The Storyteller (54 page)

“How many times did
you
hear those words, Josef?” I ask. “And how many times did
you
listen?”

 • • • 

It isn’t until I see Rocco at the espresso machine that I realize how much I’ve missed working at Our Daily Bread. “Do my eyes deceive?” he says. “Look at what the cat dragged in. / One long-lost baker.” He comes around the counter to give me a hug and without even asking, starts to make me a cinnamon latte with soy.

It is busier than I remember it being, but then again, at this time of the day, I’m usually on my way home to go to bed. There are mothers in jogging clothes, young men typing furiously on their laptops, a cluster of Red Hat ladies sharing a single chocolate croissant. That makes me glance at the wall behind the counter, the baskets filled with expertly browned baguettes, buttery brioche, semolina loaves. Is this newfound popularity due to the baker who took over for me?

Rocco can read my mind, because he nods in the direction of a plastic banner hanging on the wall behind me:
HOME OF THE JESUS LOAF.
“We get foot traffic / But just because you’re holy / Don’t mean you’re hungry,” he says. “All I pray for now / Is that you’ll come back, or else / Mary gets raptured.”

I laugh. “I miss you, too, Rocco. Where is the blessed boss, anyway?”

“Somewhere in the shrine. / Crying ’cause Miracle-Gro / Isn’t Heaven-sent.”

I pour my latte into a takeaway cup and cut through the kitchen on my way to the shrine. The kitchen is spotless. The containers of poolish and other pre-ferments are organized neatly by date; different tubs of grains and flours are labeled and arranged alphabetically. The wooden counter where I shape the dough has been wiped down; the bulk mixer rests like a sleeping dragon in the corner. Whatever Clark has been doing here, he has been doing well.

It makes me feel like even more of a loser.

If I’d been naïve enough to think that Our Daily Bread was nothing without me and my recipes, I now realize that this isn’t true. It may be different, but ultimately, I’m replaceable. This has always been Mary’s dream; I’m just living on the fringes.

I walk up the Holy Stairs to find her kneeling in the monkshood. She is weeding, wearing rubber gloves pulled high up her arms. “I’m glad you came by. I’ve been thinking about you. How’s your head?” She glances at the bruise from the car accident, which I’ve covered with my bangs.

“I’m fine,” I tell her. “Rocco says the Jesus Loaf is still getting you business.”

“In iambic pentameter, I’m sure . . .”

“And it seems like Clark’s got the baking under control.”

“He does,” Mary says bluntly. “But like I said the other night: he isn’t you.” She gets to her feet and gives me a big hug. “You sure you’re all right?”

“Physically, yes. Emotionally? I don’t know,” I admit. “There’s been a little drama with my grandmother.”

“Oh, Sage, I’m sorry . . . Is there anything I can do?”

Although the thought of an ex-nun getting involved with a Holocaust
survivor and a former Nazi sounds like the punch line to a joke, it is actually what drew me to the bakery today. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I’m here.”

“Anything,” Mary promises. “I’ll start to say a rosary for your grandma today.”

“That’s okay—I mean, you
can
if you want to—but I was hoping to borrow the kitchen for about an hour?”

Mary puts her hands on my shoulders. “Sage,” she says. “It’s
your
kitchen.”

Ten minutes later, I have an oven warming, an apron wrapped around my waist, and I am up to my elbows in flour. I could have baked at home, true, but the ingredients I needed were here; the sourdough itself would have taken days to prepare.

It feels strange to be working with such a tiny amount of dough. It feels even stranger to hear, just outside, the cacophony of the lunchtime crowd coming in. I move around the kitchen, weaving from cabinet to shelf to pantry. I chop and mix bittersweet chocolate and ground cinnamon; I add a hint of vanilla. I create a small cavern as deep as my thumb in the knot of dough, and twist its limbs into an ornate crown. I let it proof, and in the meantime, instead of hiding in the back room, I go into the café and talk to Rocco. I work the cash register. I chat with customers about the heat and the Red Sox, about how pretty Westerbrook is in the summer, not once trying to cover my face with my bangs. And I marvel at how all these people can go about their lives as if they are not sitting on a powder keg; as if they don’t know that when you pull back the curtain of an ordinary life, there might be something terrible hidden behind it.

