The Walking Bread Read online

  I slipped into the memory of my mother reading those pages to Billy and me, her voice falling into a steady rhythm of those nonsensical words. They came alive for us, though. We didn’t need to know what they meant to understand the feeling behind them.

  Now, looking down at the art-car version of those Through the Looking-Glass pages, and knowing that the portmanteaus had been one of my mother’s favorite things to teach, my eyes pooled. She’d been gone more than a year now, but she was never far from my thoughts. Or from Billy’s. Despite the passage of time, he still couldn’t express his emotions over losing our mom, but the concept behind and the execution of his art car showed just how deeply he felt the loss. He’d poured his feelings right into the words on the pages.

  Billy had gone inside for a few minutes, so I pushed my own emotions aside, snapping pictures of the paint cans stacked precariously in one corner of the garage, the piles of newspaper scattered around, and the copy of Through the Looking-Glass that Billy had referred to. I flipped through the pages of the book, finally turning to the inside front cover. There, in a slightly left-slanted writing, which was half cursive, half printing, was my mother’s writing. The inscription was dated and written to Billy:

  My darling boy, may your days be filled with whimsy, and may you always slay the Jabberwocky. Like Alice, I’m always just beyond the looking glass.

  Happy Birthday.

  With love, always ∼

  Mom

  Once again, my eyes teared up. It hadn’t been prophetic, although in retrospect it certainly seemed to be so. I wanted to snatch up the book and hold it close, as if that would somehow make the inscription for me, as well as Billy. I racked my brain, trying to remember. She had given us both books over the years; it had been her thing. She wanted to share her love of reading with us, and she also wanted to let us experience her favorite books so that we could talk about them with her. Now, thinking back, I suddenly understood. The books she’d given us helped us to know her better, even now. If we pulled them all out, it would be like getting a glimpse into her soul. They would, I realized, help us rediscover parts of her long forgotten from our childhoods. And they would let us learn new things that she’d never revealed to us. We’d see her through the lens of the books that inspired her, that spoke to her, that moved her.

  As I ran my fingers over her handwriting, committing the words to memory, I heard a movement behind me, followed by my name. “Ivy—”

  I whirled around in surprise, my camera-carrying hand raising instinctively, my finger depressing the shutter button. My dad smiled and turned to Billy’s art car.

  At the same moment, Billy emerged from the house, saw our dad, and rushed forward. My heart lurched upward, catching in my throat. Our father wasn’t prepared for the scene Billy had created. I moved toward him. “Dad—”

  But Billy and I were both too late. He was already in front of the car, his smile turning to pride as he took it in. He moved closer, looking at the enormous book Billy had created, squinting slightly as he started to read. And then suddenly his face collapsed.

  “The ‘Jabberwocky,’” he said, his voice low. He didn’t move. Didn’t turn away from the car. Instead he took a step closer and laid one hand on the painted lines. “Your favorite.”

  “Dad,” Billy said, coming to stand beside him, but whatever he was going to say faded into nothing. Our father, we both realized, wasn’t talking to us. He was talking to his wife . . . to our mother.

  “I’m sorry—” Billy started, but our dad shook his head slightly and put his arm around Billy, gently squeezing his shoulder.

  “For what? You love her. She would have been so prou—” He stopped as his voice started to break. He gathered up his emotions and continued. “I can just imagine her seeing this and—”

  “She’d recite the entire poem.” I closed my eyes, seeing her standing here with us, speaking the senseless words Lewis Carroll had written. I could recite most of it, too, because my mother had loved it so much, but the second verse had always stuck with me. I spoke it aloud, feeling the rhyme, and the strength of the description, and the portmanteaus.

  Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

  Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

  The frumious Bandersnatch!shun

  The frumious Bandernatch!

  It had been years and years since I’d thought of the poem, but hearing it spill from my lips brought it back, word for word. It was an indelible memory and I couldn’t help but smile.

