The Baker's Wife (9 page)

She swore again, and stood, then yelped when a soft weight pressed against her leg. A skinny old cat rubbed its body across her ankles and mewed. Diane shoved it away. “Shoo.”

The tabby's affection vanished and he marched off, his erect tail snooty.

She had other options. There were plenty of Dumpsters bordering the alley, though some had locked covers or sat behind secure enclosures. But a Dumpster was not the brightest spot to leave evidence while police were still scrutinizing a scene, and she had no idea when trash pickup was.

She hated the idea of carrying the phone with her longer than she already had. She hated the idea of walking any farther with it and risking being seen, stopped, questioned.

When Geoff noticed she was gone, would he send the detective looking for her? Would he give the officer a description?
Fat chick, dull red hair, middle-aged, ate all my bread and took off
without paying me .
. .

An idea came to Diane. A smart idea. She dropped the phone into her backpack and then proceeded down the alley, approaching the rear entrance of the shop adjacent to the bakery. It had something that the bakery did not: a flight of fixed metal stairs that led to its upstairs rooms.

When Diane and Donna were about fourteen, Donna started using that fire escape to sneak out of the apartment when it was necessary for her to be somewhere without their parents' permission. Their own “balcony” had a rusted ladder that was too noisy for a rebel teen who needed to go undetected, but the gap between balcony to neighboring landing was only about five feet—easy enough for an agile teenager to bridge.

Donna was the agile one. Diane, fifty pounds heavier than her twin sister even then, had tried the route only once and nearly broke her neck. Today, in the gray morning light of neediness, a much older and heavier Diane thought the gap looked smaller than she remembered.

The exterior metal stairs were shaded with an orange hue from years of sitting in moist air. They complained about her weight, and her shoes made clumsy noises on the metal steps. Diane feared she'd be heard before she made it even halfway up.

And yet she reached the landing without anyone shouting at her, demanding to know who she was and what she was doing— the same demands bouncing around in her own head.

The moisture that had accumulated on the railing was more dangerous than her foolish ideas. She wiped it off with the sleeve of her sweater, then centered the backpack between her shoulder blades and climbed up on the skinny piece of metal, first one knee, then one slippery tennis shoe at a time. This would have been impossible without the rain gutter that ran down the side of the building. She held on to the hollow tube for balance and managed to get to her feet.

Her weight was hard to center. She had visions of herself slipping off the banana-peel rail and plummeting, or of managing to jump but slamming into the outside of the other balcony. Five feet was suddenly five miles.

Think about it, girl. You're five six. All you have to do, really,
is tilt
.

She envisioned taking a hit to her midsection, which would be unpleasant regardless of her fleshy padding, or to her jaw, which would likely knock her unconscious. She imagined actually making it into the center of the balcony and then cracking her skull open when she toppled into the rail on the opposite side.

She never had been very good at the positive-thinking, motivational stuff.

Diane jumped without slipping but didn't have enough vertical height to make it to safety inside the other rail. Her knees clipped the outside on her way down, and she felt her toes grab the rim and then pop off as she fell. Eyes closing, head snapping sideways, belly scraping, fingers clawing at air. One elbow hit the side of the building and then her armpits stopped her fall, a jarring emergency brake that brought her teeth down on her tongue. The reverberating noise was ridiculous. She hung there, the pain in her shoulder muscles oozing down her torso and her arms. She smelled the damp metal of the rusty rail. The chill of it stabbed through her clothes in time with her gasping.

Any second now, the spotlight of discovery would cut through the mist and shine on her incompetence.

After a few seconds of frantic jerks, her dangling feet found the balcony's lip and her quivering legs received enough adrenaline to get her up and over into safety, gracelessly as ever. She fell onto her side, her fleshy cheek imprinted by the metal grid of the platform. The backpack shifted.

She heard a tumbling, and a clatter, and got onto hands and knees in time to see the liner-wrapped phone shoot out between two of the bars, chased by
The God of Small Things
. Diane grasped for the backpack behind her to keep the money from falling out too.

A Dumpster beneath the balcony received the phone, barely catching it at the front corner beside a flour sack recycled as a trash bag. The noise startled the tabby cat, who was nosing around the bakery's back door. He made a four-pawed jump to dodge the book, which bounced off the rim of the bin and slapped closed where he'd been standing.

Diane stared, trying to assess what her separation from these two items might mean and whether she needed to get them back. No one knew the book was hers. It didn't even have her name in it. If the phone were discovered, though, Geoff and Audrey would know that it had been in her possession. The Dumpster outside the bakery was the worst possible place for that to have ended up.

Worst for whom? For the Bofingers, not for her. She was merely an innocent bystander. They were the parties who were truly involved in the mess on the intersection. Should she care about that? On some level, some selfish level, she had to. She needed the Bofingers to be her friends, so she would try to remedy the latest problem she'd created as soon as she could. In the meantime, she'd focus on this window, which led into the room she and Donna had shared as children. It was an old wood window with so much dry rot in the sash that the lock had fallen out of it, yet one more convenience for Donna's adolescent comings and goings. Their parents had never felt the urgency to replace the lock, considering the window's location.

The morning traffic rose in volume on the street. She heard conversations and police radios.

Donna lifted her fingers to the screen.

She groaned.

This window never had a screen, this . . . vinyl window . . . these sliding panes . . . with not one but two locks.

God, will you never answer any prayer that I have ever prayed?
Will you never make a way for me to undo the things I wish I'd never
done? Are you so heartless that you'll keep sabotaging me every step
of the way?

