“I’ve never been able to do it, what makes you think this time could be any different?”
“You’re fighting yourself. You’re panicking. You must concentrate and become the yeast.”
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Cindy’s sighed. For a moment she had actually dared to hope that Martha could help her. Unfortunately, when it wasn’t even in her power to mix ingredients the right way, transforming herself into a hungry, gassy little organism was even less probable. Maybe Martha was way off the deep end.
Maybe her life and her true love cheater were figments of a schizophrenic mind. “I’m sorry?”
“Try becoming the yeast. Imagine yourself about to be mixed into water.” She got that weird dreamy look in her eyes and gestured as if she were tracing the horizon. “What is the best temperature for you to thrive in?”
“Uh . . . ”
“I know it sounds crazy, but give it a try.” Martha seemed to come out of her trance. She blinked her permanently lowered lashes solemnly. “I think you’ll be surprised.”
Cindy narrowed her eyes. “Something is different about you. You’re talking more. You’re helping me, and you should be furious for the way I screamed at you.”
“Cindy.” Martha took one of her funny endless breaths.
“We’ve all been tested here. We’ve all had to look our tragedies straight on, and we’ve all discovered things we didn’t expect to see. In short—all of us are ready to crack up.”
“You’re always so calm.”
“Calm is a state of mind you can choose, the same way hysteria is.”
“Not me.” Cindy laughed. “Calm and I are strangers.”
“If you are at peace inside yourself, then you can be calm.”
“Oh.” Cindy half expected her to say
grasshopper
at the end of every sentence. “Do you know if your friend is feeling better?”
“He died. Last night.”
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Cindy felt a jolt of adrenaline and dismay. She stared at Martha, waiting for the tears, the regrets, the outpourings of devotion. But no. Only sad resignation, which tore at Cindy’s insides more than if Martha had been hysterical. “I’m so sorry. How did you hear?”
“I haven’t heard yet.”
Okay, now Cindy was getting really freaked out. Was this odd woman all there? Was she about to go nuts and shoot up the room and/or herself? “Then how do you know?”
“I felt it.” She tested her water with her little finger, stirred in her sugar and yeast.
Cindy was pretty much convinced now that Martha was a lunatic. Cindy had been with Kevin for twenty years, but was pretty sure he could drop dead and she wouldn’t have the slightest clue until she heard from the police. Or Patty.
“Well, wow, you seem pretty . . . ”
She was not enamored with the word
calm
anymore.
“Chances were pretty good he had brain damage from a stroke. Even if he had woken up, he might not have been the man I knew.” She frowned at her measuring cup, yeast already frothing and bubbling happily on top.
“I’m sorry.” She was surprised to find that she
was
sorry, and wondered whether the man’s wife couldn’t help a small feeling of relief mixed into her grief, that she’d finally gotten rid of a snake like that.
Martha turned her sad bulgy eyes on Cindy. “You don’t think I deserve to lose him?”
“I’m not sure I believe that’s the way the world works. I didn’t deserve what Kevin did to me.” The words rolled bitterly out of her mouth, and she stopped in absolute astonishment, having no idea she’d been about to say them.
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“Has everyone’s yeast proofed yet?” Francine, the baking instructor, held up her hand and swept the room with her eyes. Everybody nodded except Cindy. She picked up her measuring cup and went over to the faucet, ran the water with her finger underneath it. How the hell was she supposed to know how this worked?
She thought about what Martha had said. What temperature would feel good to her if she were a piece of yeast, ready to dive in? What temperature did she like when she was tired and cold and needed a hot bath to bring her back to life?
The water turned slightly hotter, warm on her finger with only the tiniest bite. Exactly how Cindy liked her bathwater.
She filled her measuring cup to the proper line and brought it back to the table, added sugar, cut open her yeast packet and dumped it in, waited a few minutes, couldn’t stand it when nothing happened, and turned away to think about Martha.
What would a woman like Martha do after losing her un-healthy fraction of a relationship that she called true love?
“Where do you go from here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you should get a job telling stories. To children, or old people at libraries, or hospitals.”
