Sex & Sourdough (25 page)

Jennifer disappeared for a moment and then hurried back in with a large framed picture. She handed the frame to Anders. The picture made Anders smile. Kevin and his entire family were in the photo, all smiling brightly at the top of a tall, clear mountain peak. Kevin’s father stood in the back of the photo with his arms wrapped around his wife and children. He had Kevin’s shaggy brown hair, the same chocolate eyes, and bright, rose-colored cheeks.

“You never think things like a blush can be bad,” Gwen said, sniffling. “But for the longest time, that was the only sign. He was always sore, every day of his life, but he never let it slow him down. And he worked hard. Twelve-, sometimes fourteen-hour days. Being sore seemed like a fact of life, not a symptom of a disease. If we had known what it meant earlier, before it began to raise his blood pressure, to destroy his kidneys, he’d probably still be with us.”

“I’m sorry. It looks like he was a great guy.”

“He was an amazing man,” Gwen agreed. “More so because I’m sure there were all kinds of aches and pains and problems he never told anyone about, even me. Kevin always looked up to him, and I suppose that’s why he didn’t tell us. I just don’t understand…. After everything we went through—the hospitals, the nursing home, and then the hospice…. Not telling us he was sick, I can see him doing that. But he just vanished, he just left….”

“He’s convinced he’s dying,” Anders pointed out. “He still misses his dad. He wears a keepsake necklace with his dad’s ashes in it. He tied the cord so tight he can’t take it off.” Anders smiled. “I don’t know if he’s ever gotten over watching his dad get sick. Right afterward, he was told that he was going to go through the same illness, the same death. I feel terrified just thinking about what it would be like to face something like that. He talked about it a little, and I really believe he didn’t want to put you through losing him the same way you lost your husband.”

Gwen buried her face in her hands, shaking as she cried. “But he lived….” She gasped for breath. “We celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary the year after my husband was diagnosed. We had a life and family. How could Kevin think that those years aren’t worthwhile? That a life isn’t worth sharing just because you know it’s going to end?”

Jennifer moved to her mother and rubbed her back.

Gwen wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry,” she sniffed. “I just… I miss him. I miss them both so much….”

“I just lost track of him three weeks ago and I miss him. And I’m going to find him. I need to know that he’s okay. But now I don’t even know where to look.” Anders rubbed his hands over his eyes, trying to rub away some of the exhaustion from his drive.

“Where did you lose track of him?”

“A little town called Pittsfield. Someone has to know what’s happened to him, I just….” Anders thought about the Internet forums he’d spent so long obsessing over. “Do you have a computer I can use for a moment? I don’t know where to start looking for him, but I think I might know where to look for help.”

Gwen nodded. “In my office.”

Anders followed her and Jennifer through the house to a cramped office filled with books and stacks of paperwork. Gwen opened up an old laptop on the desk. “It’s all yours.”

“Thank you. The Appalachian Trail is huge, and thousands of people hike it every year, but they’re all a pretty close-knit bunch—even if they’ve never met each other. There are a few forums where trail enthusiasts stay caught up,” he explained. “I didn’t have any luck looking for him in person. The lady who drove him to the hospital told me who he’d been hiking with, but I couldn’t find them either. But maybe someone out there’s heard something. If Kevin’s hiking any of the long-distance trails in the country, odds are one of the people on the forum will have run into him.”

Gwen moved away from the computer. “Do you think it might work?”

He brought up the forum and started a new post. “Looking for Sourdough,” he said aloud as he typed.

“Sourdough? They really call him that?” Gwen asked.

“Everybody on the trail uses a trail name. Or twenty trail names, in my case. Kevin goes by Sourdough. Unfortunately, I don’t know how long it might take to hear something back, and I’m exhausted. Is there a hotel nearby, or a campground?”

“You don’t get to run off!” Jennifer snapped.

“She’s right. You’re not going to disappear on us. I’ll make up Kevin’s old bed for you,” Gwen offered.

“Oh, I….” Anders was too tired to think of an argument. Four days of driving and sleeping in rest stops had taken a greater toll on his body than hiking had. “A chance to rest would be great. And if the invitation to dinner still stands, I’d love to join you. I pretty much drove straight through from New England.”

Gwen nodded. “I’ll go make up his bed.”

