The Storyteller (6 page)

I know it’s a good loaf. You can smell it, when an artisanal bread comes out of the oven: the earthy, dark scent, as if you are in the thick of the woods. I glance with pride at the variegated crumb. Josef closes his eyes in delight. “I am lucky to know the baker personally.”

“Speaking of that . . . you umpired the Little League game of a friend’s son. Bryan Lancaster?”

He frowns, shaking his head. “It was years ago. I did not know all their names.”

We chat—about the weather, about Eva, about my favorite recipes. We chat, as Mary closes up the bakery around us, after hugging me fiercely and telling me that not only does God love me but she does, too. We chat, even as I dart back and forth into the kitchen to answer the calls of various timers. This is extraordinary for me, because I don’t chat. There are even moments during our conversation when I forget to disguise the pitted side of my face by ducking my head or letting my hair fall in front of it. But Josef, he is either too polite or too embarrassed to mention it. Or maybe, just maybe, there are other things about me he finds more interesting. This is what must have made him everyone’s favorite teacher, umpire, adoptive grandfather—he acts as if
there is nowhere else on earth he’d rather be than here, right now. And no one else on earth he’d rather be talking to. It is such a heady rush to be the object of someone’s attention in a
good
way, not as a freak, that I keep forgetting to hide.

“How long have you lived here?” I ask, when we have been talking for over an hour.

“Twenty-two years,” Josef says. “I used to live in Canada.”

“Well, if you were looking for a community where nothing ever happens, you hit the jackpot.”

Josef smiles. “I think so.”

“Do you have family around here?”

His hand shakes as he reaches for his mug of coffee. “I have no one,” Josef answers, and he starts to get to his feet. “I must go.”

Immediately, my stomach turns over, because I’ve made him uncomfortable—and nobody knows better than I do what that feels like. “I’m sorry,” I blurt out. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I don’t talk to many people.” I offer him an unhemmed smile, and make amends the only way I know how: by revealing a piece of myself that I usually keep under lock and key, so that I am equally exposed. “I also have no one,” I confess. “I’m twenty-five, and both of my parents are dead. They won’t see me get married. I won’t get to cook them Thanksgiving dinner or visit them with grandkids. My sisters are totally different from me—they have minivans and soccer practices and careers with bonuses—and they hate me even though they say they don’t.” The words are a flood rushing out of me; just speaking them, I am drowning. “But mostly I have no one because of this.”

With a shaking hand, I pull my hair back from my face.

I know every detail he’s seeing. The pocked drawstring of skin flapping the corner of my left eye. The silver hatch marks cutting through my eyebrow. The puzzle-piece patchwork of grafted skin that doesn’t quite match and doesn’t quite fit. The way my mouth tugs upward, because of how my cheekbone healed. The bald notch at my scalp that no longer grows hair, that my bangs are brushed to carefully cover. The face of a monster.

I cannot justify why I’ve picked Josef, a virtual stranger, to reveal myself to. Maybe because loneliness is a mirror, and recognizes itself. My hand falls away, letting the curtain of my hair cover my scars again. I just wish it were that easy to camouflage the ones inside me.

To his credit, Josef does not gasp or recoil. Steadily, he meets my gaze. “Maybe now,” he replies, “we will have each other.”

 • • • 

The next morning on my way home from work, I drive by Adam’s house. I park on the street, roll down my window, and stare at the soccer nets stretched across the front yard, at the welcome mat, at the lime-green bike tipped over and sunning itself in the driveway.

I imagine what it would be like to sit at the dining room table, to have Adam toss the salad as I serve the pasta. I wonder if the walls in the kitchen are yellow or white; if there is still a loaf of bread—probably store-bought, I think with mild judgment—sitting on the counter after someone has made French toast for breakfast.

When the door opens, I swear out loud and slink lower in my seat, even though there is no reason to believe that Shannon sees me. She comes out of the house still zipping her purse, hitting the remote control so that her car doors unlock. “Come on,” she calls. “We’re going to be late for the appointment.”

A moment later Grace stumbles out, coughing violently.

“Cover your mouth,” her mother says.