Martha gave her a look as if she thought Cindy was crazy, which Cindy couldn’t help feeling was the reverse of how it should be. Though she couldn’t really blame Martha. The idea was pretty stupid.
Except then Martha’s eyes turned thoughtful. “I’ll think about it. Thank you.”
Cindy blinked. Had she just given someone good advice?
“Look.” Martha nudged her and pointed to Cindy’s mea-As Good As It Got
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suring cup. On top of the warm water, the yeast was bubbling, frothing, fornicating furiously. “That will make a wonderful batch of rolls.”
Cindy put her hand to her cheeks, which had flushed hot.
“Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Look at that!”
Martha helped her stir the precious fluid into the flour mixture, and though Cindy’s kneading stroke was still clumsy, the dough felt warm and alive under her fingers this time. While it rose, she attacked cupcakes, letting Martha guide her, urging her to cream the butter and sugar together more thoroughly, keeping her from beating too long after the dry ingredients were added to the wet. And while the results wouldn’t win any prizes, she was pretty sure they would be among the cakes served to the campers for dessert at night.
She might not even be able to tell which were hers.
Everything got better. Her dough had risen as high as anyone else’s. She had trouble getting all her rolls the same size, but they even rose a second time, and baked to a brown crusty finish.
Cindy was quite sure the world had never looked, smelled, or been such a wonderful place. Even Martha, who could just as easily have hated her, seemed proud, and only betrayed a slight horror when Cindy gave her a hug of gratitude and sympathy.
She even asked the instructor if she could take one of the rolls back to her cabin to show Dinah and Ann, and was given permission. Cindy practically danced down the path from the kitchen to their cabin, and only stumbled once. She flew up the steps, yanked open the screen door and held a piece of bread up triumphantly. “Look! Look what I did!”
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She laughed, knowing that she was being completely ridiculous getting this excited over something so simple. Something most women probably learned to do when they were ten.
Dinah had been sitting in the common room reading
People
magazine, but she got up and gamely celebrated. Even Ann emerged from her bedroom and grinned at Cindy’s achievement as if she’d just announced a major publishing contract or a lottery win. Ann didn’t even pull away all that much either when Cindy hugged her.
Martha joined them, back from baking class a little more slowly than Cindy’s jubilant pace, and they split the roll in the common room of their cabin, exclaiming as if they were dining in a restaurant in Paris.
Tears filled Cindy’s eyes. She could not be more grateful for these women and their nutty excitement over her bread.
A knock at the door. Four shouted “Come ins,” then odd and immediate silence when Patrick walked into their sanc-tum. His eyes picked Cindy’s out immediately, and for the first time since they’d been together, she saw the warmth in them, and felt herself flushing and feeling even giddier.
“Cindy.” He glanced around the room, and brought those beautiful gray eyes back to hers. “You have a visitor.”
Cindy had so much adrenaline going that she would not have thought any more was possible, but it was. At the same time, paradoxically, a huge stillness settled over her and apparently the rest of the room.
“Who . . . is it?”
Patrick’s smile held a hint of sadness. “It’s Kevin. He wants to see you.”
Chapter 17
If Cindy thought there was true silence in the room before, when Patrick walked in, she was mistaken. Because when he said Kevin was here, that Kevin had come to get her back, exactly as she predicted, exactly as she told everybody in this camp from the first day she got here, it was as if everyone had stopped moving and breathing and digesting.
If Cindy thought that baking a decent roll had made her feel triumphant, she was wrong. She’d only experienced the tiniest fraction of triumph compared to this. She’d told them all, and Kevin had come back.
“Well.” Her voice sounded too high and too breathy. “How about that?”
She turned then, with an uncharacteristic toss of her head, unable to wait a second longer to see her roommates’
shocked and abashed faces, to enjoy the moment, to look each of them in the eye and telepathically send them the biggest, smuggest told-you-so that she could manage.
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Except while Martha, Ann, and Dinah might have looked shocked, they didn’t look abashed so much as horrified.
Cindy sighed. She didn’t expect them to understand, but she thought they might find it in their hearts to be happy for her in this as well as her baking.
