The Storyteller Read Free Page A

expression.
    Marge lets his silence stand; an offering on a pedestal. I know this is because some people come here to talk, while others come to just listen. But the lack of sound pounds like a heartbeat. It’s deafening.
    That’s the paradox of loss: How can something that’s gone weigh us down so much?
    At the end of the hour, Marge thanks us for participating and we fold up the chairs and recycle our paper plates and napkins. I pack up the remaining muffins and give them to Stuart. Bringing them back to the bakery would be like carting a bucket of water to Niagara Falls. Then I walk outside to head back to work.
    If you’ve lived in New Hampshire your whole life, like I have, you can smell the change in the weather. It’s oppressively hot, but there’s a thunderstorm written across the sky in invisible ink.
    “Excuse me.”
    I turn at the sound of Mr. Weber’s voice. He stands with his back to the Episcopal church where we hold our meetings. Although it’s at least eighty-five degrees out, he is wearing a long-sleeved shirt that is buttoned to the throat, with a narrow tie.
    “That was a nice thing you did, sticking up for that girl.”
    The way he pronounces the word thing, it sounds like think.
    I look away. “Thanks.”
    “You are Sage?”
    Well, isn’t that the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question? Yes, it’s my name, but the double entendre—that I’m full of wisdom—has never really applied. There have been too many moments in my life when I’ve nearly gone off the rails, more overwhelmed by emotion than tempered by reason.
    “Yes,” I say.
    The awkward silence grows between us like yeasted dough. “This group. You have been coming a long time.”
    I don’t know whether I should be defensive. “Yes.”
    “So you find it helpful?”
    If it were helpful, I wouldn’t still be coming. “They’re all nice people, really. They each just sometimes think their grief is bigger than anyone else’s.”
    “You don’t say much,” Mr. Weber muses. “But when you do  . . . you are a poet.”
    I shake my head. “I’m a baker.”
    “Can a person not be two things at once?” he asks, and slowly, he walks away.
     • • • 
    I run into the bakery, breathless and flushed, to find my boss hanging from the ceiling. “Sorry I’m late,” I say. “The shrine is packed and some moron in an Escalade took my spot.”
    Mary’s rigged up a Michelangelo-style dolly so that she can lie on her back and paint the ceiling of the bakery. “That moron would be the bishop,” she replies. “He stopped in on his way up the hill. Said your olive loaf is heavenly, which is pretty high praise, coming from him.”
    In her previous life, Mary DeAngelis was Sister Mary Robert. She had a green thumb and was well known for maintaining the gardens in her Maryland cloister. One Easter, when she heard the priest say He is risen, she found herself standing up from the pew and walking out the cathedral door. She left the order, dyed her hair pink, and hiked the Appalachian Trail. It was somewhere on the Presidential Range that Jesus appeared to her in a vision, and told her there were many souls to feed.
    Six months later, Mary opened Our Daily Bread at the foothills of the Our Lady of Mercy Shrine in Westerbrook, New Hampshire. The shrine covers sixteen acres with a meditation grotto, a peace angel, Stations of the Cross, and holy stairs. There is also a store filled with crosses, crucifixes, books on Catholicism and theology, Christian music CDs, saints’ medals, and Fontanini crèche sets. But visitors usually come to see the 750-foot rosary made of New Hampshire granite boulders, linked together with chains.
    It was a fair-weather shrine; business dropped off dramatically during New England winters. Which was Mary’s selling point: What could be more secular than freshly baked bread? Why not boost the revenue of the shrine by adding a bakery that would attract believers and nonbelievers alike?
    The only catch was