How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [93]
“I know. It’s like a dream.”
The music trails away behind us. He straightens, tucks a lock of my hair behind my ear. “My hands are shaking.”
“Everything in me is shaking,” I say, and frown. It feels like too much. I think of him in the record store when we were young, asking why his dreams had been stolen. I think of the music he composed, the music played here tonight, and it is highly emotional. I think of his house, so austere, stripped clean of things to care about.
And now our hands are shaking with emotion. Too much. I think, This is not going to be good for me, and I cannot afford to be caught in a dramatic love affair. Too many people are depending on me. I must be the center that holds.
“Maybe,” I say, “we should play backgammon.”
He straightens. “Yes. That’s a good idea.”
He walks me home when the concert is over. Music unhinged me earlier, but we grounded ourselves in the game and food and laughing. Now I feel the evening coming to a close, and I need to make sure we do not take this anywhere.
At the porch steps, I turn to look up at him, feeling suddenly without words—or maybe with too many words, all crowding in, tumbling over themselves. “Everything I’m thinking of to say sounds false.”
He picks up my hand and kisses my knuckles. “Don’t say anything.”
I nod. He releases me and I say, “Good night, Jonah.”
For a moment he stands quite still. Overhead, a nightingale whistles in the trees, and moonlight filters through the branches, dappling his face, his hair. I want to take him inside and tuck him close, smooth away that sorrow I now understand, but it could ruin me.
“Good night,” he says, and walks away.
Inside, I sink down on the bottom stair and let the shivering take over. It feels as if I have been fighting. Bending my head, I hear the mournful sound of his sonata, and it makes me dizzy. This is better, that we should be only friends. He is too much, the feeling is too much, and if I fell from such a distance, I don’t think I could bear it.
On legs that feel wobbly, I turn and go upstairs, to the things I can believe in. My cat. A young girl who needs me. My daughter, who might even now be writing me an email.
But as I sink into my bed, what I think of is the way his mouth tasted, the smell of his skin. How do you stop a thing once it begins?
STEP FOUR
When the dough has doubled, the belly filled with carbon dioxide and madly multiplying yeasts contained by the skin of gluten, the baker must punch it down. This is not an actual fist, a true punch, but rather a deflation. Turn the dough out onto a hard surface and gently press down to let the air out. The excess carbon dioxide is gently squeezed out, and the yeasts are more fully distributed through the dough so that the loaf can be shaped and set to rise into the true shape of the bread it will become.
Ramona
The second time bread saved my life, I was again nursing wounds inflicted by a man.
I didn’t date much after I had Sofia. There wasn’t time, for one thing. I was busy with school and work, and any hours I had left between those things were spent with my daughter. By the time she started kindergarten, I had saved enough to buy us a small house not far from my grandmother’s, and I was the assistant operations manager for the Gallagher Group, a job that paid well even if it was boring. It earned me a place in the family business. I had great benefits for Sofia and me. All around me, I saw people who had far less. If I hated my job, I was only one of billions, and at least mine was clean, honest work. Outside work, I was a classroom mother, I baked elaborate and beautiful things for Sofia’s parties, and I read a lot in the evenings.
Dane came to work for the company when Sofia was seven or so, and I didn’t pay him much attention. I didn’t pay attention to any man, and that’s why they mostly left me alone. Once in a while I dated somebody for a bit, but there were always conflicts with my job or my daughter or my own finicky tastes. My mother