  “I never understood it,” Billy said. “‘The vorpal blade went snicker-snack.’ The ‘Tumtum tree’? ‘Galumphing?’” He shook his head, looking utterly bewildered. “Those aren’t words.”

  My dad’s voice suddenly rang through the garage, louder and clearer than it had been a moment ago. He recited the two verses Billy had been referring to:

  He took his vorpal sword in hand:

  Long time the manxome foe he sought

  So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

  And stood a while in thought.

  One two! One two! And through and through

  The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

  He left it dead, and with its head

  He went galumphing back.

  “Words or not, your mom thought they were magical,” he said when he finished. “Can’t say that I understand it either, Billy, but for the first time, I think I get it.”

  He gave Billy’s shoulder another squeeze and walked around the car, taking in the other details. I met Billy’s eyes. It had taken a long time, but we could finally talk about our mother—and our dad could talk about his wife—without breaking down or being overwhelmed by grief. It felt like a pivotal moment.

  Billy attended to a detail on the front bumper of the car as I walked next to my dad. The entire thing was filled with whimsical features from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: spotted mushrooms, teacups and a teapot, a stopwatch, a crooked top hat laying on a grassy expanse, a small bottle with a label that read: DRINK ME. I took pictures of each element.

  Our father was a man of few words. Billy and I waited for him to finish his slow perusal of the car. Finally, he rejoined us at the front end. “Nice job, son,” he said, then patted Billy on the shoulder. “You’ll take it this time.”

  I agreed 100%. Billy’s Jabberwocky car was already impressive. By the time he finished, it would be spectacular. This was going to be his year.

  Chapter 2

  If Penelope Branford was my surrogate grandmother, then Olaya Solis, proprietor of Yeast of Eden, Santa Sofia’s premier bread shop, was my honorary aunt. She’d been one of the first people I’d connected with when I moved back home. She’d shared her love of baking bread with me, and I’d run with it. Some people saw a therapist. Some did retail therapy. But for me, being in Olaya’s classes and then helping out at the bread shop had helped me heal. I’d done baking therapy, and it had worked like a charm.

  Olaya had a love of caftans and she kept her softly curled silver hair short. On so many women, the color would add ten years, but on Olaya it worked. “Who has time to do the hair color?” she’d once asked her sisters. “I am too busy baking the bread. You, you can keep your hair pretty brown, pero I am not going to fight against the Mother Nature. She will do what she will do, and I will, how do you say? Embrace it.”

  Her philosophy on age was just one more thing on a long list of what I liked about Olaya Solis. I was thirty-six, so she had close to thirty years on me, but I planned to adopt her attitude about getting older. You can’t change it, so why fight it? Mrs. Branford had a similar outlook. “You’re only as old as you let yourself feel,” she’d told me. I was almost fifty years her junior, and she seemed to have as much energy as I did. Whatever water she was drinking, it was her Fountain of Youth. If I could, I’d bottle it up and store it for my future self.

  Exactly one week before the Art Show festivities would begin, I began my documentation of the art car
s themselves. I started my day at Yeast of Eden, arriving at five o’clock in the morning. Olaya was tireless when it came to baking. She lived and breathed flour and yeast and long rises. She gave 100% to every single thing she did. Sometimes I looked at her clear skin and her bright eyes and wondered if she even slept.

  Normally I’d have stayed at the bread shop until noon, but today I was photographing the first of the art cars. Many of the local entries were already complete, registered, and were being housed in an airplane hangar on the outskirts of town. In one week’s time, they’d be driven through town in a parade, the townspeople cheering from the sidewalks on either side of the road. I was itching to get an early look, and by nine-thirty, Olaya’s calvary had arrived in the form of her two sisters, Martina and Consuelo. They took over the baking and I raced home, switched out my pink Yeast of Eden T-shirt for a white blouse and a long soft gray cardigan, and changed into jeans. Standing at my closet, I considered my shoe options. I knew I’d be running around here and there, taking a million more shots than were necessary, and I anticipated needing to crouch down to get the best angles as I chronicled the features of each car. If my feet weren’t happy, I’d pay the price. I settled on my favorite pair of Taos sneakers and was good to go.

