Fall Semester (8 page)

Chapter 9

Maren

M
aren had her mom’s car for one more day, so on Saturday morning, she drove to Keller’s Bakery before returning to school for her last (
Thank God!)
shift at the registration table. Last night had been awful and mortifying with Jess and his relentless hounding and Dr. Vashal’s intervention as referee. And that she could have tolerated well enough, but it was the stony silence that had followed Jess’s return to the table that finished her off. Whenever they had dared to glance at each other, Jess had looked both shame-faced and confused, and Maren had wanted to say something, but she didn’t dare. As it was, she had practically let it slip that Helene’s feelings for Jess were more than casual, something that could not hold up against his teasing.

Maren had not decided if she should tell her friend about the exchange, so as she faced another three-hour shift, she braced herself to suffer alone.

Thus the bakery.

Keller’s was the oldest bakery in Lafayette, and, in Maren’s estimation, it was the best. Some of Maren’s friends, and even her brother, Lane, thought that Meche’s won out. Meche’s did have three locations in Lafayette, which testified to their success, but their doughnuts were monstrous—flaky with sugar or coated with a chocolate topping so thick it was almost waxy. The king cakes they sold before Mardi Gras were giant doughnut braids dripping with green, gold, and purple icing, a promise of instant diabetes.

Keller’s, by contrast, offered doughnuts that were modestly sized, lightly glazed or topped in a thin, dark chocolate frosting that left you wanting just a little more. Their king cakes were sleek rings of Danish pastry layered with filling and delicately iced in the festival tricolor. Maren’s favorite was raspberry walnut. Her dad loved the amaretto walnut cream cheese. Maren jangled the bell on the bakery door as she entered and pushed aside the dispiriting thought that king cakes would not be available again until January.

It was 7:40, and a line had formed. Maren recognized the two black women behind the counter who had worked there for years. They were always smiling and laughing with customers. She grinned at the sight of them, glad that some things did not seem to change. Maren waited for her turn, eyeing the apple turnovers and cinnamon twists in the display cases. She would have to be sure not to let her eyes get bigger than her stomach.

“Whatcha need, suga?” The older of the two women called to her. Maren read the smiling woman’s name tag, Sally, and promised herself she’d remember it next time.

“One dozen, half and half, please.”

“Yes, Lawd, yes. Got some hot ones!” Sally boasted, filling her box directly from the tray that had just come from the kitchen. “You bringin’ these to ya boy-fren, honay?

Maren laughed and handed over a $10.

“No, no boyfriend,” she replied, taking the box of hot doughnuts.

“Aw, you gotta get a boy-fren, den send him out to get
you
doughnuts on a Sat-a-day mawnin’!”

“Well, that
would
be nice,” Maren admitted, laughing again. “Though I think I was still buying the doughnuts for the last one.”

Of course, it hadn’t been doughnuts with Ben. Coffee and bagels, yes. But she had been the one to surprise him with those small, thoughtful gifts. Never the other way around.

“Live and learn, girl,” Sally sighed. “Live and learn.”

“Yes, indeed.”

Maren grabbed a handful of napkins from the dispenser on the counter, thanked Sally for the doughnuts, and carried her peace offering back to the car. That’s what it was, of course, a token to try to put yesterday behind them, and it made her feel just a little less uneasy about heading back to Griffin Hall.

She got there right at 8:00, speed-walking from the parking lot, and found only Dr. Vashal setting up the table. Jess was nowhere in sight.

“Good morning, Dr. Vashal. I brought us some breakfast. I hope I’m not late,” she stammered. “Here, I’ll help with that.”

His eyes tracked from hers, to the doughnuts, to his watch, and to the box of packets she was already taking from him.

“Hi. Thanks. No. Okay.” He gave her a half smile, but she stared at him in confusion.

“What?” She paused with the box of packets half open before her. Dr. Vashal reached for a napkin and helped himself to a chocolate-covered.

“‘Hi’ to your ‘Good morning.’ ‘Thanks’ for the doughnuts. ‘No’ you are not late, and ‘okay,’ you may pry this box from my hands.” He finished his explanation by taking a huge bite of doughnut and attempting to hide his amusement, but it shone in his gray-green eyes.

After a beat, she had to laugh at herself, but he saved her from too much embarrassment.

“Mmm. These are still hot. Where did you get them?” he asked, flipping the box lid back down to read it. “Keller’s. My favorite.”

“Yeah, they’re the best,” she said, setting the opened box of packets behind them and proceeding to straighten the stack of registration forms on the table, but she watched him, too. As he engulfed the rest of his doughnut, with obvious enjoyment, he looked like a kid. He was without his usual jacket and tie, just a button-down white dress shirt, and Maren could detect the outline of biceps and pectorals through the fabric. She caught herself wondering what it would feel like to run her hands over them and hastily pulled her gaze back to the papers in front of her.

He reached for the box of doughnuts, grabbed a second, and bit into it before a realization seemed to strike him.

“That can wait.” He nodded to the papers and held the doughnut box out to her. “Here, have one of your doughnuts.”

Maren suppressed a smile, took a napkin, and plucked a glazed out of the box.

“No chocolate?” He eyed her with disbelief. Her smile broke free.

“I like chocolate. I just like to have a glazed first,” she explained, taking a bite of the golden perfection. “They’re the best when hot.”

“I’ll have to try that next,” he noted, and his voice was softer and more relaxed than she’d ever heard it. Who knew that the fearsome Dr. Vashal could be tamed with a box of doughnuts? What would Helene think?

The last thought made her check her watch. A quarter after 8.

“Where’s Jess?” she asked.

Dr. Vashal frowned.

“He said last night that he wouldn’t be here until 9:30....I should have told him not to bother coming at all,” he added, bitterly.

