Audrey and Geoff gave Estrella the week off and started working again the next day, the moment the crime scene was cleared. None of the damage made baking bread impossible. Even more simply, making bread and feeding it to hungry people was what they did—what they would continue to do as a couple.
With one bandaged arm in a sling, Ed helped his parents nail sheets of plywood into the frames that awaited new picture windows. He cleaned up the bloodstains in the storage room left behind by Coach Henderson’s wounds, and Geoff scrubbed up the small pool that had gathered under Jack’s shoulder after his own man’s gunshot caught him on the collarbone, inches away from a deadly hit. Jack dropped the detonator, which didn’t go off, but he kept his wife’s silver necklace locked in his closed fist, even while they carried him out to the ambulance.
Audrey pulled Geoff away from the pastry case that bore the evidence of Ed’s injuries after Geoff stood staring at it for several minutes, unable to shake off how close his son had come to dying. She cleaned up that horror and sent the guys for a carryout dinner.
At five the next morning, Geoff turned on the lights in the dining room as it began to fill with the scents of rising grains and toasted herbs. Diane rose early from the guest room at her father’s house and drove the cruise ship to the bakery to help take over some of Estrella’s tasks. Her father followed at six, unannounced, and sat himself down at the same table where Geoff had once pulled out her chair. After a moment’s surprise, Diane took him a hot carrot muffin and told him it was on the house. When she rang it up at the register and tried to slip her own cash into the drawer, Geoff shut it and said it was time for her break.
Audrey watched all this from the worktable in the center of the kitchen, where she could see into the dining room while she shaped round loaves of rosemary-potato bread with flour-coated hands and then slashed the tops with a razor to form a slightly lopsided cross.
“You’re better at this than I am,” she said when Geoff came back in. “Mine always look like I used a chain saw.”
“It’s your special flair. They’re perfect.” He kissed her temple and she patted the side of his face, placing a clownish flour print there on purpose. He grinned and pretended not to know what she’d done, then began scooping up the loaves and sliding them onto the oven’s hot platform.
They worked in a comfortable cycle through the morning while Ed and Diane took care of people. Audrey and Geoff kneaded, proofed, and shaped, loaded and unloaded the ovens, scraped down the tables and spread them with fresh flour, and filled the dented industrial mixer with the same four basic ingredients of bread many times over.
While Audrey worked, a tiny pressure like a dull drill pressed down on her sternum. She tried to ignore this sensation, insisting to herself that it was only in her mind even when Geoff saw her place her palm over her heart and asked her if she needed to go home and rest. Of course she refused. She wanted today to look and feel and operate just like any other day before Jack’s and Julie’s breakdowns. She wanted it to be this way, as normal as normal could be—in spite of the plywood boards in the window gaps and the uncharacteristic sunshine on the other side of them.
The sunshine should be enough, she thought. Why wasn’t it enough to restore her sense of peace?
The drill probed the bony protection around her heart, and she kept thinking of Julie, inconsolable Julie who had rejected her sympathy twice. What more was there for Audrey to do?
She worked pensively through the day. Two o’clock, and the delivery of the last French and Italian loaves from the ovens, seemed to come hours early. By three, the baskets, shelves, and cases were nearly empty, and Ed loaded the few leftovers into bags for the soup kitchen down the street.
Audrey set aside a loaf of rosemary-potato bread without thinking too hard about why she did it. Rosemary for remembrance, the saying went. What was she trying to remember? She wasn’t planning to cook supper that night.
People lingered in the afternoon light that warmed the front room as the aromas waned and the ovens were shut down. Harlan and Diane left together to visit Cora Jean’s grave, then to take supper to Juliet. Leslie, still clearly shell-shocked, courageously came into the bakery with her parents, who brought fresh steaks and profuse thanks for Geoff and Ed’s care of their daughter during the crisis. They shared gratitude that their families were still intact.
Leslie asked for permission to put a cheerful paper-covered box on the counter that bore snapshots of Jack, Julie, and Coach. A sign on the slotted top said Please offer your prayers and support for our friends’ recovery.
Geoff placed it squarely in front of the cash register.
“Eat well tonight,” Mrs. Wood said. “Together.”
