The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (16 page)

The journal entries through the spring and summer reflected a person contented with her life. Elizabeth’s twenty-seventh birthday came and went. She socialized with members of the running club, ran a half marathon, and had a brief, disastrous relationship with her boss, Fitch.
I don’t know why I felt the obligation to be loyal to him when he so clearly didn’t. Maybe loyalty is for swans and bird-minded people too afraid or too unimaginative to see the alternatives
.

Alternatives. To loyalty. The words stood out as if they were written in red ink.

What little Elizabeth wrote for months after that was mostly related to work. She was given a supervisory role for the beverages and spirits clients, overseeing promotional materials for sporting events. She depleted her savings to buy a large computer monitor so
she could work at home, and picked up freelancing graphics work on the side. As her savings grew slowly, she dreamed of someday buying a place of her own. There were a few relationships after Fitch, short and passionate, with partners referenced only by initials. Circumspect, it seemed, or coy.

Then Fitch left the agency, and there were departmental changes; someone else received a promotion Elizabeth had hoped would be hers. She’d gotten great reviews, pulled off several large campaigns. They had both been with the company the same amount of time. She concluded that either human resources had found out about her relationship with her boss, or he’d spilled her secret that she’d never received her college degree.

Kate put down the book with a bit too much force, and its cover slapped on the wood tabletop. The woman sitting at the next table glanced at her briefly, then back to her own children.

Kate had never seen this side of Elizabeth, cool and bitter. It was the opposite of fatalism, this stark recognition of the effects of choices that had not seemed much like choices at the time. So, college had been a sore point for both of them. Maybe marrying Dave and having children—three, one right after another—had been her way of breaking the pattern of accidental choices, her big decisive act. Interesting that this had never come up in conversation,
whether they’d always anticipated motherhood. Kate could not even recall how Elizabeth and Dave had met.

Elizabeth’s friend Peg from her old firm had taken a new job, and to celebrate, Peg wanted the three friends to make a return trip to the folk festival in Telluride. Peg and Jody left their children at home with their husbands; the three women hiked, had massages, and took an ATV tour of a mining ghost town. They danced with men in tie-dyed shirts, cups of beer sloshing on their bare feet. One of the men asked Elizabeth for her phone number but she brushed him off, and Peg accused her of not trying hard enough to meet people. Elizabeth hated blind dates, but agreed to be set up with Peg’s cousin Steven back in New York just to get her to stop talking about it.

They met at a famously fashionable restaurant on the Lower East Side. When she arrived he was sitting at the bar in a Burberry coat, martini held in a manicured hand. Immediately, she planned excuses to leave early. But he surprised her; he was an animated conversationalist, and asked engaging questions. As he spoke he looked her in the eye, he smiled, and he didn’t talk about anything controversial or negative. And he asked more about her than he offered about himself, which left her with the warm, if superficial, sense of being found interesting, and liked.

They kissed good-bye with off-center pecks and murmurs about getting together again, which she knew wouldn’t happen. But she felt she’d been left with a valuable lesson: how to move with ease among people, make them feel as if you had something in common. Her lack of this, she now recognized, was to blame for not getting the promotion.

K
ATE WALKED INTO THE
bakery and a bell jangled. The old screen door flapped shut behind her with a bang.

“Be right with you,” came a voice from the back.

She looked around the small room. Flour looked the same as it had last summer, the same as the past seven years since Max had bought it, which was basically the same as the previous fifteen under the original owners. To brighten the shack in the woods he had added light green paint and homey touches like wainscot, hand-painted pottery, and fresh flowers, but little else. The creaky screen door could have been repaired easily with a single new spring, and the fact that it never had was probably not an oversight. Its folksy imperfection, some might say studied neglect, reflected the pride of the owner that the food would speak for itself. He had been wrong about some things, but that was not one of them. She would miss this place if he had to sell.

The curtain separating the front of the bakery from the kitchen was parted by thick hands, and a white apron emerged that barely covered a loud Hawaiian shirt.

When Max saw her, he smiled. “Kaaaaatie.” He opened his arms and folded her into the broad hibiscus of his chest. “Jesus Mary and Joseph, I was about to resort to hiring college students.”

