Don Refugio’s Three Loaves of Bread

Raymond Abreu hadn't set foot in Pittsfield in twenty years. He'd left at twenty-three with a duffel bag and a promise to wire money every other week, leaving behind Donna, his wife of barely eight months, in a rented two-room apartment on Tyler Street.

In Bakersfield he found work at the garage belonging to Walt Quintero, owner of a small fleet of delivery vans and a fierce distrust of banks. Raymond offered him something he himself couldn't fully explain why he'd said: "Hold onto most of what I make. Pay me enough to live on, but bank the rest until the day I move back home." Walt, who smoked unfiltered Camels and never counted the same bill twice, agreed with nothing more than a handshake.

Twenty years went by like that. Raymond changed oil, welded mufflers, slept in a back room of the shop with a window facing the parking lot of a Denny's. He picked up side work on weekends — hauling scrap, patching roofs for a contractor two blocks over — and every other Friday he mailed Donna an envelope from that cash, whatever he'd scraped together, never much, but enough for rent and groceries. The garage wages he hardly touched; Walt kept those locked up, a little more added to the tally every two weeks. Every Sunday Raymond called her from a pay phone on the corner of Union Avenue, feeding it quarters until he ran out. She always answered with the same line: "I'm still here waiting, old man." They never talked about how much Walt was holding back at the shop. Just that someday he'd come home.

On the day he hit the twenty-year mark exactly, Raymond walked into the shop office — a cramped room with a NAPA Auto Parts calendar and a ceiling fan that wobbled on its mount — and told Walt it was time.

The old man sat him down at his metal desk, pulled out an empty cigar box where he kept receipts, and laid out two options. "I've got every dollar of your garage pay written down right here. I can hand it to you right now, cash, and you go. Or I give you three loaves of bread for the road and three pieces of advice that might serve you better than the money." Raymond sat there staring at that cigar box for a long while. His coworkers at the shop, when they heard that afternoon, told him he'd lost his mind, that you don't trade twenty years of work for bread and pretty words.

But Walt had never cheated him out of anything, not even when he could have. So Raymond said, "I'll take the advice."

The old man gave it to him, counting it off on his fingers. "One: don't look for shortcuts. What looks easy almost always costs you double. Two: don't stick your nose in fights that aren't yours — curiosity kills more people than envy does. Three: never decide anything important when you're angry." He handed him three loaves wrapped in butcher paper, tied with twine. "Go on, then," he said, and sent him off to the Greyhound station with nothing but his bag, the clothes on his back, and the bread.

The bus took him east on I-40 into Arizona, then up through a transfer in Albuquerque before the long haul across the plains toward Chicago, and from there a second bus north through Cleveland and into Ohio, tracing the old lake road toward New York before cutting east for the Massachusetts line.

The first test came only a few days later, during a layover at a gas station outside Cleveland. A guy near the pumps offered to drive him the rest of the way himself, cutting six hours off the trip for just twenty bucks. Raymond thought about the first piece of advice and waited for his scheduled bus instead. Later, at a diner down the road, he heard that two other travelers had taken that same man up on his offer that week and turned up robbed on the shoulder of a back road, left stranded without their shoes or wallets.

Getting closer to Pittsfield, he stopped for the night at a cheap motel off the highway in Albany. Around midnight he heard shouting and banging in the hallway, like someone was beating another man senseless. His first instinct was to open the door and see what was happening. He thought of the second piece of advice, braced the chair against the door, and stayed put. The next morning the motel clerk told him, lowering his voice, that it was a trick some thieves ran: they'd stage a fake fight so guests would come out to look, then clean out their rooms.

But the hardest test came right on his own street, the street where he'd grown up, in front of the house Donna had described to him every Sunday on the phone — the same two-room walkup on Tyler Street, though she'd long since talked the landlord into letting her knock through to the unit next door and call it a house. He got there past eleven at night. He walked up slow, his pulse hammering at his temples, and looked through the kitchen window, lit up by a bare yellow bulb. There was Donna, sitting close to a young man, the two of them laughing about something, her hand resting on his shoulder.

Raymond grabbed the porch rail so hard a splinter dug into his palm. Twenty years of sacrifice, of engine grease under his fingernails, of sleeping alone in a room that smelled like fast food, for this? He pressed his fists against the side of the house. He wanted to kick the door in, drag the kid out by the collar, scream at Donna everything he'd kept locked up through seven thousand nights at a pay phone.

Then the third piece of advice came back to him. He let go of the rail, turned around, and walked to the town common, where he sat down on an iron bench facing the old stone church, under a streetlamp that flickered on and off. He spent the night there, tearing a loose thread off his jacket cuff and winding it around his finger over and over, watching stray cats cross the lawn, listening to the church bell mark every hour.

At dawn, his eyes swollen from staying up all night, he went back to the house and knocked. When Donna opened the door she froze for a second, then threw her arms around his neck, crying. "You're here, old man, you're here." Then she turned toward the young man, who'd come to the door in a T-shirt, still half-asleep. "Look," she said to Raymond, taking his hand. "This is your son."

Raymond's legs went out from under him; he caught the doorframe to keep from going down. Donna explained, her voice breaking, that she'd found out she was pregnant barely a month after he left, and that she'd never told him over the phone because she wanted to say it looking him in the eye. The young man he'd seen the night before, laughing next to his wife, was Daniel, the son he'd never met.

He stood there in the doorway, running through what he'd come within seconds of doing. If he'd kicked that door in the night before, if he'd screamed out everything stuck in his throat, he would have destroyed in five minutes what had taken twenty years to build.

That afternoon, the three of them sat around the kitchen table. Donna poured coffee into chipped mugs and set out a plate of donuts next to Walt's bread. Daniel, still barefoot, asked Raymond what Bakersfield was like, whether it got as hot out there as it did in a Massachusetts August. Raymond tore off a piece of the first loaf for himself and tore a second open to pass around, and that was when something heavy and wrapped in plastic thumped against the table — a stack of bills, pressed flat. He froze with his hands still in the bread. Donna's fork stopped halfway to her mouth. Daniel leaned in. Raymond tore open the last loaf with hands that weren't quite steady, and found the same thing inside. Three hundred and ten thousand dollars, counted out one by one, not a single dollar missing — every cent of the garage pay Walt had locked away for twenty years.

"That old son of a gun," Raymond said, and started laughing, a short, disbelieving bark of a laugh, because he could still see Walt's face across that metal desk, offering him the cash straight up like it was sitting right there in the cigar box the whole time. He must have baked it into the bread the moment Raymond said yes to the advice instead — betting that a man who trusted him enough to hand over twenty years of paychecks would choose the same way twice.

"What's so funny?" Daniel asked, around a mouthful of donut.

"Nothing," Raymond said, pushing the bread toward him. "Eat. We'll talk about hot summers."