  I harnessed Agatha, my little fawn pug. The bread shop was one of the few places she couldn’t tag along. Pets in a bakery? Not such a good thing. But there was no reason she couldn’t come with me now. I couldn’t actually keep her by my side while I worked, but my dad had agreed to be the solution. We would meet up at the hangar, where he would supervise Agatha. He’d get to have a sneak preview of some of Billy’s competition, Agatha got to go on an outing, which she loved, and I had both of their company. It was a win-win-win.

  I had never been inside an airplane hangar. I knew it would be huge, but that was an understatement. It was gigantic. Enormous. Massive. Walking through the door made me feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, shrinking until she was a miniature version of herself. On one side of the building were window-lined offices. The rest of the space was open with exposed steel rafters framing the arched ceiling. Ten cars were lined up in two rows along one side of the hangar. A Cessna Skyhawk sat on the other side. Its wingspan had to be close to forty feet, the length closer to thirty. It didn’t have the height of a commercial aircraft, but the hangar looked as if it could house a fleet of Cessnas, with an intercontinental jet thrown in for good measure. Relative to the vast space, the art cars looked like Matchbox vehicles.

  My dad arrived, looking better than he had in months. He’d undergone a transformation since my mother’s death. His dark hair had turned to salt and pepper, his skin had taken on a sallow pallor, dark circles rimming his eyes, and his cheeks had become starkly chiseled versions of their former selves. But looking at him now, I could almost see the healing happening almost before my eyes. There was still a feeling of melancholy hanging over him like a dark cloud, but his face had started to fill out again, the color had returned to it, and his eyes had lost the vacant look they’d taken on. He no longer resembled a zombie cast member from The Walking Dead.

  “Do you know who owns the hangar?” I asked him.

  He stopped to think. “It’s privately owned, I think. The space is rented out pretty regularly. It’s been used for all kinds of things. From vintage markets your mom used to love to come to, to police auctions—Billy got a beat-up old car or two through those,” he said with a laugh—“to the Education Foundation Las Vegas Night.”

  It was an amazingly interesting setting for any of these events, and so much more. An art gallery, for example, with local artists displaying their work. I’d sign up in a minute. They walked by my side as I started each vehicle’s documentation with the registration tag taped to the inside of the driver’s side windows. Each tag had the Santa Sofia Art Car Show logo, the car’s “name,” and the registration number. Once more cars were registered, the tags would help me keep them straight. It provided me with an extra level of organization.

  The first car in the row looked as if a bunch of people took a few cans of earth and military-toned paint colors and did a Jackson Pollock number on it. It was dubbed the “Camo-Car.” My dad nodded at it, chuckling. “It’s okay, but your brother’s blows it away,” he said, emphasizing the pun.

  I rolled my eyes. “Funny.”

  He bent down to scratch Agatha’s head. “It was, wasn’t it, Ag?”

  The pug just looked up at him with her bulbous eyes.

  “Ag?” I asked. I was pretty sure my dog’s namesake, Agatha Christie, never went by Ag.

  My dad stood and walked up to the next car. “It’s a private nickname. Don’t you worry about it.”

  I considered arguing the point, but my dad seemed almost happy. He angled his head down to talk to the dog as they walked, and he was smiling. If he wanted to call my dog Ag instead of Agatha, who was I to argue. The pug didn’t seem to mind. Her tail was a curlicue—a sign she was safe—and she trotted happily alongside my dad.

  The next car in line was called “The Mosaic.” Every square inch of it, including the tire rims, was covered with either a piece of broken mirror or a jagged bit of colored glass. Each of the fragments fit together like a puzzle, nary a gap between any of the shards. It had to have been painstaking and exacting work to get each piece to fit so perfectly. In the end, the car looked like an exquisite work of stained glass.

