How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [13]
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