After she bustled out, Jennifer cocked her head to the side and glared at Anders. “You drove all the way from Massachusetts, in one shot, looking for him?”

“Yeah. I’m not quite sure where I’d be if I hadn’t met Kevin,” Anders admitted. He was now a law-school dropout, he might be wanted for assault in the state of Florida, and he had chased a hopeless dream all the way across the country. A year ago, facing the reality of his life falling apart would have left him in a full-blown panic attack. Now, he felt like his life had been reduced to a broken jigsaw puzzle. He was desperately hoping that when he finally put the pieces back together again, he could rearrange them so there would be room for Kevin in the picture. He smiled to himself, wondering how he had changed so much after one walk in the woods. “I owe him a lot.”

A
NDERS
CREPT
forward, judging the distance carefully before he leaped. He cursed whatever noise he’d made to tip the creature off as he crashed into the bush that the damn cat had just vacated.

Budapest streaked across the lawn, evaded Jennifer with the ease of a kitten, and took off around the corner of the house in a fat gray blur.

“Damn it!” Jennifer shouted. She stumbled after the cat and fell on her butt. “I thought you had her that time.”

“I really am sorry,” Anders said again.

“I should have warned you.”

Anders didn’t say anything to that. Even if he had been warned that Budapest could go from statue to blur in a heartbeat, he didn’t think he would have been able to shut the door fast enough to stop her from getting out of the house. Anders picked himself up out of the rose bush and tried to dust off his clothes. Between the flour, grease, and dirt, the only thing he succeeded in doing was spreading the dust around. “I don’t think your cat is fat.” He joined Jennifer as she headed around the corner. “I think all that bulk is really muscle. She’s fast. I thought she was old when you got her….”

“The vet at the shelter said she was at least ten when we got her. That was seven years ago.”

“How? That would make her the equivalent of an eighty-year-old, in human years!”

“Would it?”

“I have no idea,” Anders admitted. “It seems like it would. There she is! Buddha….” He knelt down when he saw the cat lurking beneath the front porch. “Buddha, baby, come here….”

Jennifer moved around to the other side of the porch to head off Budapest’s escape.

“Come on,” Anders whispered. The cat shrank back as he reached for her. “Damn it, Buddha, come on.” The cat just hissed. Anders retreated a little and stared at the creature. She wasn’t acting scared, but more defiant. Like she knew that he wasn’t going to fit beneath the porch to get her, and she felt confident enough to gloat about it. “You know what, fine!” Anders sat down with his legs crossed in front of him. “You want to use the porch as your own personal den, fine. I’ll wait.”

Budapest tilted her head up.

“Look at me like that all you want, I’m not crawling under there. I’ve got enough scratches already.” Budapest meowed. “No,” Anders shook his head. He folded his hands in his lap and refused to make eye contact with the cat. She meowed again and inched toward him. Anders froze and kept his eyes turned toward the house. With a quick leap, Budapest landed in his lap and nuzzled his hands. “Sucking up isn’t going to get you attention,” he lied. He reluctantly kept his hands off Budapest until she dropped her entire body weight onto his lap. Then he picked her up, cradled her back paws so they didn’t dangle, and got to his feet. “Got her.”

Jennifer stared at him, eyes wide. “That damn cat has never come to sit in my lap like that! I have to bribe her with food!”

“She’s just weird,” Anders said, rubbing the cat’s cheek. “Aren’t you? You’re a weird cat. Back inside you go!”

They returned the cat to the house, and the moment it was inside, it shoved out of his arms and sprinted through the kitchen. The sound of glass and plastic colliding echoed through the living room before the cat streaked through the kitchen and down the hall.

“I hate that cat,” Jennifer swore.

“I like her.” Anders grinned. “I wish I could drag her out to the East Coast and throw her on Kevin in his sleep.”

“That’d be mean.”

“Eh, knowing him, he would just force her to cuddle so he could use her like a space heater. He hates being cold.”

“Really? It was always sunshine that triggered flares for our dad. He used to complain about arthritis when it was cold, though.”

“When Kevin first told me he was sick, he said it was arthritis. From what I’ve read, they’re pretty similar. Lupus just causes swelling, though, not actual damage to the joints. Just judging by how much Motrin he goes through, I’d guess it would take a lot of pain to make him complain about anything.”

