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I get it.
Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, a little, to hear it again, but I really do get it.
For all that I had my reasons for not talking to her last year, she’s got her own reasons, too. There was Nate. There was her dad, who hated my guts even before I set about deliberately lighting his fuse. But underneath all that, there was this other thing.
Caroline’s not the kind of girl who gets mixed up with a guy who’s dealing. She’s the type who plays it safe, does what she’s supposed to, follows all the rules.
Maybe if I were who I’m pretending to be when I’m at Putnam, me and Caroline would be possible, but I’m not. We don’t make sense together.
It’s fine.
“Tell you what,” I say. “Tonight I’m going to show you how to make a decent loaf and bake it. If you come back tomorrow, I’ll teach you something else. We don’t need to be friends. We can just do this … you know, this nighttime thing. If you want to. ”
“Can we?”
“When Bob’s not here, it’s my bakery. I can do whatever I want as long as I get the bread made. ”
“And you won’t …”
When she looks right at me, my hands twitch.
You won’t, West.
You fucking won’t.
“We’ll make bread and be not-friends. You don’t have to come within ten feet of my ears. I don’t want that from you, anyway. ”
What’s one more lie on top of all the others?
She pokes experimentally at the dough in front of her. “All right. Show me how you do this thing, then. ”
I show her, and then I show her the rest of it. She stays until her loaf comes out of the oven. By then she’s yawning.
I send her home to bed with warm bread tucked under her arm. I make her text me when she’s back at the dorm, safe behind a locked door.
The next night, she comes back.
She keeps coming back, and I keep letting her.
That’s how I get to be not-friends with Caroline Piasecki.
NOVEMBER
Caroline
When I think of the bakery, I think of all of it together.
The crunch of fall leaves piled up on the threshold of the back door where they’d blown down the alley and stuck.
The gleam of the mixing bowls and countertops underneath the banked fluorescents when West finished cleaning and locked up.
The smell of baking bread, the crumbling clay of live yeast between my fingers, West’s voice behind my ear as he leaned over my shoulder and watched me drop it into the bowl, saying, “Just like that. Exactly. ”
The way he moved his arm in short, sure strokes when he sliced open the tops of the loaves right before he pushed the rack of trays into the oven.
Winter came late. October turned into November, and I spent a long, crisp autumn of flour-strewn countertops and rising dough, sticky fingers and loud music and West working with his ball cap turned backward, an apron tied around his waist, and that smart-ass grin on his face.
West is the bakery. I can’t imagine the point of it without him in it, and I can’t imagine him—the best version of him, the one he rarely lets people see—without that kitchen as the backdrop for his movements.
