How to Bake a Perfect Life Page 4

  “That’s a mistake.”

  “Just do it my way, will you?”

  “No, sorry.” I can’t stand it when people lie, Katie had said. “I promised her I’d tell her the truth.”

  “Then don’t say anything.”

  “You’re going to have to trust me to do what’s right.”

  “Mom!”

  “Sorry. I won’t lie to her. Call her tomorrow—our tomorrow here—all right? And, in the meantime, you need to get some sleep.”

  A pause. “You’re right. Okay. I’ll call tomorrow.”

  When I hang up, a middle-of-the-night stillness muffles all sound. I lie on my back, phone warm in my hand, and think about her in a hospital halfway around the world, alone with this. I want the details of the place—are the hallways white or green? Modern or old? What kind of chairs are in the waiting rooms? When she was in college, I had her snap photos of apartments I had not seen so that I could easily visualize her moving around her environment.

  She’ll have pulled her hair into a sensible ponytail, and her makeup will have worn off by now, and she’ll be wearing tennis shoes, very white, with jeans. To accommodate her belly, she’s been wearing batik peasant blouses, colored like tapestries, which makes her look like a medieval woman. I imagine her settling a hand on her belly, putting her forehead against the wall, letting go for a minute.

  Then I know what she next will do: She will straighten, square those narrow shoulders, and march back to Oscar’s bedside.

  Oscar. Burned; an amputee. I think of his beautiful hands, his curly hair.

  Their lives will never be the same, in ways she can’t even envision now. My chest feels hollow with grief, with knowing all that she has lost.

  Next to me, Milo starts to purr, very quietly. His body is bumped up against mine, and a paw reaches through the darkness to land on my forearm, a tap. Idly, I run my hand over his forehead, down his back, scratching the place beneath his ears that he loves so much. His fur is as silky as mink. A comfort.

  Milo is a rescue, an elegant blue-eyed Siamese who showed up on my porch, wet and skinny and starving, only three or four months old. Even then he was one of the most beautiful cats I’d ever seen, with a soft squeak of a meow instead of an obnoxious yowl. He’s aloof and skittish and not terribly friendly with anyone but me. I wonder how he’s going to take the arrival of the dog, who will be here in the morning.

  Probably not well.

  “I’m sorry we have to bring a dog in, baby,” I say conversationally. “If it were just me, you know I’d never do that to you, but this little girl needs somebody in her corner, and dogs are good at that kind of thing.” Milo nuzzles into my palm, asking for a face rub, and when I do it, he licks my palm delicately, as if I am his kitten.

  It had taken my mother nearly three hours to get the dog’s transportation straightened out. Merlin had no vaccination records. Without them, he would not be allowed to fly. A vet agreed to come to the airport to administer the shots, and an airport employee would give the dog food and water overnight.

  In the morning, he will fly in a new soft-sided $200 kennel to Colorado Springs, where my brother will again be pressed into service, since he is the dog person of the family. My credit card was screaming by the end of the arrangements, but what alternative was there?

  I took Katie on a walk of the neighborhood earlier tonight, showing her where things are—7-Eleven and the post office and the tourist strip on West Colorado Avenue, cluttered with boutiques and galleries and bars, and the hilly backstreets populated with Victorians and bungalows with grassy yards. “It’s pretty here,” she said in some wonder. “I don’t remember Colorado Springs looking like this.”

  “Did you live here?”

  “Yeah, I was little. We were at Fort Carson, I think. I don’t remember it all that well.”

  When we got home, she asked to get on the Internet, and I set her up at the kitchen nook with her own ID. She chose a picture of a dog as her icon. She already had an email address, of course—that much is easy these days—and wanted to email her best friend about Merlin. I asked if she had emailed her dad. She shook her head, not looking at me. I didn’t push.

  Now I can no longer bear to lie here and think of the expenses I can’t afford, the disaster that has befallen my daughter, or the challenges of a girl who is as tense and aloof and as skittish as my cat. Gently nudging Milo aside, I tug on some yoga pants and a sweater and tie my long hair away from my face with a scrunchie. Milo tucks his long black tail around himself like a fluffy scarf and returns to sleep.

