How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [15]
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