How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [28]
“No! I chased him as long as I could, but he’s running the neighborhood. When the Humane Society opens, we’ll call and they’ll pick him up if they see him.”
“How could you?” she cries. Tears are running down her face. “I trusted you with him!”
I expected this, but it’s still terrible. “Katie, I was standing right there, and he jumped so high—he cleared the fence in the backyard. We’ll have to figure out a way to keep him in.”
“I hate you,” she says without energy, shaking her head. “I. Hate. You. He was all I had left.”
“He’s not dead, Katie. He just ran off. We’ll find him.” I say it aloud as if to bring weight to my desire, as if speaking it so firmly will make it so. I skitter away from the idea of Colorado Avenue, a busy street, and from the idea that if he was wandering on the railroad tracks when Katie found him, maybe he’s just a hobo of a dog and we’ll never see him again. “We will find him.”
Her shoulders sag. “Things don’t work out like that for me.” She bows her head and opens the door, and I can’t stand the sight of her shoulder blades sticking out like folded wings from her back. Leaping up the steps, I put my arms around her, hugging her from behind. “I’m so sorry, Katie.”
For one long minute she allows it, then she flings my arms away from her and goes inside.
Now what? I think. But the bread is waiting to be sliced. Customers are even now walking toward us.
For me, always, there is the bread. Which has saved my life more than once.
STEP TWO
Before the advent of commercial yeasts, bakers could make a fresh loaf of bread each day only by relying on the levains and starters they had been keeping according to their traditions. Some of those starters were stiff and required a good deal of water and work to release their essence into the day’s mix of flour and water and salt; others were as soft as breasts, divided from the dough of the day before and left in a warm place overnight.
In some villages, making bread was seen as such a sensual act that only the most devout could perform the task without falling to sin; in others, the bakers were required to go to confession before they baked each day, in order to avoid polluting those who would eat the bread with their desires and failings.
There are many traditions, many flours, many forms, but all have in common their power to seed the fresh ingredients of the new day, to make a ball of flat ordinary powder grow as tall and plump as a mother’s belly. Out of such simple ingredients—only flour and salt and wild yeast and fresh water—comes the miraculous holiness of bread.
Ramona at Fifteen
The first time bread saved my life, I was fifteen and six months pregnant. I’d hidden the belly as long as I could, petitioning every saint I thought might help to make something happen—not make me lose it, because that would be a sin, but make my period come like it should. I looked up herbal remedies at the library but never could bring myself to try them. No matter how little I liked church, a mortal sin was slightly more terrifying than having a baby out of wedlock.
My mother drove me to my aunt Poppy’s in her Pontiac in early June, the day after school got out for the summer. We didn’t talk much. She smoked one cigarette after another, L&M Menthol 100’s with white filters and a green pack. I rolled the window down every time, but it still made me sick to my stomach, and I leaned on the door frame, feeling the rattle in my teeth. At least nobody smoked at Poppy’s house. She’d quit years and years ago.
Poppy, my mother’s older sister, lived in a tiny spit of a town between Castle Rock and Denver on the old Littleton highway. I had stayed there many times, loving the freedom of her childless household, the relaxed rules, her bohemian decorations from her travels—statues of elephants and strings of bells and the tapestries she had on the walls. We made trips to Cinderella City, a big mall in Englewood, and played miniature golf in Castle Rock in the cricket-y coolness of summer nights.
But I couldn’t imagine staying there