Bread Alone by Judith Ryan Hendricks

my age, and it interests me how differenttheir lives are and how hard they all work. Pretty soon, they know who I am, that I’m visiting CM, and I know most of their names and what they do.
There’s Ellen, one of the owners, with eyes the color of espresso and short, dark hair. She wears long dresses with black Doc Martens and wire-rimmed glasses that keep sliding down her nose while she’s waiting on people, and she must know every single person within a ten-block radius. She asks about their husbands, wives, kids, pets, always by name. She’ll talk local politics with anybody who shows the slightest inclination, and she’s a fount of neighborhood gossip—what shops are closing and why, who’s moving in or out, who’s pregnant or getting a divorce, whose cat or dog is lost or found.
A punked-out kid named Tyler is the espresso barista, the youngest of the lot. She’s got blue hair and a nose ring, a tattoo of some Celtic knot design encircling her wrist. Lots of eye makeup and she dresses all in black. From her conversation with the other women, I gather that she just graduated from high school and is in career limbo. She works at the bakery in the mornings, dabbles in a few art classes late in the day, does the club scene at night. I wonder when she sleeps.
Diane is the resident cake baker and Ellen’s partner. She’s a Meg Ryan blonde, tall and skinny, with that coltish grace that’s all elbows and collarbone. Ellen needles her about her tendency to oversleep; she usually rolls in around nine o’clock to start baking the cakes for tomorrow and decorating the ones for today. I love to watch her designs take shape. She does wedding cakes with real flowers. She does birthday cakes with buttercream roses and daisies and ivy, fruits, animals, or toys, and the dedication in nimble, flowing script. She probably could have been a sculptor, but when I tell her that, she just laughs and says she likes being a baker because she can eat her mistakes.
On Wednesday, after I have coffee, I catch a bus down to the bottom of Queen Anne Hill and stroll south along the waterfront. The breeze off the Sound blows fresh in my face, snaps the colored pennants on the light poles. I picture CM at the studio, giving class, writinggrants, doing her own workout. Here we sit, both of us with a lapful of relationship disaster, and yet her life seems to have changed very little—at least superficially.
I wander out onto one of the wooden piers. Scents of creosote and diesel fuel merge in my nostrils with the iodine smell of seawater. Across the bay, the cranes and container ships of the working port look like an animated cartoon. I find a wooden bench that’s relatively free of seagull shit and turn my face up to the sun.
Okay, she’s not married, I am. She and Neal lived together less than two years; David and I for seven years. But that doesn’t explain it away entirely. As long as I’ve known CM, she’s seemed to have an inner compass that I lack. Even in grammar school, she knew she was a dancer.
While I was changing my major every year, she sailed through the UCLA dance curriculum and began getting work almost immediately, although not for much money. Sometimes I felt bad for her having to work two jobs, but she never seemed to find it any more than a minor inconvenience, a brief detour on the road to a destination that was never in doubt.
If I hadn’t married David, I’d probably still be teaching bonehead English to a bunch of teenage delinquents and wondering if I should go to grad school and taking aptitude-assessment tests. I guess the truth is that she’s driven and I’m drifting. But it’s never made the slightest difference in our friendship.
The closest we ever came to having a second fight was when I got engaged to David. His charm never worked on her the way it did on the rest of the female population. She found him insipid, almost beneath contempt, and never minded telling me so. She called him Pretty Boy. He