“He’s waiting for you in Betsy’s cabin.” Patrick sent her a puppy dog look—or was it hangdog? Some kind of dog.
Not Max.
“I’ll go right away.” She was glad to discover she still held a piece of roll in her hand. She could show it to Kevin, let him taste it. He’d be pleased, she was sure. He of all people would understand what an achievement this was for her, after suffering through her cooking for so many years.
She followed Patrick out of the cabin, without looking back at the girls again. Their reaction had made her kind of queasy, and jittery, and she didn’t like to think about what they’d be saying once she left. That she was weak, that she was foolish. Though it occurred to her that maybe of all of them, Martha would come closest to understanding.
Irony at its finest.
“Will you go back to him?”
She was about to say
Of course
when she realized that were their positions reversed, she’d be devastated if Patrick brushed her off so lightly. “I’ll see what he has to say.”
She kept her voice cold, but couldn’t help a smile. Didn’t she sound strong and reborn!
“Just because you planned all along to go back to him doesn’t mean you still have to, Cindy. Your will is your own, and your life is your own, and your pride and self-respect are your own. None of them belongs to him.”
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Patrick’s brave voice made her breath go all stuttering and unpleasant, and she wanted to reach for a tree to steady herself, but they were approaching Betsy’s cabin and there were no trees nearby, just the sad roses and scruffy lilacs, and neither of them would offer her support.
She stopped at the doorway and turned to face Patrick.
“Thank you.”
He looked around furtively, then grabbed her shoulders and hugged her tightly. “Be strong. Be confident. Be who you are.”
Strong? Confident? She’d tried that briefly and it hadn’t worked out. She smiled into his beautiful gray eyes and loved him desperately for saying such nice things. His belief in her even made it seem possible again that he was right. Then she opened the door and walked into Betsy’s cabin.
Kevin had been sitting in a chair near Betsy’s desk, and he rose to his feet when she came in. He looked tired. Older.
Anxious, and contrite. Her heart swelled and softened at the sight. He was suffering.
“Cindy.” He seemed surprised, as if he’d expected someone else. “You look . . . beautiful.”
He might as well have told her she was the Queen of England, for how it made her feel. She bet if she extended her hand, he’d drop to his knees and kiss it.
She was going to enjoy this.
“Kevin would like to talk to you, Cindy.” Betsy sat at her desk in her black half-glasses, arms folded across her chest.
Cindy imagined that Kevin had not been having a lovely time with her. “How do you feel about that?”
“Fine. I feel fine.” She beamed at Kevin, even while she 270 Isabel
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had a funny buzzy feeling, like she’d had many too many cups of coffee. He was back. He was here. He’d left Patty and wanted her back.
“If you’re sure, Cindy, you can take Kevin into the room where you spoke to your daughter.”
“Sure. This way.” She walked through the beautiful living room, past the window nook, into the room where she’d taken the phone call what seemed like years ago.
See? She’d been right. Patty had not moved into her house, just as she’d told Lucy.
She closed the door, sat on the bed, and patted the mattress next to her. Kevin sat in the chair by the phone, where she’d sat talking to their daughter. Cindy rolled her eyes. He never did want to do anything she suggested.
“Well this is a surprise.” She smiled at him, pretty sure that if she told him she knew all along he’d show up, he’d get annoyed. This would be hard enough on him.
Kevin fidgeted in the chair. He hated sitting still. Any second he would stand up and start pacing.
He stood up. He paced to the end of the room, looked out the window for a few seconds into the woods, and paced back.
“I suppose you are wondering why I’m here.”
“Yes, of course.” Not.
“Cindy, I’ve . . . ” He thrust his hand through his hair, turned away again, paced to the window, paced back. “I’ve been a fool.”
“Oh?” She blinked innocently at him, surprised to find herself wanting to sock him in the gut. Why was he the last person to figure that out? Even people here at camp who As Good As It Got
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didn’t know him knew he was a fool. Or worse. He’d been called a bastard and a jerk and, she believed, an asshole.