  I patter down the back stairs to the bakery kitchen. Moonlight comes in through the windows and glances off the stainless-steel island, and I think of Sofia sitting there less than two days ago.

  The overhead fluorescent lights will be too harsh just now. I turn on the small lights—over the range, over the sink, above the counter. Nearby is the bank of side-by-side fridges.

  Stored in the fridges are my sourdough starters, of course. The bakery is built on them. At the moment there are three different sponges made with various ingredients—potato starter and rye; a buttermilk-and-wheat-flour starter I’ve been experimenting with; a heavy dark barley mash, which makes a bread so rich and tangy that it impressed an anonymous travel writer enough to write it up in New York magazine. That article led to other stealthy tasters and even better coverage.

  And an even deeper rift with my family. They expected me to fail, and I have not. Yet.

  On the counter is the fourth jar, which I have left out overnight. This is the luminary of my starters, mother dough from my grandmother, which has been in the family for more than a hundred years, ever since Bridget Magill, my grandmother’s grandmother, carried it with her from Ireland, to Buffalo, then to the mining camps in Cripple Creek.

  In the silence of the middle of the night, I turn on the classical radio station, very quietly. The sound will not travel as high as Katie’s bedroom, but there is no reason to take chances. The poor girl has such circles under her eyes that she looks haunted. It’s hard to imagine what her life has been like these last couple of years.

  From a hook by the door, I take a fresh apron, the white cotton worn soft from many washings, and tie the long strings around my body once, then again in the front. On the radio is Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C Major, which many consider to be his most elegant piece of work. Humming along under my breath, I take a big aluminum bowl from beneath the counter and carry it to the plastic bins along the wall where we store dry goods—flours, of course, white and rye, whole-grain wheat, and oats; also sugars of various types, brown and white and raw. Stacks of scoops and measuring cups line the shelves above.

  The chemistry of bread is not as exact as you might imagine. Everything influences the mix of dry ingredients to wet, particularly with the artisan loaves I am baking tonight. I use the small shovel in the bin to fill my bowl with white flour and take it back to the center island, then gather the rest of my ingredients and tools—some sugar and loose yeast to help the mother dough along, a scraper and plastic wrap, measuring cups and spoons.

  As I begin to measure dry ingredients into a fresh bowl, my mind drifts back to Katie. Tomorrow the dog will arrive. Before he gets here, maybe there will be time to get her a haircut, maybe some new clothes. Everything in her suitcase was quite plainly purchased secondhand, and much of it is stained or ragged or too small. Her panties, in particular, pain me. Every single pair has holes. I washed everything and neatly folded it all, then stacked it on a chair just inside her bedroom door. The child slept on, oblivious, her body so thin she barely lifted the covers.

  As I measure flour, I imagine her after her mother’s arrest: waking up in an abandoned house, putting on those tattered panties, and trying to comb her crazy hair. I have to lean my hands on the cold steel counter, take a long breath against the blistering heat it rouses in me.

  How could she have slipped through so many cracks? Oscar was at war, obviously, and Sofia lived here, but di
dn’t they talk to her? And what about her teachers? Parents of her friends? Didn’t somebody notice?

  Obviously not—Katie had been living with her mother in a house with no running water and no appliances for a couple of months, maybe more. Katie was clearly adept and clever, so she made people believe what they wanted to believe.

  Still. Those collarbones.

  As if to nudge my darkening mood aside, a minuet twirls out of the radio. I stir the liquid ingredients together, set them aside for a few minutes to greet one another, and transfer the sourdough sponge into a clean jar that is carefully labeled. It goes back in the fridge, in a special small box I have outfitted with a lock to which only I have the key. My aunt Poppy tends a line of the sponge, as well, but each of ours has a different quality, as you might imagine. Poppy has been happier than I, so hers is sweeter.

  All of our sourdough starters are born from the same carefully tended mother dough our ancestor carried from Ireland in 1845. How she kept it alive through the famine times is a mystery we don’t examine too closely.

