The Baker's Wife Read Free

wondered if her assumptions had been wrong.
    The thought passed through her mind that she should go back, knock on the front door like a respectable friend, apologize, and get to the bottom of things. Fix what Ed had broken, if necessary, though Ed wasn’t prone to breaking very many things in life. He was a good boy. A careful boy. Man now.
    Audrey looked back at the redbrick house.
    A flash of light, a phantom sensation of liquid fire tearing through her body, prevented her from returning to the Mansfields’ property. She had no desire to press Miralee for details of the heartbreak. Especially not after the girl had refused.
    She had done what God asked of her. This excuse propelled her back toward her car, the sunny air rich with the scent of rosemary-potato bread pushing against her face.
    Audrey didn’t second-guess this decision for three months. In June the Grace Springs Church board, spurred to fury by none other than Jack Mansfield, fired her husband and barred him from seeking another post as pastor.

CHAPTER 2
    November
    For some sins, there was no atonement. Diane Hall had believed this all of her adult life, and twenty-five years of prison chapel services hadn’t altered her perspective. Penance, however, was a different matter. For all sins, punishment was required even when pardon was out of the question. By her own logic, if not by God himself.
    This was the truth that had hounded Diane through her years at the women’s penitentiary in Central California, where she’d lived as though half dead since she was seventeen, tried and convicted as an adult. It was the truth that prevented her from sleeping through the nights at the halfway house after her release, where she lay awake at age forty-two while her housemates snored and dreamed.
    It was the truth that finally kicked her out of bed after midnight one November morning, two months after her prison sentence was completed. She loaded a backpack in the dark and then slinked out the doors onto the streets of freedom, where she would have been lost if not for the guiding compass of penance.
    Diane headed home.
    On the southbound side of the highway, she stuck out her thumb wondering how hard it would be for an overweight middle-aged woman to get a ride on a road that passed through jail country. Her answer arrived within ten minutes in the shape of a hairy bass player whose various guitars were stacked high in cases on the backseat.
    â€œHow far south you going?” she asked through the open passenger window of his sedan. She estimated him to be half her age.
    â€œAll the way to Sin City.”
    â€œI’m not going that far this time,” she said, and when he didn’t ask her for specifics, she didn’t offer.
    She threw her few belongings onto the floor under the dash, and driver and passenger didn’t say anything more for quite some time. Apparently he didn’t care that she was from the penitentiary any more than she cared that he might have a harmful bent. Perhaps her past wasn’t outwardly obvious. She didn’t have enough experience yet to know how to assess outsiders’ judgments of her, “outsiders” being anyone who’d never served a sentence. Diane had survived the pitfalls of prison life by learning how to be invisible, a strategy that involved (among other things) feeding her already ample body into largeness. She was smart, wily if necessary. She could outwit a kid musician if she could outwit anybody.
    The fog rolled in, a familiar visitor that would stay for most of the cold season. Diane left the window cracked open at the top and closed her eyes, let the fog blow in and caress her cheeks. The sensation reminded her of her mother’s touch, a gesture so long forgotten that tears pooled like memories behind her lids.
    Eventually her driver tried to make small talk, and she tried to be polite.
    â€œWhere you headed?” he asked.
    â€œHome.”
    â€œAnd that’d