The Solace of Bay Leaves

me. “I think you’re being a little hard on yourself.”
“Maybe. I don’t think she sees it that way. Although she did come in the shop a couple of times this summer. She doesn’t cook much, but she buys gifts. Remember, we’re meeting Laurel for brunch in the morning.” I never wanted to be one of those women who gives up on her girlfriends when a guy comes along, but when I met Nate, Laurel had completely understood that our long-standing Sunday tradition needed an update. If I wasn’t available, she met other friends. Occasionally, Nate joined us, as we’d planned for this weekend well before the Friday night revelations.
I do have a dining table—a weathered, round cedar picnic table with two benches and a pair of pink wrought iron chairs, refugees from an ice cream parlor. A café table and chairs sit on the veranda, for days when the weather permits. But this felt like a “dinner on the couch with a movie” night. Salads first, then steaming bowls of fish chowder, soaked up with bread and accented with wine.
With a classic movie I’d seen a dozen times on the TV, my tummy full of good, hot food, and a good, hot man beside me, the dog working on his bone at our feet, I’d had enough of murder. Enough of old horrors coming back to haunt good friends. I didn’t want to think about special agents and shots fired in peaceful neighborhoods. All I wanted was what I had, a quiet evening in a space I adored with the man who’d set his hook and reeled in my heart.
I picked up the remote and switched off the TV, then leaned close to Nate, holding my face for a kiss. He obliged.
“Please, sir,” I said. “Might I have some more?”

Six
Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts.
—James Beard
“CUTE HOUSE,” I SAID. THE THREE OF US STOOD IN FRONT A sage green cottage with cream trim and a front door painted a deep plum. Four of us, counting Arf. We were all dressed for rain, a preemptive strike.
“Surprised to see it up for sale again. They want a hundred grand more than I got for it, three years ago,” Laurel replied, pointing at the FOR SALE sign at the edge of the tiny yard. “Though that was more than double what we paid, the year Gabe was born. All they did was paint it and kill Pat’s favorite rhodie.”
The landscaping did look a little ragged. The flip side of Seattle’s mild temperatures and long growing season is that some homeowners lose their enthusiasm for yard work long before the yard work is done. That was one of the attractions, and drawbacks, of the ubiquitous rhododendrons.
“So Pat was the gardener?” Nate asked. I appreciated his tenderness toward Laurel. Though I’d met him on a walk after a Sunday brunch with her, at Fisherman’s Terminal, they’d only seen each other a few times. At our age, a new relationship means stepping into a busy life with its own friendships and routines. For me, the biggest adjustment was to Nate’s schedule—six months here, six months in Alaska, more or less.
Huddled in her forest green Gore-Tex, hands stuffed in her pockets, Laurel nodded. She’d wanted to see the house again, but I suspected that walking this neighborhood was more bitter than sweet. When I left Tag, he stayed put, and Nate’s ex-wife had kept their house. But those marriages had ended by our own hands, through divorce, not sudden violence.
I looped one arm through hers and another through Nate’s. “Coffee time.”
We strolled up the block, headed for a funky neighborhood joint on Twenty-Fourth, Montlake’s main drag. The homes were lovely, most dating back to the 1930s and ’40s. I’d never been in Laurel and Pat’s house, but it was small, one bedroom up, one down, and the price jump sounded modest to me. Seattle’s crazy-hot housing market had cooled lately, but prices had been on the rise for a long time. Laurel hadn’t held out for top dollar, eager for a quick sale. The stigma attached to a “murder house” hadn’t helped. No wonder the buyers had painted everything.
“I do miss living here,” she said. “Good people. Environmentally conscious. Lots of activities. Great parks.”
“A lot like the houseboat community,” Nate observed.
After my family moved out of Grace House, the co-operative peace-and-justice community headquartered in the big house now home to Kristen’s family, my parents bought a little bungalow a few blocks up the hill. I’d been twelve then, back when a pair of teachers could still afford a small house around here. Although I had an idea my grandmother helped. And my dad was handy with home repair, which the place had badly needed.
But it had been years since I’d walked these streets, and I found myself reeling a bit from the memories. Did the prosperous folks we passed, walking their dogs or coming back from coffee in their North Face and Patagonia rain jackets and their Hunter wellies, remember that a well-loved man had been murdered a stone’s throw away, in the safety of his own home? Now that a second incident had occurred, were they keeping a closer eye on their kids and double-checking their doors? Though tragedy can strike anywhere, most of us blessedly oblivious.
I don’t tell many people this, because I like my life and have no desire to be shuffled off to the funny farm, but sometimes, when emotion hits me hard, I hear things. Grace House ran a free meals program for families and older adults in the basement of St. James Cathedral, and occasionally when I helped out, unloading donations, we could hear the choir practicing. Though my mother loved the community and was devoted to its work, she was never crazy about