The Woods’ plans to visit Coach Henderson at the hospital next prompted Ed and Geoff to hang up their aprons and follow suit.
Audrey didn’t rush anyone away. She made kind small talk with the stragglers and sidestepped invasive questions about Jack and Julie with the practiced grace of a pastor’s wife. Perhaps there wasn’t any difference in this new role after all.
When the last customer left, she swept up the dusty floor. She wiped down tables without seeing them, thinking of the people who had gathered around the round tops, and the men who would, God willing, sit down with her at the dinner table tonight. Eat well, together. They would, as they always did.
Gratitude overwhelmed her.
But there was another family in town who might not ever eat together again, who perhaps had not truly shared the blessings of a joint meal in months. Years. The sadness of this bore down on Audrey until she finally gave into it, as she should have from the beginning.
She locked up the front, drew the curtains, and turned on the security lights. She shouldered her purse and hugged the rosemary bread and let herself out the back, where her car was parked.
Audrey’s heart was thumping as never before, fearing another rejection. She didn’t understand the peculiarities of this situation, the ridiculous fear. She’d been rejected on other occasions. Good grief. Her gift of Geoff’s bread had been mocked now and then. There was nothing at stake today, nothing for her to lose.
Until she realized that the fear was not for her own well-being, but for the one who might not know what she really needed until it was far too late.
She drove past the city courthouse and wondered where Jack was being treated. The consequences he faced were out of their hands, overtaken by the district attorney and anyone who threatened to file a civil suit against the detective. The Woods had suggested that was something Coach Henderson ought to do. Audrey and Geoff already knew they wouldn’t. Geoff had lightheartedly claimed that punishing Jack with daily visits would be revenge enough, then looked appropriately embarrassed when he was the only one who laughed. His jokes were like her bread-dough slashes, and she did smile at his effort.
Audrey steered the car around the public hospital and saw Geoff’s truck in the lot near the main entrance. She wondered if he might think to drop in on Julie, if the Halls weren’t already there. Julie would have her own legal price to pay eventually. Apparently the city frowned on people who left their vehicles unmanned in dark intersections and poured their blood out on the street and monopolized the taxpayers’ resources.
For that matter, Audrey was expecting a citation and fine from the National Park Service for destroying the road barrier. At least she hoped that would be her only punishment.
Six more tree-lined blocks brought her to an old residential area of modest homes. She drove to the one that belonged to Jack and Julie, who might never return to the house even if free to do so. Audrey parked in the driveway and leaned over to scoop the bagged rosemary loaf off the passenger seat.
She walked to the front door and wondered what she might have done differently the first time she was here if she’d been able to foresee all that came after. The question that was powerless to change the past, though the answer would forever inform her future.
The drilling in Audrey’s heart had brought her here, confident that Miralee wasn’t keeping vigil at her mother’s side or running away to complete her college term. The survivor’s guilt that accompanied this particular kind of regret was the emotion that Audrey recognized as being different from Julie’s grief, an impenetrable, victimized sadness that degraded into selfishness.
She had a sneaking maternal suspicion, in fact, that Miralee had never actually enrolled at Davis but had merely escaped her home, which was decimated in her absence. And now, like Julie, where was Miri to go?
Audrey knocked, and no one answered.
The ache in her chest deepened.
She pounded again.
Through the closed door she heard Miralee say, “Now’s not a good time.”
Audrey sighed. Now, of course, was the only time. She knocked more gently but spoke loudly enough to penetrate the door. “You shouldn’t be alone right now, hon.”
Miralee refused to answer and seemed to be waiting for Audrey to give up.
“Okay, girl, I’m ready for history to stop repeating itself!” Audrey said, and a flock of birds wintering in the oak tree scattered. She strode back down the walkway and past her cooling car, entered the side yard through the gate, and marched around to the rear of the house. Just like the last time she’d entered uninvited, she walked straight through the garage and into the kitchen through the unlocked door.
Miralee was standing at the kitchen sink with her back to Audrey, looking out through the window across the faded winter lawn. Her lack of surprise tipped off Audrey right away. The girl had hoped that Audrey would kick in the door of her tough exterior.