  What we do know is that Bridget Magill carried her sponge to a big house in Buffalo, where she was a cook in a banker’s house, and made the finest bread anyone had ever tasted. More than one matron in the fashionable district tried to steal Bridget away, but she steadfastly cooked for the Mitchell family until her thirty-fifth year. By all accounts the lively, plump old maid then charmed a westward-thinking miner by the name of William O’Hare, who married her and brought her to the gold rush in the Colorado mountains, where she cooked just as happily for miners until she died.

  Bridget’s good nature made a bread that was sweet as heaven. She also kept her loaves cold for a long stretch, letting them ripen, resulting in a bread that melted on your tongue like sugar.

  I am not as prone to good cheer as my ancestress, and tonight my mood sends the yeasts bubbling riotously in the bowl, filling the air with that fecund and piercing scent. It carries with it a promise of rain, and I turn it out on the layer of fine white flour I’ve scattered across the surface of the counter.

  Finally I can begin to knead, and everything slips away, as if I am meditating, as if I am praying.

  Only names waft through my mind: Sofia. Katie. Oscar.

  RAMONA’S BOOK OF BREADS

  EASY SOURDOUGH STARTER

  Technically, the best sourdough starters are made without commercial yeast, but it’s easier to understand the properties of a sponge if you make an easy one to begin with. This one is simple and reliable.

  2 cups potato water (water in which potatoes have been boiled until soft), lukewarm

  ½ cup rye flour

  ½ cup whole-wheat flour

  1 cup unbleached white flour

  2 tsp dry yeast

  In a 2-quart jar, mix the water, flours, and yeast until smooth. Cover loosely with cheesecloth and let stand in a warm spot, stirring every 24 hours, until bubbly and agreeably sour, usually 4–10 days. Taste it every day to know how it is progressing.

  When it is ready, store loosely covered in the fridge, refreshing it once a week by throwing away half the starter and adding 1 cup water, 1 cup white flour. Can be used in bread recipes, biscuits, pancakes, even corn bread.

  Katie

  Katie jerks awake from a heavy, dreamless sleep and sits straight up, blinking, trying to gather information as fast as possible. Where is she? Is she late for school? Is there any trouble?

  A bank of windows.

  Lemonade light splashing on slanted walls.

  And, finally, the living scent of bread baking, a smell that fills her head so much that it makes her feel tilted sideways.

  No, she doesn’t have to worry about school. She’s not even in Texas. She is in Colorado, in Sofia’s mother’s house.

  With a sigh of relief, she falls back on the soft, soft bed and scrunches the extra pillows around her like a nest. Her legs and arms feel buzzy from sleeping so hard, easing some of the aches she feels all the time lately. Growing pains, Madison’s mother said.

  It is still super-early. The smell of the bread fills the whole room, and her stomach growls. She tries to imagine the empty space of her belly filled with cotton, muffling the sound, easing the pangs.

  But it comes to her that she doesn’t have to do that anymore. She’s living over a bakery! A bakery. With a woman who seems to want to be sure Katie has plenty of that bread in her stomach.

  Tucking a hand under her cheek, she shifts lazily. But like a blue jay suddenly sensing danger, she hears a blast of warning in her mind—don’t get too comfortable!—and she knows she has to listen. She will have to be very, very careful here.

  The room is like something in a fairy tale. The bed is the best she can remember in forever, maybe even better than the bed she had in Germany, when her parents were still together and they had an apartment where Mom and Dad took turns cooking. That was when her mom was happy still, before she went to Iraq and became somebody else.

  When both of her parents were deployed to Iraq, Katie had to go live with her grandma, who smelled like cabbage and went to church all the time and obviously didn’t like Katie’s mom very much and said mean things about her. It made Katie cry one time, and her grandma stopped after that, but Katie knew she was still thinking the same things.

  Buried in the fresh-smelling covers and pillows, Katie lets herself take a long breath and close her eyes for just a little longer. Somewhere outside her windows, a bird chirps. (Warbles, she thinks, composing a note to Madison in her mind.) The last place she lived was the only house left in a whole neighborhood of apartments, and it seemed like somebody was always yelling or playing their music somewhere.

  This is good. Very, very good.

  Don’t get used to it.