“Not that,” she said. “Let’s not do anything rash.”

The embrace lasted an extra moment, a recognition that they had not seen one another since his breakup. Then she pulled back and looked at him. His wavy gray hair, once so lustrous that classmates called him Vidal, had thinned since last summer, and shaded circles pooled under his eyes. He cocked his head and flashed her a theatrical smile, mocking her scrutiny.
All okay here, folks. Move along
.

“Oh, Max,” she said.

His smile faded, and he rubbed the back of her shoulder with his knuckles, his form of affection. Then he walked back through the curtains. “So how many weeks you here this year? A lot longer, right?”

“Seven,” she said, following him to the kitchen. “We got a good deal, and Chris is working from here.” The boxy room behind the curtain had its familiar feel of an orderly yard sale. Row upon row of shelving filled the walls with worn but well-organized appliances and containers, with cutouts for two windows. Kate took in the scuff marks on the walls, the chipped paint. Max had always been meticulous before about repainting the kitchen during the off-season.

“How’s business?” she asked.

“Oh, fine. Good.” He reached behind her into the glass display case of pastry, and tossed her a piece of rugelach as if it were something he was trying to be rid of. “But the investors are making all kinds of suggestions. They want to add tables and wireless. And that would bring in ALL the riffraff, the novelists and stroller moms and whatnot, kill the whole ambience and kill me with the racket. I won’t do it.”

“Good for you. The world doesn’t need one more place to check e-mail.”

“Amen, sister.”

She leaned against the butcher-block island. “So what about the offer? Have you decided yet?”

“No.” He picked up a sponge and wiped the counter with round, slow strokes.

“Don’t you have to let them know soon?”

“I have a little time yet.”

The bakery had cachet, and history. For years, long before Max bought the place, islanders had been coming to the outpost on Harvest Road for the cakey old-fashioned doughnuts first thing in the morning, a secret among locals and those in the know. Max bought it and expanded the offerings, and the crowds grew to include summer people and weekend tourists. He added quiche, folded with unusual vegetables and cheese. Rhubarb streusel muffins. Tiny berry tarts glazed with amaretto marmalade, boxed as beautifully as Fabergé eggs. She imagined him starting over, an assistant chef in some charmless storefront bakery. Sitting home nights drinking Scotch and trying to reacquaint himself with working for someone else, and with living alone.

“God, I hate this,” she said, kicking the base of the wood island. “I really hate him for it.” Her voice caught at the end, and he looked at her with tired eyes. They’d been through all this on the phone.

Max stepped behind her and wrapped both arms around her shoulders. She was enveloped by his warmth, the wholesome scent of yeast and soap that had always defined him. His soft gray hair brushed her cheek in a way she could never imagine her father’s doing, clipped so short.

“Let’s go to Italy,” she said. “We’ll hunt him down.”

“I just wish that if he had to clean me out, he’d taken the exercise equipment while he was at it,” said Max. “No more jocks for me. I hate all this big metal in the house, like hulking robots.”

“Sell it. Scrap it,” she said. “Program the damn things to knead bread.”

He smiled. “So, when can you come in? Tell me you can work next week. I have a bunch of tarts to do for a dinner at one of the harbor houses.”

The children had camp, and Chris was working but was not scheduled to travel. She went to the drying rack and picked up two muffin tins, moved to put them away in their cupboards. “I might
be able to come in for a while. Let me check if Chris can watch the kids after camp.”

“Bring ’em. We’ll set them up with paintbrushes.” He gestured to the walls. “ ‘Paint covers all ills.’ ” He was mocking himself, quoting himself.

Max had been an architect in New York before he’d retired early to attend culinary school. His amateur enthusiasm revealed real skill and he’d had his pick of the best apprenticeships, a sore point among those who scoffed at second careerists and hobbyists. It bothered critics even more when he took a job with one of New York’s top chefs, only to fritter away the urban opportunity, as they saw it, and leave to run a bakery-café. On an island. When he was first getting started she’d had him as a guest on her cable show several times, setting up cameras and filming from his kitchen while she was on vacation.