  One by one, I went down the line. An old VW Beetle painted in red and white, with a nearly identical car somehow attached to the hood, upside down, creating a mirror image of the original; a replica of a supermarket shopping cart built on a pickup truck’s chassis; a tiny smart car, the roof piled precariously with vintage suitcases. Each art car was unique and detailed, each, I imagined, expressing some element of the owner’s personality.

  My dad and I approached the next car registered for the parade. Agatha, who had been trotting along happily, suddenly stopped dead in her tracks. “Come on, girl,” my dad said, tugging the taut leash.

  She didn’t budge.

  “Agatha! What are you doing?” I patted my open hand against my thigh. “Let’s go.”

  But instead of launching herself forward, as she normally would have, the little pug sat down.

  I stared at her. Agatha was a high-spirited pug, but she was also well trained and obedient. This was not normal behavior for her. I slung my strap over my head, securing my camera across my body to protect it as I crouched down in front of my dog. “What’s going on, girl?” I asked her. She didn’t understand my words, but by the way she tilted her head and looked at me, I knew that she was responding to the soft and questioning tone of my voice. She blinked, yelped, and directed her globular gaze toward the next car in the parade line. In true attack dog form, she bared her tiny teeth, but any menace was diffused by the one-sided Elvis-style curl of her lip.

  She was telling me something and I couldn’t ignore her. I stood, looking for the registration and car number, but as far as I could see, it wasn’t attached. The car was a giant face—or what was left of it. I registered the strips of skin torn away from the skeletal structure, the bone structure revealed beneath the rot, and its wide, dead-looking bloodshot eyes facing the sky. Two bottom teeth were missing, what should have been a fleshy pink tongue was a mottled gray, and half of one nostril was cleaved, fake skin flapping as if would rip free any second. Not even the curling hair was normal. It was crafted of what looked like modeling clay—a lot of it—and while the original color was black, the majority of it was tinged a dull and muddy-looking gray. I moved closer, walking around it. The ears were carved with exacting detail, but they, too, were mangled, part of one lobe shredded, the other missing a chunk. The strands of hair poking out from the inside were visible and distinct.

  It was a zombie, and a disconcertingly grotesque one at that. No wonder Agatha was spooked.

  From the grass, Agatha stood next to my dad, her tail no longer curled, but hanging straight down behind her, the s
neer still on her smashed face. Even from where I stood, I could see her tiny teeth. Most of the art cars entered in the contest had a light and whimsical sensibility, and many had a meaningful message, like Billy’s did. But this one was dark and menacing, and even Agatha got that from where she stood.

  As I walked around to the other side, I caught a glimpse of the rotted black teeth. The gums were stippled with that same muddy gray color. I felt my nose twitch and my own lips lift in disgust. Zombies were more popular than ever, but even so, this one was hard to look at. From inside the cavernous mouth, I caught a glimpse of a pair of sneaker-clad shoes, as if the human-turned-monster was eating or swallowing a body.

  I gave an involuntary shiver, but steadied myself. Despite the alarming nature of this particular art car, I readied my camera. I definitely wouldn’t feature it on the event website, but I had to document it just like the others. Backtracking slightly, I took pictures of the ear and the hair, then made my way around it to capture the back of the head.

  Next I headed to the front of the art car. Turning to face it head-on, I shook away the unease sliding through me and took a few shots. Agatha growled a warning as I moved closer. My dad was crouched down next to her, his hand on her back, but she would not be calmed. She lurched forward, tugging hard on her leash and knocking my dad right off of his feet. She was only nineteen pounds, so he managed to keep his grip on the lead, but my little dog was determined. She backed up and then charged forward again, barking, her chin raised aggressively.

  I shushed her, but her reaction sent another shiver down my spine. Something about this particular art car had raised her hackles and since she didn’t know a zombie from a bone, it was something else that had her spooked.