Sex & Sourdough (24 page)

“Three years?”

Jennifer blinked away tears and looked up at the customers-turned-audience staring at them. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “We’re going to have to close early.” The line of people filed out slowly, some grumbling, some smiling anyway.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

One of the last men to leave flipped the open sign on the front door over. “It’s all right, Jen,” he said. “If you can find Kevin, bring him home.”

She nodded and wiped at her eyes. When the front of the bakery was empty, she wiped her eyes again, dried her fingers on her apron, and held out her hand to him. “I’m Jennifer, but I guess you knew that.”

“Anders.” He shook her hand. He stood up and pulled her to her feet. “I’m sorry for making a scene, I…. Kevin and I spent the past four months hiking together. The last thing I expected when I tried to catch up with him was to hear that he had a heart attack right after I left. Well, everyone said he had a heart attack, but I figured it was probably something with the lupus. Maybe his heart or lungs, but….” Anders shrugged. “I didn’t imagine he could actually be dead. When you said he was gone…. Are you okay?”

Jennifer was wringing her hands and had become deathly pale. “What are you talking about?” she whispered, fresh tears streaming down her cheeks.

“His disease, systemic—”

“Systemic lupus erythematosus,” she whispered, shaking her head frantically. “He can’t have that. He can’t have that!” She covered her mouth and nose, trying to keep herself from hyperventilating. “He can’t have that!”

“He’s been gone for three years?” Anders asked. “He never told you he was sick, did he? Fuck, I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Shouldn’t have said anything!” Jennifer shrieked. She reached out and smacked Anders’s shoulder. “He should have said something! Where has he been all this time? Has he been sick for the past three years? Has he been to a doctor? Where is he?”

“I… I don’t know. I’m sorry I don’t have those answers. He was on the Appalachian Trail, just inside of Massachusetts, when he started having heart problems. A local woman took him to the hospital. The hospital staff told me they couldn’t give me any information except that he wasn’t a patient there anymore. That’s all I know. I was hoping to find him here.”

“After all this time…. He’s been sick all this time….”

“I’m sorry.”

She stopped bothering to wipe her tears away. “My mother works the early shift, doing most of the baking. She’s home now…. Will you come home with me to talk to her? It would break her heart to know someone came through with news and she missed it.”

“I’ll come,” he agreed.

The house was just what Anders would have pictured Kevin growing up in. It was an old country home with a steep roof, small bedrooms, sturdy wood furniture that looked as if it had been through several generations of small children, and a kitchen that belonged in an interior design magazine. The kitchen was larger than the rest of the house combined, with a large table, a breakfast bar, two ovens, and a built-in stone pizza oven. Unlike the picturesque kitchens in magazines, and the one in his family’s home in Florida, this kitchen was filled with all the culinary clutter that came with life that revolved around food.

“Mom!” Jennifer shouted, setting her things down on a small side table covered with junk mail and gadgets. “Please, sit down, make yourself at home. She’s probably in her office.”

Anders sat down at the large oak table. In less than ten seconds, he was assaulted by the biggest cat he’d ever seen. It leaped into his lap before he even saw it coming, and it was so fat it drooped over both sides of his lap. It stared at him with condescending eyes that seemed to both insult him and demand attention at the same time.

“Are you Budapest?” he asked the cat. He wasn’t used to cats, but a skittish horse couldn’t be that much different. He held his hand up and let the cat sniff the back of his knuckles. She began to purr immediately and rubbed her temple over his knuckle. “There’s a good girl,” he whispered. He scratched behind her ears with his other hand. The cat began to purr louder and shut her eyes. Then she bit him.

“Ah! No!” Anders said sharply. The cat stared at him, her golden eyes confused and angry at the same time. She started purring again a second later.

“Pest, get down!” An older woman with dark black hair hurried into the kitchen and shooed away the cat. The giant furball slunk down and hid under his chair. The woman froze when she saw Anders. “Hello. Who are you and what are you doing in my house?”

Anders scratched the back of his head. “Did Jennifer find you? She asked me to wait here….”

“Oh, you’re a friend of Jen?” The woman relaxed. “What on earth is that girl doing home already? And my goodness, young man, what happened to your face?”

“Bit of a fight.” Anders touched the three gashes across his cheek, each sealed with medical grade superglue. At first, he’d been grateful to get the glue instead of stitches, but the glue had been on so long it was starting to flake off and it itched like mad.

