The Baker's Wife (4 page)

Diane doubted it. “Duh on me,” she said, faking a laugh.

“No worries. I heard the door slam and remembered I didn't lock up after I restocked the paper goods this morning.”

He must think she was a sinister person. She descended, afraid now because she needed to get in touch with her distant past, but it seemed her recent past was going to be forever in the way.

“I'm an ex-con,” she blurted. She would either affirm his worst fears or allay them—a truthful ex-con was better than a dishonest one, right? “I just got out two months ago.”

He nodded as if she had said this was a great town to live in. “Well, I'm an ex-pastor,” he said. “And I just got out four months ago. Maybe we've got some things in common.” He laughed at that, but she didn't. Geoff cleared his throat. “Besides my knack for flat jokes. I never did master that part.” He pointed with the broken muffin to the ladies' room. “Here you go. If you want, come into the kitchen when you're done. I'll get you something else to eat.”

Diane watched him push his way back into the dining room, disbelieving his unaffected reaction. In two months the number of outsiders who continued speaking to her after they learned she had a criminal record was one. This one, this former pastor. She wondered if he regretted having pulled out that chair for her. Maybe she should have just said,
I'm a killer, you shouldn't invite me
in like this! What if I kill you too?
Maybe that would shake him up.

She opened her mouth, daring herself.

There was no time for words. From the street that passed the bakery outside, the ear-drilling sound of colliding metal and breaking glass came straight through the thin walls as if it were coming for her.

CHAPTER 3

In the Great Central Valley of California, fog settled like dead bread dough in a bowl: dense, heavy, unwilling to rise. Audrey sat erect in the driver's seat and hugged the steering wheel, fingers gripping twelve o'clock and elbows squeezing the sides, as if pulling her body forward would help her to see the road better. Her car schlepped along at fifteen miles an hour, which was too fast for these conditions but a risk she was willing to take. It was five in the morning, she was late to the bakery, and traffic was light. She'd seen only one vehicle on this rural road in the last ten minutes— a pickup transporting field-workers toward the pecan and orange groves for harvesting.

In the passenger seat her son yawned, his maw wide enough to drink the scented air that poured through his open window. Plowed earth. Barley seeds. Winter on its way after the most brutal summer their family had ever endured.

Ed rested his head on the doorframe. When he regained control of his mouth he said, “You and Dad've gotta hire another person.”

“We hired you,” Audrey murmured, straining her eyes to keep track of the street's white fog line on the right and dashed yellow lane divider on the left. Her own headlights worked against her efforts, bouncing off the waterlogged air and glaring into her windshield. But it was that or drive in blackness.

“I mean someone who
likes
getting up when the rest of the world is going to sleep.”

She chuckled. “Again, that'd be you.”

“If you were running a nightclub maybe.” He crushed his eyes with the heels of his hands and rubbed.

“It's good of you to help like this. Your dad and I appreciate it. We really do.”

Ed sniffed and said something under his breath. Audrey shot a glance at him, then tried to refocus on the barely visible road.
Hypocrites
, she believed she'd heard.

“I didn't mean you,” he said, more alert.

“I know. I understand.”

The road's white fog line broke on the right for a wide dirt driveway that belonged to an orchard. It was Audrey's “fogmark,” as she called it, the indication that she could expect a street signal a hundred yards ahead, though she wouldn't see it until she was right on top of it. She slowed the car to ten and craned her neck toward the dashboard, looking.

Her son said, “As if none of them ever made a mistake in their pathetic lives.”

“Ed.” Her warning was gentle. It was a tender scab he kept picking at, the family's mutual wound, and she had no more emotional salve to apply to it.

She almost changed the subject by asking if his friends had decided about going to Mammoth to ski for Thanksgiving, or whether he would fill out the application to the community college, or how he was thinking about spending the next six months of his “time off” besides earning a few bucks at the bakery she and Geoff had opened after being thrown out of the church. It was important that she learn the answers to all of these questions, but the moment she opened her mouth she understood that she'd fail to change the subject at all. In Ed's mind, the various threads of his destiny were hopelessly tangled. This young man had watched his carefully knit plans for life unravel into a heap at his feet, and he'd been staring at the knots, disbelieving, for months.

She released the steering wheel with one hand and squeezed his knee.

The green light appeared, ghostly and floating over the road, where Audrey would have to enter the intersection and take the left turn. It was impossible to detect oncoming traffic, but nearly as dangerous was any vehicle that might be following her. Its driver might see the green overhead before registering her turn signal.

She turned the wheel and stepped on the gas.

When she had moved to California's inland valley and was told to expect foggy winters, she had hoped for something poetically beautiful. Shimmering water droplets. Wispy ballerinas, slender and light-footed, dancing among trees and grasses. The occasional moody mystery. She had not expected this: a gray tomb that not even sunlight could fully penetrate, weather that muffled sounds and swallowed cars and killed by the dozens every year.

Tule fog, it was called, after the thick tule grasses that grew throughout the valley.

A blaring horn startled her. She punched the gas pedal and her little sedan was catapulted to safety. In her rearview mirror she saw the smudge of yellow and red that were the lights of another car passing through the intersection she'd just cleared.

“There's got to be a better way to do this,” she said and blew her spiky blond bangs off her forehead.

“Ditch this commute, move into town.” Ed put his sneakered foot on the dash. “You should give up that sorry excuse for a rental house and move into the rooms over the bakery.”

“Living there would be quaint.”

“European.”

“Old subject, Ed. You'd go stir crazy. It's microscopic, hardly a home. You need your space. We don't want you to feel . . . tied to us, to this venture. Besides, I was talking about driving, not housing.”

