THE BAD YEAR
Diane Keene answered on the sixth ring.
“Mara?”
“Yes.”
“Is something wrong?”
It was seven fifteen in the morning.
Her mother had every right to assume catastrophe.
Mara had not called before breakfast since the year Diane had her hip replaced.
“Do you remember Linden Street?”
There was a pause.
“What about it?”
“The family center.”
“I know what Linden Street was.”
Mara stood in her office above the bakery with Theo's loaf beside the computer.
“Did Dad ever go there?”
The pause this time was longer.
“What brought this up?”
“So he did.”
“I didn't say that.”
“You didn't have to.”
Diane sighed.
It was infuriating how family members developed matching evasions without agreeing to.
“Mara, I haven't had coffee.”
“I just met someone who says Dad used to bake there.”
“Who?”
“A baker.”
“What baker?”
“One I fired.”
Her mother went quiet.
“I'm going to need you to start over.”
Mara didn't.
She asked again.
“Did Dad go to Linden Street?”
“I don't know.”
“You were married to him.”
“That did not make me his parole officer.”
The sharpness was familiar.
Diane had stopped working in the bakery four years before Arthur died and almost never entered it now.
People assumed age had driven her out.
Mara knew better.
There were rooms in a marriage that remained uncomfortable long after the person who occupied them was gone.
“Mom.”
“I knew he went somewhere.”
“Where did you think?”
“I don't want to discuss this at seven in the morning.”
“What did you think?”
Diane's voice flattened.
“I thought there was a woman.”
Mara sat down.
She knew this.
Sort of.
Nobody had ever stated it plainly.
During the bad year, her mother had begun checking receipts.
Her father had slept downstairs twice.
Once, Mara had arrived at the bakery and found Diane crying inside the walk-in refrigerator because it was the only place customers could not hear.
There had been arguments about money.
About nights away.
About a name Mara never clearly remembered.
“I thought you found out there wasn't.”
“No.”
“You stayed married.”
“People stay married without solving things.”
That sentence disturbed Mara more than she expected.
“What did Dad say?”
“Nothing useful.”
“He denied it?”
“He said I was wrong.”
“Did he tell you where he was going?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Ask him.”
The cruelty of the answer was accidental.
Diane corrected herself almost immediately.
“Well. We can't.”
Mara looked at the loaf.
“Someone knows.”
“Who?”
“The baker.”
“Your fired employee.”
“Yes.”
“What exactly did he say?”
“That Dad baked at Linden Street when he was twelve.”
Diane did not answer.
“Mom?”
“I heard you.”
“He knew Dad's fold.”
“What fold?”
Mara closed her eyes.
Her mother had never cared about bread technique.
“The one he used for the old country loaf.”
“You'll have to be more specific.”
“The heel turn.”
Silence.
“You remember.”
“I remember him making bread, Mara.”
“He never taught employees that.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he taught me.”
Diane's voice softened slightly.
“He taught lots of people things.”
“Not that.”
“How can you possibly know?”
Because Mara had spent fifteen years preserving Arthur's bakery as if every adjustment threatened to erase him.
She did not say that.
Instead she asked, “Do you remember flour going missing?”
Diane gave a dry laugh.
“Oh, I remember.”
“How much?”
“Enough.”
“And you thought he was taking it to her?”
“I thought many things.”
“What woman?”
Another pause.
“Her name was Sofia.”
Mara wrote it down without meaning to.
“Sofia what?”
“I never knew.”
“How did you know her first name?”
“I found a note.”
There it was.
The object families built stories around.
“What did it say?”
“Thank you. The boys ate everything. Sofia.”
Mara stared out the office window.
Below, customers were beginning to fill the bakery.
“That's all?”
“At the time it was enough.”
“It wasn't proof of an affair.”
“I know that now.”
“Did you know it then?”
“No.”
Diane's answer came without defense.
For the first time that morning, Mara heard the twenty-year distance inside her mother's voice.
“What happened when you showed it to him?”
“He became angry.”
“Because you accused him.”
“Because I asked.”
“You accused him.”
“Yes.”
“And he still didn't explain Linden Street?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“You are asking me to explain a man who spent forty-one years believing silence was a personality.”
Despite herself, Mara almost smiled.
That was Arthur.
Diane continued.
“He said I would think what I wanted anyway.”
“And what did you say?”
“That if he cared so little what I thought, he could sleep somewhere else.”
Mara remembered the cot in the bakery office.
The missing shirts from her parents' closet.
Her father coming to Thanksgiving dinner with a split lip because he had walked into a rack in the dark and refusing to explain even that.
“How long was he out of the house?”
“Seven weeks.”
Mara had remembered four.
Memory simplified everything.
“Did you ever find out?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“No.”
“Why did you let him come home?”
Diane was silent so long Mara checked the phone.
“Because I missed him,” she said finally. “That is not the same thing as believing him.”
Mara looked at the loaf again.
For twenty years, the bad year had existed in the Keene family as settled history.
Arthur disappeared.
Diane suspected another woman.
Arthur refused to explain.
The bakery nearly failed.
They stayed married.
Nobody mentioned it again.
Then a twenty-seven-year-old baker walked into Mara's production room carrying her father's hands.