Free The Up-Down by Barry Gifford Page B

sisters. A remarkably cool breeze from the river snaked in through the slightly open bedroom window, causing Pace to pull a sheet up over his chest. The thought hit him that he had not felt really peaceful since leaving N.O., and he had to come back to get it. Etta Jones’ final soft figure segued into Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson on tenor playing “This’ll Get To Ya” with Brother Jack McDuff filling on organ. Marnie was downstairs in the kitchen making omelettes for them. They had not eaten dinner, having fallen deeply asleep after making love. Pace savored the moment. Craziness was never far from home, wherever that might be, but you didn’t have to sign up for it. He closed his eyes and shivered a little from the breeze. When he reopened them, Marnie, completely naked except for a leopard print scarf tied around her neck, walked through the doorway holding two plates.
    â€œGuess what, darlin’?” she said. “Day after tomorrow I’m puttin’ you to work in the bakery.”

 
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    Pace didn’t have much time to write. He’d never baked a cake in his life, so he had to learn from scratch. Marnie put him to work making Magdalena Kowalski’s Krakow yellow cake, named after her mother, from Magdalena’s recipe. Pace enjoyed doing the basic preparation, measuring the dry ingredients, sifting the cake flour, then re-sifting it with the baking powder and salt, creaming the butter and sugar, adding egg yolks (never the whole egg), vanilla and grated lemon rind—using both, Marnie explained, was her mother’s secret—and adding the sifted ingredients to the butter mixture in three parts with thirds of milk. After Pace had poured this into pans prepared with parchment and put them into the oven, he left the filling and frosting to Marnie or her second in command, Dolores Silva, a native of Jalisco, Mexico, who had lived illegally in the United States for forty years, since she was ten. Her parents and grandparents had all been great cooks and passed their collective culinary knowledge on to Dolores. Marnie told Pace that Dolores made the best white pozole on the planet, and he was eager to try it whether or not he had a hangover.
    While Marnie went swimming in the afternoons, Pace usually took a nap, then wrote for a couple of hours before having a cocktail with her. They had dinner together and went to bed early. After four weeks of this routine, Pace felt renewed, the poison of the previous months having drained from his system almost entirely. Other than taking Milk and Honey out to run in Toni Jones Park behind Dillard University, Marnie and Pace stayed close to home. This suited Pace and he and Marnie got along with “nary a ripple” as she said old Elsie Buell would have put it.
    Pace was awakened from his nap on a Thursday afternoon by Marnie, who came into the bedroom holding a sheet of paper and an envelope. She sat down in a rocking chair next to the bed and shook her head from side to side.
    â€œWhat’s up, Marn? Why aren’t you at the Y?”
    â€œSpecial delivery letter arrived just as I was goin’ out the door. Digger got blown up by an incendiary explosive device along with three other guys in a jeep on the outskirts of Kabul. Those three are dead. Digger survived but he lost a leg—it doesn’t say which one—and was permanently blinded. He’s already in D.C. at a rehab center. They’re gonna release him this Saturday and fly him to N.O. I’ve got to take him in, Pace. He’s got no place else to go.”
    â€œOf course you do.”
    â€œIt says in the letter that he’ll continue his rehabilitation at the VA hospital here, but he can live at home. I’m afraid this puts an A-number one crimp in our own arrangement, at least for the time bein’.”
    Marnie’s eyes were full of tears; certainly for poor Digger, but probably, Pace thought, partially for the