The Storyteller Read online

  Now, I do. The bakery. He comes in often with his dog, a little dachshund, and he orders a fresh roll with butter and a black coffee. He spends hours writing in a little black notebook, while his dog sleeps at his feet.

  As we enter the room, Jocelyn is sharing her memento: something that looks like a mangled, twisted femur. "This was Lola's," she says, gently turning the rawhide bone over in her hands. "I found it under the couch after we put her down."

  "Why are you even here?" Stuart says. "It was just a damn dog!"

  Jocelyn narrows her eyes. "At least I didn't bronze her."

  They start arguing as the old man and I get settled in the circle. Marge uses this as a distraction. "Mr. Weber," she says, "welcome. Jocelyn was just telling us how much her pet meant to her. Have you ever had a pet you loved?"

  I think of the little dog he brings to the bakery. He shares the roll with her, fifty-fifty.

  But the man is silent. He bows his head, as if he is being pressed down in his seat. I recognize that stance, that wish to disappear.

  "You can love a pet more than you love some people," I say suddenly, surprising even myself. Everyone turns, because unlike the others, I hardly ever draw attention to myself by volunteering information. "It doesn't matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it's there."

  The old man slowly glances up. I can feel the heat of his gaze through the curtain of my hair.

  "Mr. Weber," Marge says, noticing. "Maybe you brought a memento to share with us today . . . ?"

  He shakes his head, his blue eyes flat and without expression.

  Marge lets his silence stand; an offering on a pedestal. I know this is because some people come here to talk, while others come to just listen. But the lack of sound pounds like a heartbeat. It's deafening.

  That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much?

  At the end of the hour, Marge thanks us for participating and we fold up the chairs and recycle our paper plates and napkins. I pack up the remaining muffins and give them to Stuart. Bringing them back to the bakery would be like carting a bucket of water to Niagara Falls. Then I walk outside to head back to work.

  If you've lived in New Hampshire your whole life, like I have, you can smell the change in the weather. It's oppressively hot, but there's a thunderstorm written across the sky in invisible ink.

  "Excuse me."

  I turn at the sound of Mr. Weber's voice. He stands with his back to the Episcopal church where we hold our meetings. Although it's at least eighty-five degrees out, he is wearing a long-sleeved shirt that is buttoned to the throat, with a narrow tie.

  "That was a nice thing you did, sticking up for that girl."

  The way he pronounces the word thing, it sounds like think.

  I look away. "Thanks."

  "You are Sage?"

  Well, isn't that the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question? Yes, it's my name, but the double entendre--that I'm full of wisdom--has never really applied. There have been too many moments in my life when I've nearly gone off the rails, more overwhelmed by emotion than tempered by reason.

  "Yes," I say.

  The awkward silence grows between us like yeasted dough. "This group. You have been coming a long time."

  I don't know whether I should be defensive. "Yes."

  "So you find it helpful?"

  If it were helpful, I wouldn't still be coming. "They're all nice people, really. They each just sometimes think their grief is bigger than anyone else's."

  "You don't say much," Mr. Weber muses. "But when you do . . . you are a poet."

  I shake my head. "I'm a baker."

  "Can a person not be two things at once?" he asks, and slowly, he walks away.

  *

  I run into the bakery, breathless and flushed, to find my boss hanging from the ceiling. "Sorry I'm late," I say. "The shrine is packed and some moron in an Escalade took my spot."

  Mary's rigged up a Michelangelo-style dolly so that she can lie on her back and paint the ceiling of the bakery. "That moron would be the bishop," she replies. "He stopped in on his way up the hill. Said your olive loaf is heavenly, which is pretty high praise, coming from him."

  In her previous life, Mary DeAngelis was Sister Mary Robert. She had a green thumb and was well known for maintaining the gardens in her Maryland cloister. One Easter, when she heard the priest say He is risen, she found herself standing up from the pew and walking out the cathedral door. She left the order, dyed her hair pink, and hiked the Appalachian Trail. It was somewhere on the Presidential Range that Jesus appeared to her in a vision, and told her there were many souls to feed.

  Six months later, Mary opened Our Daily Bread at the foothills of the Our Lady of Mercy Shrine in Westerbrook, New Hampshire. The shrine covers sixteen acres with a meditation grotto, a peace angel, Stations of the Cross, and holy stairs. There is also a store filled with crosses, crucifixes, books on Catholicism and theology, Christian music CDs, saints' medals, and Fontanini creche sets. But visitors usually come to see the 750-foot rosary made of New Hampshire granite boulders, linked together with chains.

  It was a fair-weather shrine; business dropped off dramatically during New England winters. Which was Mary's selling point: What could be more secular than freshly baked bread? Why not boost the revenue of the shrine by adding a bakery that would attract believers and nonbelievers alike?

  The only catch was that she had no idea how to bake.

  That's where I come in.

  I started baking when I was nineteen years old and my father died unexpectedly. I was at college, and went home for the funeral, only to return and find nothing the same. I stared at the words in textbooks as if they had been written in a language I could not read. I couldn't get myself out of bed to go to classes. I missed one exam, then another. I stopped turning in papers. Then one night I woke up in my dorm room and smelled flour--so much flour I felt as if I'd been rolling in it. I took a shower but couldn't get rid of the smell. It reminded me of Sunday mornings as a kid, when I would awaken to the scent of fresh bagels and bialys, crafted by my father.

  He'd always tried to teach my sisters and me, but mostly we were too busy with school and field hockey and boys to listen. Or so I thought, until I started to sneak into the residential college dining hall kitchen and bake bread every night.

  I left the loaves like abandoned babies on the thresholds of the offices of professors I admired, of the dorm rooms of boys with smiles so beautiful that they stunned me into awkward silence. I left a finial row of sourdough rolls on a lectern podium and slipped a boule into the oversize purse of the cafeteria lady who pressed plates of pancakes and bacon at me, telling me I was too skinny. On the day my academic adviser told me that I was failing three of my four classes, I had nothing to say in my defense, but I gave her a honey baguette seeded with anise, the bitter and the sweet.

  My mother arrived unexpectedly one day. She took up residence in my dorm room and micromanaged my life, from making sure I was fed to walking me to class and quizzing me on my homework readings. "If I don't get to give up," she told me, "then neither do you."

  I wound up being on the five-year plan, but I did graduate. My mother stood up and whistled through her teeth when I crossed the stage to get my diploma. And then everything went to hell.

  I've thought a lot about it: how you can ricochet from a moment where you are on top of the world to one where you are crawling at rock bottom. I've thought about all the things I could have done differently, and if it would have led to another outcome. But thinking doesn't change anything, does it? And so afterward, with my eye still bloodshot and the Frankenstein monster stitches curving around my temple and cheek like the seam of a baseball, I gave my mother the same advice she had given me. If I don't get to give up, then neither do you.

  She didn't, at first. It took almost six months, one bodily system shutting down after another. I sat by her side in the hospital every day, and at night went home to rest.