Nicole opened the envelope with a thumbnail, carefully, the way a person opens a letter from a hospital, and she drew out the first page and held it close to her face. In the kitchen, the snow ticked on the window. She read the name of the bakery. She read my name. She read a number, and then she lowered the page and looked at me, and for a long time she said nothing. “Six million, nine hundred thousand dollars,” she said at last. Her voice was a whisper. “For Hélène. They paid six point nine million for the jar on my counter.”
Denis snatched the page from her. He read it standing, and I watched the color go out of his face in layers, like the bark off a birch. “Ma,” he said, “you never told me.” I said, “You never asked, Denis. You asked about the annuity. You asked about the porch.” I looked at the jar. “Nobody ever asked about Hélène.” He sank onto a chair. The cinnamon pinecones on the table gave off their cloying smell, and underneath it rose the sour, living smell of the starter, which had survived a crossing from Québec and fifty years in a kitchen in Lewiston, and was not going to be hurried.
I laid the statement from the insurance company beside the contract. “Twenty eight months of six hundred dollars,” I said. “Sixteen thousand, eight hundred. And the four hundred a month I put into a bread bag for you, twenty four months, nine thousand six hundred more.” I added it in my head, because Roland taught me to. “Twenty six thousand, four hundred dollars.” Nicole closed her eyes. “The snowmobile account,” she said. “He told me it was from the overtime at the shop.” She opened her eyes. “There is no overtime at the shop. There never was.”
A jar of fifty year old sourdough starter was set on a kitchen table beside a bakery contract and gave one widow the afternoon to bring her son back from the parking lot.
Denis put his head in his hands. When he spoke again it was to the table, and what he said surprised me. “I lost the job at the paper mill in Jay in the spring of the year before last,” he said. “I did not tell Nicole. I did not tell anybody. I got up every morning and put on my coat and drove to the Hannaford parking lot and sat there. For eleven months.” Nicole made a sound like something tearing. “I used the annuity to keep up the payments on the house. And then the snowmobile, I bought it with the first of the money, to make it look like I was doing fine.”
It is a strange thing to be told the truth by someone who has lied to you for two years. I had prepared myself for rage. What I felt instead, to my own surprise, was a kind of tired sorrow, the sort that comes when you see that the thing you feared was weakness all along, not wickedness. Mind you, he had still stolen from his mother. He had still moved her onto a sunporch in a Maine winter and listened to her cough through a baby monitor. Weakness does not excuse that. But it explained it. “Denis,” I said. “You could have come to me. I would have given you the money.”
“I could not,” he said. “You were so proud of me, Ma. I was the one who went to college.” He wept openly then, a grown man in a flannel shirt, with the hands of Roland and the shoulders of Roland, and I got up and put my arms around his head. It was the first time I had held him since the funeral. He smelled of cold air and cheap coffee. Nicole stood in the middle of the kitchen with her arms wrapped around herself. “Marguerite,” she said, “I want you to know I will pay back every cent, if I have to scrub floors. And I am so ashamed of that porch.”
I did not hold on to my anger. It is too heavy to carry up two flights of stairs. But I did set my terms, there in the kitchen, in my own voice, which was steadier than I expected. Denis would repay the twenty six thousand, four hundred dollars, and the annuity would go back into the account at the credit union by the first of the month. He would tell the mill, and the bank, and the truth, in that order, and he would let his wife help. I would be leaving the sunporch that afternoon. I had already telephoned a woman named Yvette, an old friend from St. Peter and Paul, who had a spare room.
I took Hélène in her jar and my sewing basket and my two good dresses, and I put them in the back seat of the car of Nicole. She insisted on driving me. Denis stood in the doorway in his sock feet with the snow blowing in around him and did not say goodbye, because he could not. At the end of the drive, I looked back. The sunporch glowed, three walls of glass, and in the middle of it, on the sill, the baby monitor sat with its little green light still on. I think he must have turned it on again after we left. I do not know who he thought was listening.
I opened the bakery in April. Not the big one in Boston, which now sells Mill Town Sourdough in every grocery store in New England, with my name in red script on the bag. I mean my own, a tiny shop on Lisbon Street with a flour dusted window and four tables. Eighteen loaves on Saturdays. Four dollars a loaf, same as 1974. Nicole works the counter on weekends. She showed up in a white apron on the first morning and said nothing, and I said nothing back, and she has not missed a Saturday since.
Denis came in May. He stood in the doorway for a long time, under the bell, with his hat in his hands. Then he came to the counter and put down a bread bag with four hundred dollars in it, all ones and fives, the first installment. I took the bag. I took a loaf off the rack and set it in front of him, still warm, and I said, “Eat.” He broke it open. He ate it standing up, with tears on his face and crumbs on his shirt, and I thought that Roland would have been proud of him. I thought it would take a good many Saturdays. But Hélène is patient. She has the time.