“Hope you won. I’m Gwen. Can I get you something to drink?”

“A glass of water would be great.”

“You sure? I’ve got iced tea, every flavor of diet soda on the planet, and brandy. It’s too early for brandy, isn’t it?”

Anders shrugged. “I don’t know. My mom is a big fan of mimosas with Sunday brunch, provided they contain more champagne than orange juice. Iced tea would be great, though, I’ve been driving for….” Anders shook his head. “I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been driving.”

“Your mom sounds like my kind of gal.” She pulled three tall glasses out of a high cabinet and filled them with iced tea.

Budapest jumped up into Anders’s lap again, this time digging her claws into his thighs. “Buddha!” Anders hissed. He picked the cat up and stared at her. She looked furious at being manhandled. “If you want to be held, no claws!”

Gwen gaped at him. She brought one of the glasses of iced tea to the table, set the second glass in front of the empty chair beside him, and then sat down across the table. “Pest doesn’t usually like people. I’m surprised she’s not hiding in the basement.”

“I’m not really used to cats,” Anders admitted, rubbing the huge creature’s ears. “She seems sweet, even with the teeth. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a house cat this size.”

“She’s supposed to be on a diet,” said Gwen. “She’s been on a diet for years now. I don’t know how she’s still so huge. So how long have you and Jennifer known each other?”

“About twenty minutes. And I don’t think your cat’s fat.” He picked up the cat again. “You’re just big-boned, aren’t you?”

“Twenty minutes?”

Anders knew this wasn’t going to go well. He wasn’t sure just how it might blow up in his face, but he knew that the actual explosion was inevitable. Better, he supposed, to just get it over with. “I’m a friend of Kevin’s. We’ve spent the past few months hiking together, but I had some school issues and he had some medical issues and we got separated. I couldn’t find him, and no one knew what had happened to him, so I thought maybe he’d gone home. Since the only thing I knew about his home was that he was from Bishop, and that his family owned a bakery….” Anders shrugged, hoping the rest would come together without an explanation. He rubbed Budapest’s back and tried not to flinch as she bit him again. She didn’t bite down hard, but she didn’t seem inclined to remove her teeth from his hand, either. “As soon as I smelled his sourdough, I knew it was the right bakery.”

Gwen stared at him quietly for a long time, not saying anything.

“Oh.” Jennifer hurried back into the kitchen. “You’re in here! Mom, this is Anders. Anders, this is my mom, Gwen Winters. Mom, Anders… has already told you, hasn’t he? Pest! Stop that!” The cat released Anders’s hand and hissed at Jennifer.

“She’s all right.” Anders rubbed the cat’s neck. “She wasn’t actually hurting me. She’s kind of a strange cat.”

“Psychotic. She is a psychotic cat. She always kind of belonged to my dad and Kevin. She’s never liked me.”

“He talked about her,” Anders confessed. “But he said she was already old when he adopted her, so I wasn’t expecting to see her.”

“I’m sorry.” Gwen’s entire body was trembling, but her voice was steady. “But… you’ve seen my son?”

“Yes, ma’am. Although, I didn’t realize that was a big deal until I showed up at the bakery.”

“Is…. Is he all right?”

Anders cringed. “I came here hoping to find out. The medical issues he had sounded pretty serious. Like, emergency room serious. All they could tell me was that he wasn’t a patient there anymore. I know he didn’t get back on the trail, because I started looking for him too far north and then backtracked trying to find him. I even had had a forest ranger contact the northern terminus to see if he had checked in to climb Katahdin. He wasn’t there, either.”

“Katahdin? What is that?”

“The mountain where the Appalachian Trail ends. That’s where he was headed. I might have jumped the gun, coming out here…. But you hear things like ‘heart attack’ and suddenly driving for four days doesn’t seem like such a big deal.”

“Heart attack?” Gwen set her hands carefully on the table, using the smooth hard surface to stop her fingers from shaking.

“Hiking?” Jennifer snarled. “Three years he’s been missing and this whole time he’s been hiking!”

“I really doubt he had a heart attack,” Anders said quickly. “Kev is in great shape. He could hike circles around me while carrying around five extra pounds of flour. But he’s also been trying to manage his lupus with medication, and from what I’ve read, it’s a disease that can change fast.”