“The second time,” Aleks told me, as I lay beside him after we made love, “it was a prostitute, who had stopped to pull up her stockings in an alley. It was easier, or so I told myself, because otherwise, I would have had to admit that what I’d done before was wrong. The third time, my first man: a banker who was locking up at the end of the day. There was a teenage girl once, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And a socialite I heard crying on a hotel balcony. And after that I stopped caring who they had been. It only mattered that they were there, at that moment, when I needed them.” Aleksander closed his eyes. “It turns out that the more you repeat the same action, no matter how reprehensible, the more you can make an excuse for it in your own mind.”

I turned in his arms. “How do I know that one day you won’t kill me?”

He stared at me, hesitating. “You don’t,” he said.

We did not speak after that. We did not know that someone was outside listening to everything we had said, and to the symphony of our bodies. So while Damian slipped away from where he was eavesdropping and went to the cave to capture a frantic, frightened Casimir, I rose over Aleks like a phoenix. I felt him move within me, and I thought of not death, but only resurrection.

LEO

My cell phone rings when I have just spread the photo array from Genevra across the expanse of the hotel bed. “Leo,” my mother says, “I had a dream about you last night.”

“Really,” I say, squinting at Reiner Hartmann. Genevra used the photograph from his SS file, which is now propped up against a pillow that was decidedly uncomfortable and that has left me with a crick in my neck. I look at the first page of the file, with his personal information and the snapshot in uniform, trying to compare this picture with the one I am planning to present to Minka.

HARTMANN, REINER

Westfalenstrasse 1818

33142 Büren-Wewelsburg

DOB 18 / 04 / 20

Blutgruppe AB

You can’t see his eyes very well in the photograph; there is a strange shadow in the grain. But the reproduction in the suspect array isn’t shoddy, as I had first thought; it’s just that the original isn’t in the best shape.

“I was with your son and we were playing at the beach. He kept telling me, ‘Grandma, you have to bury your feet or nothing will grow.’ So I figured, he wants to play a game, fine. And I let him pile the sand up to my ankles and pour water over them from a bucket. And then guess what?”

“What.”

“When I shook off the sand there were tiny roots growing out of the bottoms of my feet.”

I wonder if Minka will not be able to make an ID because of the quality of the photograph.

“That’s fascinating,” I say absently.

“Leo, you’re not listening to me.”

“I am. You had a dream about me that I wasn’t in.”

“Your
son
was in it.”

“I don’t have a son—”

“You have to remind me?” my mother sighs. “What do you think it means?”

“That I’m not married?”

“No, the dream. The roots growing out of the soles of my feet.”

“I don’t know, Ma. That you’re deciduous?”

“Everything’s a joke to you,” my mother says, miffed. I can sense that if I don’t take a few minutes to focus on her, I’m going to have to field a call from my sister, too, telling me that my mom is angry. I push the photographs away.

“Maybe that’s because what I do for a living is so hard to understand, I need a way to let it go at the end of the day,” I tell her, and I realize that this is true.

“You know I’m proud of you, Leo. Of what you do.”

“Thanks.”

“And you know I worry about you.”

“Believe me, you make that patently clear.”

“Which is why I think it’s important for you to take a little time to yourself.”

I don’t like where this is going.

“I’m working.”

“You’re in New Hampshire.”

I scowl at the phone. “I swear to God, I’m hiring you. I think you’re a better tracker than anyone I’ve got in the office—”

“You called to ask your sister for a hotel recommendation and she told me you were on the road for business.”

“Nothing’s sacred.”