Why oh why weren’t people free to just say what they needed? Life would be so much simpler. Less interesting, perhaps, but simpler.
Audrey closed the door. The pressure clamping down on her heart eased up enough for her to take a deep breath.
“I see you didn’t pay much attention in your Security for Single Women seminar,” Audrey said.
“I was never as good a student as Ed,” Miralee said. “He should never have lost his acceptance. I’m sorry about that. Really.”
The plastic of the bread bag was slick in Audrey’s palms. She placed it on the counter at Miralee’s elbow, and the crinkling sound caused the girl to turn and look. She placed both hands on top of the loaf, feeling its roundness through the protective covering.
“I didn’t think you’d come in this time. You know, without the high stakes—without having to save anyone’s life.”
“How about your life?”
“That’s overstating it a bit, isn’t it?”
“You tell me.”
Miralee sighed. “I think they’re going to keep Mom in the hospital for a while. Wait for the infection to clear up. She has a suicide watch note posted outside her door, but no one would talk to me about that.” She untwisted the tie and opened the bag, then held the bread up to her nose.
“It would be a terrible thing to lose your mother that way. I can’t imagine.”
“It would be worse to turn out like she has.” Miralee hugged the bread to her chest then, and faced Audrey. “Did I actually say that? I didn’t mean it. I love my mom.”
“I know. Of course you do.”
“It’s just, I never thought I’d see her the way she was up in that cabin, like a sick little baby, like a nutcase. I was supposed to leave home, and she was supposed to stay here, to be here whenever I need to come back. She’s . . . she’s supposed to be my mom.”
Audrey took a step toward her and cupped her palm protectively around Miri’s elbow. Her fingers tingled. “I don’t think Julie expected you to see her like that. If she’d known you’d come . . . well, it’s impossible to say.”
“I hate hospitals.” Miralee tore off a chunk of the bread and placed it in her mouth.
Pungent rosemary scents filled Audrey’s nose.
“I hate the way they smell,” Miri said around the food. “The way you have to beg and wait for some shred of good news. They expect you to be patient and optimistic. That’s unreasonable, if you ask me.”
Audrey nodded. Miralee chewed and stared at the tile floor. She tugged another piece free of the loaf and held it up to her lips.
“Mom told me to leave,” she said without biting the food. “She didn’t want me . . . with her.”
“Oh, Miralee. I’m so sorry.” Audrey leaned against the counter and placed her arm around Miralee’s shoulders. “We hardly know how much we hurt the ones we love when our own hearts are split wide open.”
“She had so many other options besides leaving like that. She didn’t have to do to my dad what he did to her! It’s unending misery! For me.”
“I doubt your mom realized what would happen when she made those choices.”
“Why not? She should have.”
“Did you—when you set up Ed and then ruined my husband’s career? Did you ever think it would go this far?”
Miralee sagged against the counter, shaking her head. “I don’t know what to do.”
“You don’t have to figure that out tonight.”
“I don’t even know whether to go to sleep or stay awake.”
Standing at Miralee’s side, Audrey squeezed her in a gentle hug and felt the muscles of the girl’s back tense. She shifted, reading the flinching as a request for space, but then Miralee started to cry and turned in toward Audrey’s arms, squashing the bread between them.
“Please tell me what to do.”
It was easy for Audrey to be a mother, the most natural role in the world for her to step into. This time she didn’t try to avoid the pain and wasn’t afraid of what it might do to her. She surrounded Miralee with her arms and invited the girl’s heartache to become her own, all the confusion and fear and anger and doubt, so that it would be easier to bear.
“Come home with me,” Audrey said.
“Then what?”
“We’ll decide that later. For now, don’t be alone. That’s all you have to figure out.”
“I . . . I can’t. Ed . . . Geoff . . .”
“Will be the first to forgive you. Though an apology would be good for everyone.”
Miralee pulled away, snuffling. She noticed the damage she had done to the bread. “I wish I had more answers.”
“Me too.”
“More chances to get things right the first time.”
Audrey knew exactly what she meant.
“This is really good bread,” Miralee said, finally eating her second piece.
“Let’s go, then.” Audrey opened the garage door. “I’ve got more of it at home.”