Maren didn’t know how to respond to this, and she was glad when a handful of people approached the registration table and put them both to work. Once there was a lull, Maren pulled out her Romantics text and returned to
Christabel
. Even though she’d just turned in a research paper for Dr. Sheridan, the department head had announced that she would give them an in-class essay test on Monday concerning the Coleridge poem. Dr. Sheridan had encouraged the class to read in the area of its most notable criticism, but she also warned them that their responses on the essay test needed to emphasize their own original thought.

And Maren had read. And read. And read.

“You’ve been staring at that page for nearly 20 minutes,” Dr. Vashal declared with a hint of impatience. “For God’s sake, what are you stuck on?”

“It’s
Christabel,
” she said, looking up from the lines that she hadn’t really been reading.

“Yes, I can see that,” he deadpanned.

Maren puffed her bangs out of her eyes and slumped in her seat.

“I’m just trying to see it from a new perspective,” she explained, feeling defeated. After a moment, Dr. Vashal gestured to the book in front of her.

“May I?”

She slid the book toward him. Maren didn’t want to
ask
him for help, but she was willing to accept it if he offered. She watched him as he languidly flipped through the gothic poem,...and then she just watched
him
.

There was no doubt about it. He was beautiful. In profile, as he looked down at the words, his lashes had a life of their own. The fine muscles below his golden cheek and around his mouth were European in their tautness, evidence of the fact that he was fluent in another language. The straight slope of his nose drew her eyes down to the alluring flesh of his lips and his strong chin.

Yes, he was beautiful. But there was more than beauty. She remembered the condemned look in his eyes she had seen a few weeks before, and her heart twisted. Absorbed in the reading, there was the tender humanness of him. The singularity, the essence of him that was vulnerable and sacred. And, somehow, she could see it. As she sat beside him, realizing that she was witnessing
him
, she knew the moment would end too quickly. And it did.

“What do you know about ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’?” he asked, turning to look at her.

Maren tried to close down the wonder that must have shown on her face, but she wasn’t sure that she had done it in time. She cleared her throat, blinked her eyes, and took the book back from him before answering.

“Well,...it came out of a disappointment,” she stammered. “Coleridge was supposed to go on an outing with friends, but he wasn’t well, so he stayed back in the garden. And what started out as bitterness became transcendence as he imagined the pleasure of his friends.”

Dr. Vashal smiled in appreciation.

“That’s right. His wife, Sara, spilled scalding milk on his foot, and so he was laid up while his friends enjoyed their jaunt in the English countryside.” His smile grew as he talked, but his eyes narrowed. “Now, Coleridge’s was a loveless marriage. He fell in love with Sara Hutchinson two years later and made no attempts to hide his heart or his infidelities. What I’ve always wondered is, how long was Coleridge an adulterer? And was that spilt milk really an accident?”

She was about to ask what this had to do with
Christabel
, but she stopped herself. If there was a connection of any kind, she wanted to figure it out herself.

“This has nothing to do with
Christabel,
” he said, practically reading her mind. “It just leaps to mind when I think about Coleridge.”

He gave a short chuckle and reached for the book again, but she stopped him.

“No,...I think I’m good,” she said, musing.

He helped himself to another doughnut.

“Well, that was never in doubt,” he mumbled.

Jess showed up an hour later, but he was so distracted that there wasn’t even an opportunity for Maren to feel awkward about what had transpired the night before. While checking in an older man, Jess had to ask him twice to repeat his name, and, once, he handed back the check a woman had just written instead of giving her the conference materials.

Dr. Vashal had grumbled at this and sent Jess to get coffee for the three of them. Maren was more than grateful when 11:00 rolled around without incident. She bid the two men goodbye and headed home, and it wasn’t until she got there that she checked her phone, which she had silenced that morning.

CALL ME!

Helene’s text, coupled with Jess’s obvious weirdness, set her heart pumping, filling her veins with guilt.

With trepidation, she tapped Helene’s number. Helene answered on the first ring.

“Are you home?” Helene’s voice was all business, giving nothing away.

“Um...yes...?”

“Can I come over?” Maren judged that she at least didn’t sound angry or tearful.

“Sure. Should I make tea?”

“God, yes. Make some tea.” Helene said before hanging up.

Maren just had time to set the kettle on the stove, lay out two cups, and let Perry into the backyard before Helene’s car halted in her driveway. Maren met her at the door.

“You are not going to
believe
the morning I’ve had,” Helene said, dropping her purse and keys on the floor and sinking into one of the dinette chairs in the kitchen. “So. Fucking. Weird.”

Maren didn’t want to play dumb, so she went for it.

“Jess?”

“Jess.” Helene nodded and gave her a bewildered look. “He came over to my apartment this morning at freakin’ 7:30!”

“What?!?”

“Woke me up. Scared the piss out of me because who the hell knocks on the door at 7:30? And he wants to know if I’ll go to breakfast with him.” They both looked at each other with wide eyes.

“Holy cow.”

“I thought he was messing with me, you know, trying to fuck with my head when my guard was down,” she said, giving a sardonic laugh. “And my guard was
down.
I was in my pj’s—a tank top and shorty shorts, and I thought his eyes were going to fall out of his head. But when I asked him what he wanted, or more like yelled it, he got all nervous and stuttery.”

The kettle started to whistle, so Maren went to the stove.

“So, did you go?”

“Hell, no! I stood in the doorway and yelled at him for waking me up, for embarrassing the hell out of me all week, and for being a general asshole.”

Maren stifled a smile at that image, filled the teacups, and carried them to the table.

“And what did he say?” she asked.

“Well,...he just...stood there...and took it,” Helene said, and her eyes drifted down, pulling her into the memory of it. “So, finally, I stopped yelling. And just stood there for a second,...and he
apologized.”