping Billy and me, too. From organizing meals to be delivered to checking in on each of us on a daily basis, she had been a rock for us all. I’d always be grateful to her for that.

I filled her in on my photography and the bread shop, and she gave me an update on her husband, children, and grandchildren, and I promised I wouldn’t be such a stranger. After another hug, I headed down the corridor to the city manager’s office, stopping at the threshold. My dad sat in his black ergonomic chair. It was a luxury he’d refused to indulge in, but finally, after years of an aching back, we indulged in it for him. It was the best Father’s Day we’d given him since Billy and I were knee-high to a grasshopper. As little kids, every Father’s Day was a treasure, but as adults, finding something that made a person’s daily life better was immensely gratifying. And that chair had done the trick.

He had his back turned to me as he riffled through the contents in a filing cabinet drawer. I watched as he walked his fingers over the tabs until he settled on two folders. He reached his hand down, but muttered under his breath as it came up empty a second later. Whatever folder was supposed to be there was not. My dad was a stickler for organization. In that one way, he and my mother were polar opposites. She was the creative type, always leaving a trail of whatever she was working on in her wake. He, on the other hand, had a different philosophy. There is a place for everything and everything had a place. Billy and I had both ended up somewhere in the middle. Neither of us obsessed how orderly—or not—our space was, but neither did we feel comfortable in a house full of scattered stuff. A missing folder would annoy me, but I wouldn’t lose sleep over it. That same missing folder would drive my father crazy.

He flicked his fingers over the files again, finally landing on the one he wanted. “How’d you get there?” he muttered to it, as if it had up and moved itself to a different spot in the drawer. As he turned to place it on his desk, I cleared my throat to announce my presence and stepped into the room. “Hey, Dad.”

“Ivy! This is a surprise,” he said. He got up, rounded his desk, and wrapped me up in a hug that lasted a beat longer than normal. Sometimes it felt as if I was his lifeline. My mom’s absence hit us all in different ways and at different times. The truth was that we were all each other’s lifeline.

“I’m here to steal you away for ice cream,” I said.

He ran his hand through his hair. Billy had gotten dark brown waves, while I’d inherited my mother’s spiraled ginger curls. But my dad’s hair had turned to gray, all color wiped clean away, never to return. I’d gotten used to the change in hair color, but I hadn’t adjusted to the changes in his face—from the gauntness of his cheeks to the downturn of his mouth, always a little melancholy now, to the new set of lines between his eyes from so many hours sitting, pondering, asking why. Why was it Anna who had died? Why had she been taken from him?

He shook his head. “I don’t know, Ivy. I’m backed up.”

I’d known he wouldn’t just drop everything to take a midday excursion at my first request, but I’d come prepared for a fight and I would not take no for an answer. “The work will be here when you get back.”

“It never goes away,” he agreed.

“You deserve a break now and then.”

“I had a long break,” he said. “Months, in fact.”

He was talking about the time after my mom died. “That doesn’t count, Dad. You don’t have to make up every hour you were gone. Your job isn’t like that.”

“I’m not trying to make up the time, but I have things that have to get done. I have a budget report that is due in a few days and a meeting with one of the council members later today,” he said.

I knew his schedule was busy, and I’d been lucky to find him in his office rather than running around here and there, politicking, but even the head honcho was entitled to an afternoon break. “Dad, it’s just ice cream. I’ll have you back in less than an hour.” And then I took him by the hand, dragged him out the door of his office, down the hall, and out of the building.

He’d continued to resist at first, but soon we were back in town and sitting at a cute little bistro table at our favorite old-fashioned ice-cream parlor. I had a hearty scoop of strawberry in a cup and my dad had a double-scoop hot fudge sundae. Eating the ice cream was easy. Making small talk, not so much. It didn’t take long before we came around face-to-face with the elephant in the room. “So those are some possible leads,” I said after filling him in, making my voice as hopeful as possible.

We were silent for a minute; then he looked into my eyes. “You being careful, Ivy?”

I met his gaze and saw his fear blazing from behind them. It wasn’t just fear for my personal safety. It was fear that I wouldn’t succeed. Wouldn’t manage to find the truth and free Billy from the accusations and the outcome of being charged with Max Litman’s murder. “Always, Dad. Nothing’s going to happen to me. Nothing’s going to happen to Billy.” I took his hand. “We’ll be okay.”

He squeezed my fingers. “I hope so, Ivy. God, how I hope so.”

It hadn’t been the uplifting trip to the ice-cream parlor I’d hoped for, but we were together and that was what we both needed. We just hadn’t known it.

An hour after I’d picked him up, I dropped him back at the city building; then I went home. Home to my old historic house on Maple Street. Home to Agatha. Home to think.