I realize I am holding my breath. Grace looks like Shannon, in miniature—same golden hair, same delicate features, even the same bounce to their walk. “Do I have to miss camp?” Grace asks miserably.

“You do if you have bronchitis,” Shannon says, and then they both get into the car and peel out of the driveway.

Adam hadn’t told me his daughter was sick.

Then again, why would he? I don’t hold claim to that part of his life.

As I pull away, I realize that I’m not going to book those airline tickets to Kansas City. I never will.

Instead of driving home, though, I find myself looking up Josef’s address on my iPhone. He lives at the end of a small cul-de-sac, and I am parked at the curb trying to concoct a reason that I might be dropping by when he knocks on the window of my car. “So it
is
you,” Josef says.

He is holding the end of Eva’s leash. She dances around his feet in circles. “What brings you to my neighborhood?” he asks.

I consider telling him that it is a coincidence, that I took a wrong turn. Or that I have a friend who lives nearby. But instead, I wind up speaking the truth. “You,” I say.

A smile breaks across his face. “Then you must stay for tea,” he insists.

His home is not decorated the way I would have expected. There are chintz couches with lace doilies on the backs, photographs on top of a dusty mantel, a collection of Hummel figurines on a shelf. The invisible fingerprints of a woman are everywhere. “You’re married,” I murmur.

“I was,” Josef says. “To Marta. For fifty-one very good years and one not-so-good.”

This must have been the reason he started coming to grief group, I realize. “I’m sorry.”

“I am, too,” he says heavily. He takes the tea bag from his mug and carefully wraps a noose around it on the bowl of the spoon. “Every Wednesday night she would remind me to take the garbage can to the curb. In fifty years, I never once forgot, but she never gave me the benefit of the doubt. Drove me crazy. Now, I would give anything to hear her remind me again.”

“I almost flunked out of college,” I reply. “My mother actually moved
into
my dorm room and dragged me out of bed and made me study with her. I felt like the biggest loser on earth. And now I realize how lucky I was.” I reach down and stroke Eva’s silky head. “Josef?” I ask. “Do you ever feel like you’re losing her? Like you can’t hear the exact pitch of her voice in your head anymore, or you can’t remember what her perfume smelled like?”

He shakes his head. “I have the opposite problem,” he says. “I can’t forget him.”

“Him?”

“Her,” Josef corrects. “All this time, and I still mix up the German words with the English.”

My gaze lands on a chess set on a sideboard behind Josef. The pieces are all carefully carved: pawns shaped like tiny unicorns, rooks fashioned into centaurs, a pair of Pegasus knights. The queen’s mermaid tail curls around its base; the head of the vampire king is tossed back, fangs bared. “This is incredible,” I breathe, walking closer for a better look. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Josef chuckles. “That is because there is only one. It is a family heirloom.”

I stare with even more admiration at the chessboard, with its seamless inlay of cherry and maple squares; at the tiny jeweled eyes of the mermaid. “It’s beautiful.”

“Yes. My brother was very artistic,” Josef says softly.

“He
made
this?”

I pick up the vampire and run my finger over the smooth, slick skull of the creature. “Do you play?” I ask.

“Not for years. Marta had no patience for the game.” He looks up. “And you?”

“I’m not very good. You have to think five steps ahead.”

“It’s all about strategy,” Josef says. “And protecting your king.”

“What’s with the mythical creatures?” I ask.

“My brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men.”

I find myself thinking of Adam; of his daughter, coughing as a pediatrician listens to her lungs. “Maybe,” I say, “you could teach me what you know.”

 • • • 

Josef becomes a regular at Our Daily Bread, showing up shortly before closing, so that we can spend a half hour chatting before he leaves for the night and I start my workday. When Josef shows up, Rocco yells to
me in the kitchen, referring to him as “my boyfriend.” Mary brings him a cutting from the shrine—a daylily—and tells him how to plant it in his backyard. She starts assuming that even after she locks up, I will make sure Josef gets home. The dog biscuits I bake for Eva become a new staple of our menu.