“I’m sorry…. What?” Gwen smiled, but her entire face went pale. “That’s not possible. That’s….” She shook her head frantically and looked at her daughter. “Is this some kind of joke?”

Anders tried to keep his voice calm and soothing. “He told me he was diagnosed a few months after your husband died. As far as I know, he’s receiving treatment. I know he’s careful about his medication.”

“No!” Gwen shot up from her chair, almost knocking it over. The cat dug her claws into Anders’s thighs again. “No! Kevin wouldn’t do that! If he developed lupus, he’d have said something! He wouldn’t have just left! This is the sickest joke I have ever heard!”

“He….” Anders wished he knew what to say. “I can’t say why he left. But he’s spent the past three years living out of a backpack, trying not to get close to anybody so nobody will become attached to him. He told me that it took you months to come back to yourself when your husband died. I don’t think Kevin would ever want to make you go through that again, and he can’t seem to see anything else in his future except the disease.”

Gwen shut her eyes. The smile she’d been fighting to maintain melted into an agonized grimace. She shook her head again. “No…. That can’t be right. He’s just too young. He needed to get away. He needed a break. He… No….”

Over the oven, a timer beeped. Jennifer and Gwen both didn’t seem to hear it. “Scoot.” He shoved Budapest to the floor and went to oven. He turned off the timer and noticed that the top oven was on. He peeked inside and was overwhelmed by the smell of sweet roasted garlic. A round loaf of bread was sitting right on a large terracotta tile, so he didn’t dare try to pull it out. He turned the oven off instead.

“I’ll get that,” Gwen said quickly. She moved around the oven on autopilot, pulled a short-handled pizza peel off a hook on the wall and used it to pull the bread out of the oven. She set it on another tile built into the counter, closed the oven, and hung the pizza peel back up.

“Is that Kevin’s sourdough garlic bread?”

She looked at him with wide eyes, her grimace transforming back into a smile despite the wretched news. “Yeah. We only do it on the weekends at the shop, but I’m making eggplant parmesan tonight. It’s Kevin’s recipe. He still makes it?” She sniffled and reached for a tissue.

“He lives for it. He’s got backcountry sourdough down to a science, and it’s always incredible. He makes some kind of sourdough each day, and it always makes him smile. They even call him Sourdough.”

“I can believe that.” Gwen almost laughed. “When….” She shook her head again. “I don’t even know where to start….”

Anders’s stomach growled. “Excuse me,” he whispered. “I haven’t convinced my stomach that my body’s not hiking twelve hours a day anymore.”

Gwen patted his shoulder. “I’ll start the eggplant parmesan now. I think better when I’ve got something to do with my hands. I always make plenty, so I don’t think calming your stomach down will be that tricky.”

“Oh, I couldn’t….”

Gwen pulled out an enormous stainless steel frying pan and glared at him. “Don’t you dare. I’ve spent three years wondering if my son is dead or alive, wondering why he left, and why he’s never come back. You will stay for dinner and tell me about my son.”

“I….” Some deeply honed survival instinct surfaced, manifesting itself in the form of his Southern upbringing. “Yes, ma’am.”

Where his own mother would have sniffed, nodded, and dismissed him, Gwen cocked her head and laughed. It was an expression he’d seen on Kevin’s face a few times, and it was heartwarming to realize this woman was where Kevin had picked up the gesture. “He smiles like you do.” Anders chuckled.

“What?”

“Kevin smiles just like that. Usually when I say something stupid, though.”

“We’re not that formal, Anders. Stop that ‘ma’am’ crap.”

“Okay. If you’re feeding me, can I help out with anything?”

“No. I need to be doing something right now. Just sit down and tell me about him.”

Anders went back to the table, watched Gwen dart from one corner of the kitchen to the other and back again, and he told them about the time he and Kevin had spent together on the Appalachian Trail. He edited his story so he wouldn’t out Kevin to his family, but from the way Gwen’s expression changed, he suspected that something must have come across in his tone anyway. When he showed them pictures he’d taken of Kevin and the Mount Rogers ponies that he’d transferred to his new phone, Gwen started crying.

“I see it in his cheeks,” she whispered. “Just like his dad. Jen, go pull down that picture from our last ski trip, won’t you?”