The Return of Wade
By Friday afternoon, the parish office felt entirely too quiet. I had spent the morning counseling a young couple through wedding jitters and listening to an elderly parishioner fret about her cat’s impending hip surgery, but my mind kept drifting back to the bakery doors and the impending arrival of Wade.
Wade and I had a polite, distant relationship. When Margaret and I married in our late sixties, Wade was a thirty-something corporate analyst living in Chicago—driven, sharp-edged, and entirely immersed in spreadsheets and quarterly projections. He had attended our quiet wedding, smiled for the photographs, kissed his mother on the cheek, and promptly caught a flight back to Illinois. He respected me as the man who made his mother happy in her twilight years, but we didn’t exactly share a vernacular. To Wade, life was an equation to be balanced. To me, it was a mystery to be preached about.
At 4:15 PM, the bell above the bakery door chimed.
I looked up from wiping down the glass pastry case. Wade walked in, looking remarkably like his mother around the eyes, carrying a sleek leather duffel bag and wearing a charcoal suit jacket that looked entirely out of place among sacks of unbleached flour and copper mixing bowls.
He stopped near the counter, blinking against the warm, yeasty air of the kitchen.
“Tommy,” he said, offering a tight, polite nod. “Good to see you.”