The first dim streetlights of town came into view.

“If I moved out, would you do it? I'm not supposed to be here anyway. I'm supposed to be pulling all-nighters, playing college basketball, struggling to make the transition to independent living, that kind of thing.”

“Don't start with that. You're here, and we're glad to have you.”

“You won't be saying that when I'm thirty.”

“You won't be so morose when you're thirty, I promise. Stay, go, duck when life throws stuff at you, and come home to see us now and then. Your dad and I won't live anywhere that doesn't have a decent place for you to crash. Deal with it.”

“Aw, Mom, where's your tough love?”

“You don't need tough love. You need to give yourself a little grace is all. For that matter, just accept the grace everyone wants to give you.”

“This little town is just full of grace, isn't it?”

Audrey pursed her lips and had no comeback. She understood in a new way that her only child probably wouldn't stick around for many more months, even if it meant leaving before their hearts had healed.
Stay, go
. Her maternal heart was already torn.

They crawled past a mechanic's graveyard and several east-facing, weather-bleached storefronts, then turned right into a clear pocket of air. The tule fog, in its predictably unpredictable manner, had receded here and formed walls like a stadium's, turning Main Street into a socked-in arena. Whereas a second ago Audrey couldn't see ten feet in front of her, now she could see all the way to the Honey Bee restaurant three blocks away. The yellow awnings the owners had installed last spring had already paled a little in the blistering summer sun. Even so, under the streetlamps they seemed to give off their own light. The bakery was a block beyond on the northwest corner, still shrouded in fog.

Audrey accelerated to a much more productive pace. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty. Storefronts clicked by her window under the light-shadow-light-shadow rhythm of the streetlights.

It might have been that the shifting patterns deceived her, but as she approached the end of the good visibility, a movement on the left side of the street drew her eyes. A gliding form passed through a cone of light quickly, a leaf bag caught by the wind. There was no wind, though, and Audrey supposed on second thought that the shadow had been larger than a bag. Larger than a bag and more weighty than breeze-tossed plastic, moving like a living creature: a leaping dog, a stooped person dashing through a rainstorm, a cloaked villain.

Ed said, “I still think we could have taken over a failing bakery in some town where the Mansfields don't live.”

Audrey's head swiveled away from the street and toward her son-of-the-stubborn-perspective. She was going to say
We don't
run from problems
or
We made this decision as a family
or something similar to remind him that several good people had chosen to stand by him in the universe of his particular heartache, at no small cost to themselves, but she ran out of time.

In the space of a second her car plunged back into fog like a bullet passing through flesh. Her foot found the brake in half a second more, but she entered the intersection of Main and Sunflower blind. The tires squealed, but her good reflexes were not enough to overcome the laws of physics. The sedan bulldozed something solid and heavy where nothing solid and heavy should have been.

Audrey gasped and threw her arm across Ed. He reached out for the dash, body folding over his elevated leg, but his seatbelt held him back. The object they struck stayed in front of the car, metals cracking and screeching. Ed shouted and Audrey felt the front end of the car rise and then fall again as it was lifted by whatever part of the obstacle had slid under the wheels. The thing came apart and clattered, separated, scattered beneath the blanket of fog. The street stilled.

Mother and son glanced at each other in shadows, stunned. Ed's steady but heavy breathing was the only human sound to reach Audrey's ears, and that's what frightened her the most.

She began to fumble with her seat belt, praying aloud— “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus”—and mixing this with jumbled instructions: “Where's your phone? Call 9-1-1. Did we hit someone? Stay in the car. Please, Jesus. Sweet Jesus.” It took longer than it should have to find the seat belt button and release the latch. She clawed at the handle and pushed the door open. Ed had his phone to his ear.

The fog hid what she needed to see, what she hoped not to see. She swung her feet out of the car and gripped the top of the doorframe with her right hand, then hauled herself up—an old habit that, this time, probably saved her from breaking her neck. Her legs went out from under her before she was upright, her shoes sliding across the paved road as if it were covered in ice. She lost her grip on the door as she went down and felt the strain in her shoulder as the jolt tipped her sideways. She landed on the heel of her left hand, tiny shards of deteriorating asphalt puncturing the skin at her wrist, then cracked her elbow on the threshold of the car's frame.

“Mom!” Ed was not about to stay put in the passenger seat, and Audrey heard him talking to an emergency operator while he climbed out of the car on his side and ran around the back.

Shooting pain from her wrist doubled up at her elbow and immobilized her entire arm for a few seconds. Something damp seeped in through the denim of her jeans as she sat there on the ground, and when she could move her fingers again she noticed they were covered in a dense, sticky goo.

Ed's tall form bent over her. “She's conscious,” he said into the phone. And then to her: “Did you hit your head?”

“No. Watch where you step.”

He took first note of the spill.

“It must have busted an oil line or a gas line or something,” she said, wondering at the same time if that was even possible. She knew nothing of auto mechanics. Audrey rolled cautiously to her knees, holding her injured wrist to her stomach. There at eye level, she saw where some of the fluid had splashed onto the body of the champagne-colored car. It dripped slowly down the sides, dropping truth into Audrey's mind with a revolting splash.

“That's a lot of oil,” Ed said. He moved toward the front of the car, eyes on the slippery hazard, phone still to one ear.

“Ed, no. Go get your dad.” The bakery was right there on the corner, mere feet away from the intersection, a saving distance from the possibility of a broken human body. Her son did not need images of the dead dancing on the graves already dug in his mind. Audrey lifted her throbbing hand to her nose. She sniffed and then recoiled, having no idea what to do with the coating on her skin and clothes. This was no oil.