“Sounds like you know him pretty well.” She poured them each a glass of iced tea.

Anders stared at her for a moment. He had spent three days helping her and her mother in the bakery, learning how to use commercial mixers, proofers, and ingredients. He had trouble judging when the bread was done with the mixer. His first attempt at a pan of French loaves had turned out rock hard. Overworked dough, according to Gwen. He was better at making bread by hand, and Jennifer had set him to kneading dough at the front counter. Despite their volume being too big to ever knead all of their bread by hand, having someone kneading bread where customers could see it had increased their sales by nearly 20 percent.

“Can I ask you something?” he asked, taking the iced tea gratefully.

“Hmm?”

“Why didn’t you call the police when Kevin disappeared?”

“Because he was a jerk,” said Jennifer immediately. “He had been a jerk for months. He would shout at everybody, say horrible things to me and Mom. He even punched a hole through the wall at one point. So when he took his backpack and stomped out, I was glad to see him go. I didn’t have any clue what was wrong. I just knew he was making Mom cry all the time. Taking a few weeks to go backpacking wasn’t that strange—our folks used to take us on the John Muir Trail at least once a year. When a few weeks turned into a few months, my mom called the police. They said that since he was a young man, and he’d gone off on his own after a fight with his family, unless there was evidence that he was in danger, they didn’t have the manpower to look for him. I thought we should hire a private investigator, but keeping the bakery going had to come first. They all wanted thousands of dollars just to listen to us. He has to be spending money, you know, so I figured we could track him down that way. But every day we’re not open means we have to eat into what’s left of our savings. It’s not the type of business that you can walk away from….”

Anders nodded slowly. From what he had learned about Kevin over the past few days, he had been a violent asshole in the three months before he left home. Anders could only imagine how hard it must have been, grappling with a terminal diagnosis when his life was just beginning. Anders would probably have lost his temper a few times, too, before he accepted the news. “Kevin worked there since he was young?”

“He loved it.” She smiled. “He was always in the bakery. Or out in the woods.”

Anders drank the iced tea and felt Budapest rub up against his legs.

“So.” Jennifer set her hands against the counter and leaned forward. “Do you have a girlfriend back in Florida?”

Anders nearly dropped his glass. Even though being gay was supposed to make him inexplicably attractive to women, he’d never had to tackle that particular drawback of being gay. “Ah… I’m gay.”

Jennifer’s lips formed a perfect O. “I guess I should have seen that coming. The sweet ones are always gay.”

“Not always. You said it yourself—Kevin was a jerk when he found out he was sick. Still, he’s got his sweet moments….” Anders realized what he was saying and shut his mouth fast, but it was too late to stop the words from slipping out.

She took a sip of her iced tea and then froze with the glass halfway back to the counter.

“Kevin isn’t gay.”

“He’s not?” Anders felt like smacking himself. “I’m sorry, just forget what I said. Of course he’s straight.”

“He is straight! Kevin’s always dated girls. In high school he used to date a new girl every few months. He would have told us if he was gay! Hell, I’ve got friends I could have hooked him up with if he was gay!”

“Which of your friends has decided he’s gay now?” Gwen asked, strolling into the kitchen. “Oh, you found her!” She knelt beside Budapest and scratched the cat’s head for a moment. “Jayden, this time?”

“No, Jayden is dating Cathy.”

“Oh. Which one, then?”

Jennifer stared at Anders with raised eyebrows.

“Me,” Anders squeaked.

“You’re just now figuring that out?” Gwen patted his hand.

“No,” Anders sputtered. “No, I’ve had that nailed down since I was thirteen….”

“All right, then.” She set a stack of handwritten recipes on the counter. “Cranberry recipes. We always have seasonal recipes in the shop. The Thanksgiving and Christmas ones are my favorite. Last year everything was about pumpkin, so this year I’m doing cranberries.”

“You just want to bring back those sunrise muffins.” Jennifer smirked.

“They’re good.”

Anders sighed. “Sunrise muffins?”

“Orange-cranberry muffins with sourdough starter instead of milk. The secret isn’t the sourdough starter, though. It’s using frozen cranberries instead of dried or canned. They melt into the batter and just….” Gwen shrugged. “They’re wonderful.”