The Baker's Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

hoped for something poetically beautiful. Shimmering water droplets. Wispy ballerinas, slender and light-footed, dancing among trees and grasses. The occasional moody mystery. She had not expected this: a gray tomb that not even sunlight could fully penetrate, weather that muffled sounds and swallowed cars and killed by the dozens every year.
    Tule fog, it was called, after the thick tule grasses that grew throughout the valley.
    A blaring horn startled her. She punched the gas pedal and her little sedan was catapulted to safety. In her rearview mirror she saw the smudge of yellow and red that were the lights of another car passing through the intersection she’d just cleared.
    â€œThere’s got to be a better way to do this,” she said and blew her spiky blond bangs off her forehead.
    â€œDitch this commute, move into town.” Ed put his sneakered foot on the dash. “You should give up that sorry excuse for a rental house and move into the rooms over the bakery.”
    â€œLiving there would be quaint.”
    â€œEuropean.”
    â€œOld subject, Ed. You’d go stir crazy. It’s microscopic, hardly a home. You need your space. We don’t want you to feel . . . tied to us, to this venture. Besides, I was talking about driving, not housing.”
    The first dim streetlights of town came into view.
    â€œIf I moved out, would you do it? I’m not supposed to be here anyway. I’m supposed to be pulling all-nighters, playing college basketball, struggling to make the transition to independent living, that kind of thing.”
    â€œDon’t start with that. You’re here, and we’re glad to have you.”
    â€œYou won’t be saying that when I’m thirty.”
    â€œYou won’t be so morose when you’re thirty, I promise. Stay, go, duck when life throws stuff at you, and come home to see us now and then. Your dad and I won’t live anywhere that doesn’t have a decent place for you to crash. Deal with it.”
    â€œAw, Mom, where’s your tough love?”
    â€œYou don’t need tough love. You need to give yourself a little grace is all. For that matter, just accept the grace everyone wants to give you.”
    â€œThis little town is just full of grace, isn’t it?”
    Audrey pursed her lips and had no comeback. She understood in a new way that her only child probably wouldn’t stick around for many more months, even if it meant leaving before their hearts had healed. Stay, go . Her maternal heart was already torn.
    They crawled past a mechanic’s graveyard and several east-facing, weather-bleached storefronts, then turned right into a clear pocket of air. The tule fog, in its predictably unpredictable manner, had receded here and formed walls like a stadium’s, turning Main Street into a socked-in arena. Whereas a second ago Audrey couldn’t see ten feet in front of her, now she could see all the way to the Honey Bee restaurant three blocks away. The yellow awnings the owners had installed last spring had already paled a little in the blistering summer sun. Even so, under the streetlamps they seemed to give off their own light. The bakery was a block beyond on the northwest corner, still shrouded in fog.
    Audrey accelerated to a much more productive pace. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty. Storefronts clicked by her window under the light-shadow-light-shadow rhythm of the streetlights.
    It might have been that the shifting patterns deceived her, but as she approached the end of the good visibility, a movement on the left side of the street drew her eyes. A gliding form passed through a cone of light quickly, a leaf bag caught by the wind. There was no wind, though, and Audrey supposed on second thought that the shadow had been larger than a bag. Larger than a bag and more weighty than breeze-tossed plastic, moving like a living creature: a leaping dog, a stooped person dashing through a rainstorm, a cloaked villain.
    Ed