The Storyteller Read online

  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."

  "Don't you think one outweighs the other?"

  Josef stops walking. "You tell me," he says.

  As if his words have heat behind them, my scar burns. "How come you've never asked me," I blurt out. "How it happened?"

  "How what happened?"

  I make a circular gesture in front of my face.

  "Ach. Well. A long time ago, someone once told me that a story will tell itself, when it's ready. I assumed that it wasn't ready."

  It is a strange idea, that what happened to me isn't my tale to tell, but something completely separate from me. I wonder if this has been my problem all along: not being able to dissect the two. "I was in a car accident," I say.

  Josef nods, waiting.

  "I wasn't the only one hurt," I manage, although the words choke me.

  "But you survived." Gently, he touches my shoulder. "Maybe that's all that matters."

  I shake my head. "I wish I could believe that."

  Josef looks at me. "Don't we all," he says.

  *

  The next day, Josef doesn't come to the bakery. He doesn't come the following day, either. I have reached the only viable conclusion: Josef is lying comatose in his bed. Or worse.

  In all the years I've worked at Our Daily Bread, I've never left the bakery unattended overnight. My evenings are ordered to military precision, with me working a mile a minute to divide dough and shape it into hundreds of loaves; to have them proofed and ready for baking when the oven is free. The bakery itself becomes a living, breathing thing; each station a new partner to dance with. Mess up on the timing, and you will find yourself standing alone while chaos whirls around you. I find myself compensating in a frenzy, trying to produce the same amount of product in less time. But I realize that I'm not going to be of any use until I go to Josef's house, and make sure he's still breathing.

  I drive there, and see a light on in the kitchen. Immediately, Eva starts barking. Josef opens the front door. "Sage," he says, surprised. He sneezes violently and wipes his nose with a white cloth handkerchief. "Is everything all right?"

  "You have a cold," I say, the obvious.

  "Did you come all this way to tell me what I already know?"

  "No. I thought--I mean, I wanted to check on you, since I hadn't seen you in a few days."

  "Ach. Well, as you can see, I am still standing." He gestures. "You will come in?"

  "I can't," I say. "I have to get back to work." But I make no move to leave. "I was worried when you didn't show up at the ba