  She makes herself get out of the soft bed and patters over to the windows in her underwear and T-shirt. Way, way down in the backyard is Ramona, her red hair in a braid that falls all the way down her back, almost to her butt. It’s the longest hair Katie’s ever seen on a grown-up. Sitting on a bench is an old woman, petting a cat.

  The garden looks kind of nice, but what Katie thinks is that she can get to the kitchen and post an email to her mother before Ramona comes in. She brushes her teeth and washes her face. Her dad used to do push-ups every morning, and Katie did them with him, but lately they make her arms feel shaky and she has to quit.

  Her clothes are in a neat stack on a chair in her bedroom, everything all clean and perfectly folded. Katie bends her head into them and smells laundry soap. It almost makes her cry. Tears would actually have spilled if she hadn’t swallowed fast.

  On top of the pile is her favorite sweater, light brown with thin green stripes, and she pulls it on over her T-shirt, along with some jeans that are a little too short. Barefoot, she heads down the first flight of stairs, checking to see which stairs squeak. There’s nobody else around.

  In the kitchen, there’s a bowl of apples and oranges, and Katie snatches an apple, biting into it eagerly. It’s so juicy, she has to wipe off her chin, and she puts it aside so the computer keys won’t get sticky. At school, they always have to wash their hands before they use the computers.

  Katie opens her own special account that Ramona made for her and crosses her fingers. Be there, be there, be there.

  Nothing. Nothing from Madison, though Katie had not really expected it. Madison might get to go on somebody else’s computer at their house or something but not until the weekend. Madison’s mother didn’t think they’d even get a little bitty netbook until her dad went back to Iraq. The girls would have to make snail mail work.

  Also nothing from Katie’s mom. Though Katie knows not to expect it yet—her mom is probably still in detox, where everybody is too sick to be using computers—she’s disappointed.

  The worst is that there is nothing from her dad. He writes her an email almost every week, but there hasn’t been one in a while. Not that she’s been able to get anywhere to read them.

  But seeing that empty mail
box makes her heart hurt for a long, long minute, until she takes a bite of apple and promises she will not think of him again for five hours. Just like everything is normal. She read a book that said whatever you think about comes true, and that scares her. What if she can worry him into being dead?

  Instead, she wants to think about her dad being okay, only a little bit hurt, making jokes in his hospital bed.

  Feeling nervous, Katie thinks about her mother. She is not allowed to talk to her. She gets up, looks out the back windows of the kitchen, and sees that Ramona is still there. The other lady is gone. The smell of bread baking is even stronger here, but it still seems as if nobody else is in the house except her, so she creeps back to the computer and opens a new email.

  TO: laceymomsoldier@prt.com

  FROM: katiewilson09872@nomecast.com

  SUBJECT: safe and sound

  Dear Mom,

  I know you can’t probably even get to a computer yet, but when you do I wanted there to be an email from me so you didn’t have to worry. I’m staying with Sofia’s mom in Colorado and it’s totally boring but safe, so you don’t have to worry. I’m thinking about you every day. Hope you feel better super-fast and we can be together again.

  Love you lots and lots, Katie

  She hits the send button. No one will know. It would make her dad really mad. Standing up, she pushes the chair back exactly the same way it had been. Still nibbling her apple to make it last, she wanders through the rooms on this floor, peeking into the big living room and the bedroom that must be Ramona’s. An old-fashioned bed with curlicues made of iron sits in an alcove beneath three windows hung with fragile-looking lace. The bed isn’t made, and Katie likes Ramona better for it, and for the pair of pants that are flung over a chair, and for a couple of pairs of shoes sitting by the closet door, as if they’d been kicked off.

  She ambles through the long hallway, stopping to look at framed pictures of a little girl getting bigger and bigger until she turns into Sofia.

  The bathroom is amazing. It’s gigantic with black-and-white tiles in diamonds across the floor and a big old tub that you could practically swim in, sitting on sturdy claw feet. One wall is made of glass cubes that make everything look wavy, so right now they are all green and white and blue, like a kaleidoscope. A huge green velvet curtain hangs on rings near the ceiling. Katie pulls it, and it flows on a bar across the glass wall for privacy. “Cool,” she says to no one.