“Anyway, maybe you want to get a massage when you’re back at the hotel at the end of the day—”

“Who is she?” I ask wearily.

“Rachel Zweig. Lily Zweig’s daughter. She’s getting a degree in massage therapy in Nashua—”

“You know, the cell phone service really stinks up here,” I say, holding the phone away from me at arm’s length. “I’m losing you.”

“Not only can I track you, I can tell when you’re feeding me a load of BS, Leo.”

“I love you, Ma,” I laugh.

“I loved you first,” she says.

As I gather the photo spread together into its file, I wonder what my mother would make of Sage Singer. She’d love the fact that Sage could keep me well fed, since always I look too skinny to my mother. She would look at her scar and think of her as a survivor. She would appreciate the way Sage still grieves for her own mom, and her close attachment to her grandmother—since to my mother, family is the carbon atom at the base of all life-forms. On the other hand, my mother has always wanted me to marry someone who is Jewish, and Sage—a self-professed atheist—doesn’t qualify. Then again she has a grandmother who survived the Holocaust, which has to earn her a few points—

I break off in my thoughts, wondering why I’m thinking of marrying a woman I met yesterday—one who is simply a means to a witness for me, and one who clearly, as evidenced by last night, is in love with someone else.

Adam.

A guy who stood about six four and had shoulders you could use as a Thanksgiving banquet table.
Goyishe,
my mother would call him, with his sandy hair and aw-shucks smile. Seeing him last night, and watching Sage react as if she’d been electrocuted, brought back every acne-riddled middle school post-traumatic flashback—from the cheerleader who told me I wasn’t really her type after I published a sonnet to her in the school literary magazine, to my junior prom date, who started dancing with a soccer jock when I was getting her a cup of punch, and wound up going home with him.

I’ve got nothing against Adam, and what Sage wants to do to screw up her life is her own business. I also know that it takes two to make a mistake of that magnitude. But . . . Adam has a
wife. The expression on Sage’s face when she saw the woman made me want to put my arm around her and tell her she could do so much better than this guy.

Like, maybe, me.

Fine, okay, I have a little bit of a crush on her. Or maybe her baking. Or her husky, raspy, incredibly sexy voice, which she doesn’t even realize is sexy.

This feeling takes me by surprise. I spend my life hunting down people who want to stay lost, but I have had considerably less luck finding someone I’d like to keep around for a while.

Stuffing the file into my briefcase, I shake these thoughts off. Maybe my mother is right and I
do
need a massage, or whatever form of relaxation it will take to get me back to separating my work life from my private life.

All of my best-laid plans, however, go out the window as soon as I arrive at her place and find her waiting for me. She’s wearing jean shorts, cutoffs, like Daisy Mae. Her legs are long and tan and muscular, and I can’t stop staring at them. “What?” she says, glancing down at her calves. “Did I cut myself shaving?”

“No. You’re perfect. I mean, you
look
perfect. I mean . . .” I shake my head. “Did you talk to your grandmother this morning?”

“Yeah.” Sage leads me into her home. “She’s a little scared, but she’s expecting us.”

Last night, before we left, Minka had agreed to look at a photo spread. “I’ll make her as comfortable as I can,” I promise.

Sage’s house is the visual representation of that favorite sweatshirt you own, the one that you search through your drawer for, because it’s so comfortable. The couch is overstuffed, the light creamy and soft. There’s always something baking. It is the kind of place you could settle down for a few moments and wake up, years later, because you never left.

It’s completely orthogonal to my apartment in Washington, which is full of black leather and chrome and right angles.

“I like your place,” I blurt out.

She glances at me oddly. “You were here yesterday.”

“I know. It’s just . . . very cozy.”

Sage looks around. “My mother was good at that. At drawing people in.” She opens up her mouth and then shuts it again abruptly.

“You were going to say that you’re not,” I guess.

She shrugs. “I’m good at pushing people away.”