Diane sagged, not expecting God to answer at all, but certainly not to answer in the voice of grinding gears and shifting hydraulics. At the far end of the alley, the lights of a commercial trash truck were jostled as the beast tipped a Dumpster into its upturned mouth, filling the narrow passage with the sounds of bouncing cans and breaking glass.

It wasn't God, of course. Not really.

Her attention snapped back to the waist-high window. She lifted her foot to the side not covered by the screen. She had enough room to hit the pane square on, and forcefully. She had enough body weight to put some power behind a good kick. She'd spent enough time in prison to know what a good kick was.

The truck would need a minute to arrive. She had only one chance, maybe two, to make this work.

Diane reached into the backpack and transferred the few remaining items from the center compartment into the smaller surrounding pouches. Then she shoved her foot inside the bag and zipped the sides up to her thick leg to prevent it from getting cut. She waited for the truck to arrive beneath her, hoping that the driver would stay put in his cab while the automated arms did their work, oblivious to her.

The truck's complaints were louder directly under her than they had been down the street, so loud that she considered kicking even before the dump. The Dumpster creaked as it came off the ground. She failed to make up her mind in time for a decision to matter.

When she heard bags starting to slide, she kicked dead center in the pane of glass.

And bounced off.

Trash was raining into the truck. She stole a look downward. The old Dumpster was rusted through the bottom in three spots.

She focused her mind on her heel, instructed it to go
through
the glass.

Diane kicked again and the pack penetrated. Glass daggers fell into her old bedroom and snagged the backpack as she withdrew her leg. She thrashed a little, losing her balance and falling back against the balcony rail. A few pieces of glass fell to the ground below, shattering.

Two more swift kicks took out most of the shards before the Dumpster was set again to rest. By this time Diane had her leg out of the backpack and her hand inside it. She used the leatherlike reinforced seat of the pack like a glove and swiftly wiped out the remaining glass before the trash truck pulled out of the alley onto Main Street and turned left.

The sour smell of neglect rushed out of the closed-up space, trying to get away.

CHAPTER 8

The first time Audrey had felt the arm of God encircle her shoulders, during their first winter in the Great Central Valley, she and Geoff were baking bread.

They baked bread every Tuesday because it was something they had done together since the early years of their marriage. It was an easy habit to maintain, Tuesdays falling when the church office closed and complaints about the Sunday sermon from the dear hangnails and bunions of their precious “body” had been addressed. Audrey loved the members of Grace Springs Church because they were so unapologetic about their own humanity. On the downside, her role as the pastor's wife seemed like an eternal, unsatisfied audition for the part of June Cleaver.

It took Geoff and Audrey most of the day to bake whatever variety they'd chosen for the week: whole wheat or peasant bread or semolina rounds or sourdough-rye. Ed understood that he was on his own for breakfast and lunch and could enter the kitchen on Tuesdays only after his parents had left it. They rose before the crickets stopped chirping, weighed and kneaded the ingredients, then made coffee in the French press. They carried coffee mugs and walked up and down the rows of the hundred-acre orange orchard behind the parsonage while the yeast did its early work on the dough.

Yeast, Audrey thought, didn't get much good press in the Bible, so she particularly liked Jesus's singular comparison: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.” A good thing, a wonderful thing, a small creation doing great and wide work.

In San Francisco, land of the American sourdough, rumor had it that some commercial bakeries used a yeast starter that had been in existence for more than 150 years. Surely that represented “a large amount of flour.”

The words were recorded in Matthew, right after Jesus' remark about the greatness of faith no bigger than a mustard seed, the tiniest of seeds. But yeast, though the disciples couldn't know and science wouldn't be able to explain for another eighteen hundred years, was smaller still: a living, single-celled organism destined to have far-reaching effects. Set in motion by the sensitive fingertips of a woman, no less.

Geoff allowed her the pleasure of getting feminine credit for this. Every Tuesday, their personal sabbath, God's sense of humor and his promises restored them both.

They would return from their walk, punch down the massive glob of dough, and divide it into crude loaves. Then the dough rested, and so did they. Everyone ought to have such recovery time after a pounding, Audrey always thought. The lumps took a nap under kitchen towels, and they returned to bed, stealing half an hour of bliss before their son rolled out of bed and placed his feet on the floor for the day.

Then they gave the loaves their final, intentional shape and ran their empty dishwasher through a rinse cycle, turning it into a miniature sauna. When it finished, they set the loaves inside on a special rack Geoff had made to fit, then closed the door for a final proofing. They preheated the tile-lined ovens, one in the kitchen and, in the garage, two from a refurbished-appliances store. Audrey read the day's headlines aloud while Geoff scored the loaves—her cuts were clumsy and unartistic—just before they'd doubled in size. While she flipped pages he spritzed the ovens' interiors with water, and then the bread baked.

In spite of Audrey's stealing credit for working yeast into the dough, the art of creating bread was Geoff's passion and skill. There was something very biblical and sexy about that ability, Audrey thought. Not everyone could make golden, weightless loaves out of flour, water, salt, and yeast. And though she loved every moment alongside her husband in the close quarters of their kitchen, her love of food had more to do with feeding people.

She planned the evening meal around the scent of rising bread as if it were wine worthy of a perfect pairing. Dense millet-and-oat loaves called for hearty vegetable stew, glossy rosemary-buttermilk dinner rolls for fish, torpedo-shaped Vienna rolls for leftover-turkey sandwiches. This was the family's California-style, midweek Sunday dinner.

Audrey and Geoff had been installed at the Grace Springs church for two months the first time she felt the weight of God on her neck. The sensation was peaceful and warm, and she stopped fashioning the loaf between her palms to experience rather than examine the moment. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and then a stabbing headache and upending dizziness took her to the floor, where she blacked out for a few seconds.