“Anyway, Seth and I went in. Several customers were inside. They still had people take numbers, and we took one, even though Seth had only a couple of dollars in his pocket, and that might have been enough for a single salt roll. When it was our turn, I smiled at the man behind the counter. He was short, Italian, and you could tell he was full of the spring day, too. He spread his arms as if he was offering everything in the glass case in front of him. Beside the loaves of bread were beautifully glazed cinnamon rolls and these almost shimmering nut rolls and muffins that seemed more blueberry than muffin.
“I remember saying to him, ‘I’m sorry we’re taking up your time, but we have almost no money. Would it be okay if you held up one of those beautiful loaves of bread, and I could just take a deep smell of it?’ On another day, maybe he might have told me no, and asked me to leave, but he smiled at me, and said, ‘Sure, no charge,’ and he pulled a loaf from the rack and held it out over the counter in his gloved hands, and I brought my face close, and breathed it in. When I pulled my head away, I said, ‘Thank you so much,’ and he laughed, and I looked at Seth and said, ‘What?’ and he rubbed his finger across his own nose. ‘You got a little flour there. You took a little too big a whiff.’ I turned to the baker and said, ‘I’m sorry!’ but he was already sliding the loaf in a paper bag, and then setting it on the counter, and saying, ‘On the house, my girl,’ and when we walked out of there, he called out after us, ‘Enjoy the bread! Enjoy your youth!’ and Seth held my hand as we walked home, except when we were tearing away pieces of the loaf. It was so good. The sun on our faces. The warmth of that bread in our mouths.”
She kept hearing drops of rain pelt the lot, but none had landed on her yet, and she couldn’t see them falling in the streetlight.
“When we got home, and back up to the apartment, I stood at the window again, and I was nibbling at a crust of the bread. But I remember how it seemed, standing there, that by going back upstairs, I’d been removed from the day. And Seth came up from behind me again. And he wanted to make love, and of course we hadn’t been drinking, and if we had made love, maybe that would have been the first time without it. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t. He kept telling me he loved me, which he usually didn’t tell me in the daytime, in the morning, and I didn’t want to hear it. I kept thinking of the men in the fantasy he’d described the night before when we were drunk, and the boy with the soccer ball, and the baker and his springtime gift to us, and I kept wondering why Seth wanted to be bleeding in an alley while I was raped, and why this man would want to give us this bread, and how there could have been no baker without the men in the alley, how the boy couldn’t have kicked the ball without Seth being hit with the brick, and that wasn’t literally true, I knew, but it was in my head, and the rest of that day I wouldn’t let Seth come near me.”
She stopped then, having slid into the space between remembering that time, remembering Seth, and the place she was now lying next to Genevieve. She thought of how, sometimes, when it rained, a breeze would come up with the first wave of raindrops, and she often wondered why that happened, why everything would seem still, and then when the breeze arrived, she wondered if it was being pulled by the rain or if the wind was carrying the rain over her. But this night was airless, and the few drops that had hit the ground had now passed. She wanted Lucy. She wanted to see her sleeping in her bed at home in order to dispel the closeness of the night.
“So maybe you should stop right there,” Genevieve said. “And tell me the rest tomorrow in the car. It’s late, and we have a long drive.”
“All right, Gen,” she said.
“Are you okay?”
“I think I’m a little homesick.”
Genevieve reached out and took her hand and squeezed it.
“I know,” she said. “Sometimes it seems like the road was made for it. Do you want to hear a little more of your father’s story?”
“I don’t know, Gen. The closer we get, the less that seems to make sense. I’m going to see him for real in less than forty-eight hours.”
“Don’t you want to hear what happened next?”
She lay there, thinking about it. She had told Genevieve more than she’d ever intended. But she said, “I do. I do. I do want to hear what happened.”
“The next stretch of highway is so plain,” Genevieve said. “So dull. I’ll tell you a little bit now, and I’ll wait to tell you the very last part till then. Maybe we’ll change the landscape some.”
“Okay.”
And then they lay quietly for a while. Genevieve had not let go of her hand. Claire was waiting for Genevieve to begin, but she could feel herself passing into the images that accompany first sleep, and she heard Genevieve humming a tune, like a lullaby. In the midst of that tune, Genevieve asked, “Did you lose track of Seth?” The question caught Claire off guard.
“Yes. Of course I did.”
“Why of course?”
“Well, I lost track of almost everyone from that time. After I was—after I was hurt, I never heard from Seth again. It was strange, I suppose. My mother told me he had been cut, too, right along a cheekbone. I don’t imagine that had anything to do with him never even trying to call. What do you say after something like that happens and you’re twenty years old?”
Genevieve nodded, and kept her eyes closed, and finished humming her tune.