That afternoon, he wasn’t sure what drew him to the church. Nonetheless, there he stood above the small marker: PETER KLAUS ABEND, BELOVED. 1919–1938.
A dried daisy chain encircled the dates, and Josef wondered who placed it there—Peter’s sister, Trudi, perhaps. Josef hadn’t any siblings. His father had been hit by an automobile when Josef was too young to remember. Embittered by her loss, his mother had been a strict disciplinarian who believed hard work and diligence might help them find happiness again. She encouraged his participation in the Memmingen branch of the Greater German Youth Movement and lived long enough to see him join the official military ranks. Two years after he moved east to Munich, she passed away in her sleep. A neighbor friend found her, stiff as a log, and stained from neck to navel in blood. The doctors diagnosed it as acute tuberculosis. It’d been so long since he’d returned home, and so infrequently did they speak that he couldn’t recall if she’d even had a cough. Since his mother was a needlewoman known for her meticulous floral embroidery, he’d paid handsomely that her casket be sheathed with every bloom imaginable. That would’ve pleased her, he thought.
A scarlet poppy fluttered against Peter’s slate. Josef wondered who would mourn when he died. He hadn’t sisters to make daisy chain remembrances, nor brothers to carry on the family name. He was well liked by many friends, but his absence would not touch any of them so deeply. Standing in the waning light over Peter’s grave, he tried to imagine his own funeral assembly. The landlady in Munich would surely come out of respect and duty. Perhaps a girl or two he once courted. Frau Baumann would cry for him but not dare show her face—a renowned prostitute at any man’s funeral was inappropriate. It comforted him, however, to know she’d feel loss, probably more than any other. And then the Schmidts, he hoped. He’d become close to Herr and Frau Schmidt and watched as Elsie blossomed from a gangly girl to a young woman. They were genuine people. True to each other and those around. Yes, they’d be there too. He pictured Elsie clutching a bouquet of cornflowers and drying her eyes with a handkerchief. Lovely, even in sorrow.
“You were smarter than I gave you credit for,” he said aloud, then shook his head and laughed, embarrassed to be talking to a dead man—and worse, a dead man who wasn’t even there. But he meant it.
From all he heard, Hazel Schmidt was even more charming than her sister, her beauty only matched by her reputation as a generous lover. He attempted to visit the Lebensborn Program at Steinhöring, not as a companion but with the hope of helping Hazel and Peter’s son in some capacity. His application was rejected on the grounds of inferior health records. The names of the Lebensborn women were so greatly protected that not even a hundred kreppels could convince his archive secretary to pull Hazel’s file. So he stopped trying to reach her directly. His migraines continued, and his shots increased.
He stayed up nights tallying all the pain he’d caused: a widow before a wife, two families’ heartache, a daughter’s banishment, a fatherless son; and he continued to struggle with the part of him that remembered the Hochschilds fondly. However, this in no way interfered with his staunch commitment to the Reich. He turned the Kristallnacht scene over and over in his mind, rationalizing every action, and concluding that while the Hochschilds were Jews, Peter acted recklessly. Josef did not regret his anger, but rather his lack of control. The one thing he couldn’t excuse or deny was that Peter’s death was wrong. “Good care should be taken not to deny things that just happen to be true”—so it was written in Mein Kampf.
But even after visiting Frau Abend two years prior, Josef was unable to shake the heavy guilt he carried. He tried to call on the Abends once again, but Trudi claimed no one home and ignored her mother’s calls from the parlor. He took it as a not-so-subtle indication that his presence caused more grief than consolation. But from whom could he request atonement? On that second visit, he went again to the bäckerei, distressed by the Abends’ rebuff. The Schmidts greeted him as a son returned. They were his only connection to Peter’s life, and through them, he wanted to make right.
He bent down to the headstone and picked the flower. The smell reminded him of poppy seed rolls.
Chapter Twenty
ELSIE’S GERMAN BAKERY
2032 TRAWOOD DRIVE
EL PASO, TEXAS
NOVEMBER 16, 2007
Reba entered the bakery at quarter till closing. Overhead, the tinny doorbell jingled, familiar and welcoming. Hearing it, Jane peeked through the kitchen curtains.
“Well, hello there, gal.” She greeted Reba with another hug.
Reba’s muscles tensed only slightly. She even hugged back a little and was pleased by how pleasant the reciprocation felt.
“How are you?” asked Jane.
“Living,” said Reba.
“Oh now, that’s no kind of answer. Mold on bread is living. I hope you’re doing more than that,” she teased. “If you need Mom, she’s gone this afternoon—had a doctor’s appointment. A slap-n-pap.”
“A what?” asked Reba.
Jane laughed. “It’s our nickname for gynecological exams. We treat dough better than they do our lady parts. They slap your boob on the machine like it don’t feel nothing, then add insult to injury with the stirrups and paper nightie. I’ve been on Mom for nearly four years to get a checkup. She hates the docs—even though my daddy was one.” She scratched her head. “Well, maybe it’s only the gyn-ohs. But I finally convinced her to go. You wouldn’t know yet, but when you hit a certain age, lumps and bumps and all kinds of things grow everywhere. You go to sleep and wake up with a grapefruit attached to your derriere. It’s scary.” She threw a dishtowel over her shoulder. “Never mind all that. What can I do you for?”
Reba didn’t know exactly why she’d come. She left the condo convinced she needed to get more information on German Christmas traditions, but she could’ve looked that up on the Internet just as easily. On the drive, she told herself she wanted to take a few more snapshots of the bakery in case the assigned photographer didn’t get enough, but then she’d forgotten her camera. In the parking lot, she realized she’d only eaten a couple microwaved Jimmy Dean patties for breakfast, so maybe her stomach led her, subconsciously. But now, with the question posed, she wasn’t quite sure at all.
“I—I …” Reba pinched the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath.
Riki had officially moved out the week prior. He said he was giving her space to decide what she really wanted. For a couple days, she was relieved, even grateful for the freedom, but all too soon the old sadness moved into Riki’s vacant closet and drawers.
She rang her editor to talk word counts, headlines, and layouts; it made things better for an hour, but afterward the emptiness seemed larger than before. Riki called late Sunday while she was at the grocery store picking up a deli-made dinner. He left a message saying he was checking in. Children laughed in the background, and she wondered where he was. She played the message ten times over while scraping creamy chicken salad from its plastic container, still hungry when it was all gone.
Maybe he was staying with Bert, she thought. Riki hadn’t any family left in the city. His parents were dead, both buried back across the border in Juárez. He’d asked her to come with him to their graves during the Día de Los Muertos celebrations, but she’d said she was working a story and hid in the magazine’s editorial room while everyone else paraded about with sugar skulls and masks. She feared a day dedicated to the dead. It seemed ghoulish, unnatural, and far too intimate to hover over the bones of loved ones. Reba had never returned to her own daddy’s grave, and she didn’t want to. Riki said the dead came back to visit the living on Día de los Muertos, a religious superstition she prayed was entirely mythical. Because if she ever saw her daddy again, she knew she wouldn’t be able to contain the simmering grief within. She’d tell him he was a damn coward for leaving them the way he did, for not loving them enough to fight for himself and their family; for not being a better man. She’d tell him she’d never let anybody hurt her the way he had, never let anybody get close enough to try.