We talk about teachers that I had at the high school when Josef was still working there—Mr. Muchnick, whose toupee once went missing when he fell asleep proctoring an SAT test; Ms. Fiero, who would bring her toddler to school when her nanny got sick and would stick him in the computer lab to play Sesame Street games. We talk about a strudel recipe that his grandmother used to make. He tells me about Eva’s predecessor, a schnauzer named Willie, who used to mummify himself in toilet paper if you left the bathroom door open by accident. Josef admits that it is hard to fill all the hours he has, now that he isn’t working or volunteering regularly.

And me: I find myself talking about things that I have long packed up, like a spinster’s hope chest. I tell Josef about the time my mother and I went shopping together, and she got stuck in a sundress too small for her, and we had to buy it just so that we could rip it off. I tell him how, for years after that, even uttering the word
sundress
made us both collapse with laughter. I tell him how my father would read the Seder every year in a Donald Duck voice, not out of irreverence, but because it made his little girls laugh. I tell him how, on our birthdays, my mother let us eat our favorite dessert for breakfast and how she could touch your forehead if you were feverish and guess your temperature, within two-tenths of a degree. I tell him how, when I was little and convinced a monster lived in my closet, my father slept for a month sitting upright against the slatted pocket doors so that the beast couldn’t break out in the middle of the night. I tell him how my mother taught me to make hospital corners on a bed; how my father taught me to spit a watermelon seed through my teeth. Each memory is like a paper flower stowed up a magician’s sleeve: invisible one moment and then so substantial and florid the next I cannot imagine how it stayed hidden all this time. And like those paper flowers, once they’ve
been let loose in the world, the memories are impossible to tuck away again.

I find myself canceling dates with Adam so that I can instead spend an hour at Josef’s house, playing chess, before my eyelids droop and I have to drive back home and get some rest. He teaches me to control the center of the board. To not give up any pieces unless absolutely necessary, and how to assign arbitrary point values to each knight and bishop and rook and pawn so that I can make those decisions.

As we play, Josef asks me questions. Was my mother a redhead, like me? Did my father ever miss the restaurant industry, once he went into industrial sales? Did either of them ever get a chance to taste some of my recipes? Even the answers that are hardest to give—like the fact that I never baked for either of them—don’t burn my tongue as badly as they would have a year or two ago. It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you’re alone. It feels less like a wound, more like a poultice.

Two weeks later, Josef and I carpool to our next grief group meeting. We sit beside each other, and it is as if we have a subtle telepathy between us as the other group members speak. Sometimes he catches my gaze and hides a smile, sometimes I roll my eyes at him. We are suddenly partners in crime.

Today we are talking about what happens to us after we die. “Do we stick around?” Marge asks. “Watch over our loved ones?”

“I think so. I can still feel Sheila sometimes,” Stuart says. “It’s like the air gets more humid.”

“Well, I think it’s pretty self-serving to think that souls hang around with the rest of us,” Shayla says immediately. “They go to Heaven.”

“Everyone?”

“Everyone who’s a believer,” she qualifies.

Shayla is born-again; this isn’t a surprise. But it still makes me uncomfortable, as if she is specifically talking about my ineligibility.

“When my mother was in the hospital,” I say, “her rabbi told her a story. In Heaven and Hell, people sit at banquet tables filled with amazing food, but no one can bend their elbows. In Hell, everyone starves
because they can’t feed themselves. In Heaven, everyone’s stuffed, because they don’t have to bend their arms to feed each other.”

I can feel Josef staring at me.

“Mr. Weber?” Marge prompts.

I assume Josef will ignore her question, or shake his head, like usual. But to my surprise, he speaks. “When you die you die. And everything is over.”

His blunt words settle like a shroud over the rest of us. “Excuse me,” he says, and he walks out of the meeting room.

I find him waiting in the hallway of the church. “That story you told, about the banquet,” Josef says. “Do you believe it?”

“I guess I’d like to,” I say. “For my mother’s sake.”

“But your rabbi—”

“Not my rabbi. My mother’s.” I start walking toward the door.

“But you believe in an afterlife?” Josef says, curious.

“And you don’t.”

“I believe in Hell . . . but it’s here on earth.” He shakes his head. “Good people and bad people. As if it were this easy. Everyone is both of these at once.”