Read Online All Stories Are Love Stories by Elizabeth Percer - Free Book Online Page B

divine perfection. But her prayers were not being answered. As deeply as she wished to find communion with her simple devotions, she could not be distracted from her anxious heart, the beads of anticipatory sweat collecting on her forehead and lip.
    What had she gotten herself into? Somehow she’d helped her sister cajole her into doing the thing she most wanted and most feared. And she’d done it all before lunch, well before the blessed darkness of evening could drift in and help her put it off, maybe even renegotiate in the morning. She’d thought it was a blessing in disguise when Jesse asked her to stay a few extra hours to help manage the holiday rush, but all it had done was give her more time to think.
    She tried anew to become absorbed in preparing the next day’s croissants. Thank God for the rich reward of pastry, its even demands. She pulled a rectangle of cold butter from the refrigerator and placed it on her freshly rolled dough, standing back to adjust and admire the symmetry of her work. Fourteen ounces of butter: an astounding amount, and just enough. It never failed to give her a little thrill. Reverencefor butter was a job requirement, and one of the first things that helped her stand out from the stylishly aproned young women who could frost a pretty cupcake but whose svelte figures quaked at the undeniable lead role that sheer, unadulterated butter played in the making of French pastry. Svelteness had never been Vashti’s problem. Her roundness was as much a part of her as her taste for the things that contributed to it. It might be written on her tombstone:
Here lies Vashti
,
who was not afraid of butter.
    Over and back, palms across, wrists twisting, the dance of dough. She began to breathe into it, borrowing the rhythms of its transformation.
Every dough must contain life
, she thought to herself.
It takes a little and it gives a little back
.
    How long ago had it been, exactly? She pretended it took some effort to recall that it had been fourteen years and three weeks to the day. Just as he had pretended throughout her marriage that she had made the right choice to leave Max; that she was investing in a better, sturdier love by leaving San Francisco for the expansive shelter of Dale’s Sonoma estate; that she could forget what true love really felt and tasted and looked like. But instead of living the sort of inspired life she’d once wished for, she found herself trying to live someone else: Dale’s, or the life she and Dale tried to fabricate together. The truth was, and it didn’t bother her as much now to admit it as it once had, she’d been acquired, just as Dale had acquired his wealth and his stature and his land and success. It was not a callous acquisition—Dale never acquired anything he didn’t want unequivocally—but she walked into the terms of someone else’s world when she did, and she knewit would no longer be hers once he was gone. The ranch and the wealth and the great big house with its wide-open spaces were where she had lived, but they did not belong to her the way San Francisco belonged to her, the way a place echoes of who you are no matter how long you’ve been away from it. She had loved Sonoma, but it was the sort of love one has for a favorite vacation spot, where everything new and wonderful is held up to everything old and loved. Objectively, Sonoma’s lush harvests and violet dusks and bee-and-blossom-choked fields were more beautiful than the city, but Vashti lay awake at night thinking of strange eucalyptus groves and narrow hills and distant sirens and houses with windows larger than their doors. When Dale died, she used part of the money he left her to buy an apartment at the top of Liberty between Noe and Castro and buried the rest of the funds in accounts she never intended to touch. Freed from his world, she returned to hers, happy despite its changes. She secured a job at Sucre thanks to a great deal