Stones for Bread (10 page)

So we have no more bread in our home. Until one day I walk through the door and the entire kitchen is bread. Not like when Oma died. This is chaos. Deformed boules tumbling into the sink. Burnt loaves are stacked four and five high, shaky ziggurats beckoning the untidy gods of imprecision. My mother kneads with frenzy, sprinkling this and pinching that, rolling great blobs of dough through her hands.
Help me, Liesl. There’s so much to do
.

For what
?

The party
.

What party
?

Why, the one I want to have
. She laughs, loose and jangly and unconcerned. I’m frightened, because my mother’s entire world spins with concern. Everything is well cared for, everyone holds value to her. She is loving-kindness.

This is madness.

Maybe we should call Dad
, I say.

She slams the dough onto the counter.
Spielverderber. Both of you
, she hisses. Then she sweeps the car keys into her hand.
You’re a teenager now. You can stay home alone
.

She leaves me. I’m not yet twelve, my birthday seven weeks away.

Jude is Xavier in miniature. Narrow in the shoulders, tattered shorts cinched bag-like on his hips, thin-limbed and graceful. His features are finer but positioned the same, his mannerisms nearly identical. Jude has hair, though, a shocking mess of bright blue, and a silver ring at each corner of his bottom lip. And glasses, thick black plastic frames. He wears Adidas flip-flops and a white sleeveless undershirt every day.

I expect a sullen, resentful teenager. What seventeen-year-old wants out of bed at three in the morning? But he works hard, and Zave is right—those hands. He has the fingers of a sculptor, twisting bread in ways I only see in glossy, oversized books on artisan baking. The designs he cuts into the crusts—birds and vines and abstract swirls—make my stick-figure-drawing self bubble with envy.

“Where did you learn to do that?” I ask him. “It’s just . . . wow.”

Jude shrugs. “Tenth-grade ceramics studio, I guess.”

“Zave, can’t we get some sort of, I don’t know, coating or sealer or something to put on these and preserve them? I’ve seen other bakeries do it.”

“Don’t bother,” Jude says. “There’ll be more tomorrow.”

“Well, maybe you should go up against Jonathan Scott.”

He shakes his head. “It’s all just window dressing.” And he goes out the back door, down the street to the shiny blue public bench—nearly the same color as his hair—and smokes two cigarettes. I watch him puff and blow, stubbing out the butts on the sidewalk, sometimes tossing them in the trash, other times flicking them into the gutter.
I think about tobacco residue slipping from the oil on his fingertips into the dough, but say nothing and charge nearly five dollars more for his designer loaves. They sell out before noon.

Patrice Olsen has made certain every possible publicity outlet in a hundred-mile radius knows about Wild Rise and
Bake-Off
. All four local television news affiliates run stories, poking their cameras in patrons’ faces and taking some footage of Gretchen and me preparing dough. They promise to return for the contest, now less than two weeks away. The one daily and two weekly papers feature articles, as do the two big city newspapers. All the coverage increases business. We make thirty more loaves a day, closing most afternoons with no more than five left over. When Tee complains she needs more help too, Xavier volunteers Jude. She leaves him notes about what to prep each morning before she arrives; he chops carrots and marinates chicken and dices onions into tiny slivers while wiping the tears away. Tee dotes on him much the way she does with Cecelia, making him thick Panini sandwiches for lunch dripping with provolone and bacon. “You need to get fatter,” she says, bringing him desserts too, made at home the night before,
perekladanets
and
fruktovykh ta horik-hovykh shtrudel
. Or sometimes plain old chocolate chip cookies, big as saucers. Xavier delights in breaking off small pieces of the sweets and popping them in his mouth while she watches. She thumps him with every sort of utensil, across the knuckles or on the top of the head. “Only for the boy. None for the pigs.”

Tee returned to work three days after the death of her sister without apology or explanation, though her landlady must have told her I phoned. She worked silently and efficiently, eyes downturned, taping to the cooler a list of ingredients she needed for the next day. We all let her be, even Xavier, until he decided she’d been sullen long enough. He took her favorite spatula, greased it with raspberry jam, and planted it, handle down, in a loaf of bread. “So it waves to her when she come in,” he said.

“Zave—”

“Trust me, my dear girl. She needs this.”

When she saw the spatula, she shimmied it from the loaf and scoured it clean, saying nothing.
She’s crushed
, I thought.
Under the weight of loss
. Twenty minutes later Xavier couldn’t find his lame. He searched under towels, in aprons, in the cooler, even checking the bread baskets and the oven. The beginnings of a smirk whet Tee’s lips. We all noticed. “Tatiana, darling, you wouldn’t happen to have seen my razor, have you?” Xavier asked.

“I believe, yes,” she said. “But my memory runs away from me. I think I forget.”

He scored the dough with a serrated knife instead of giving her the satisfaction of borrowing mine. The next day he brought a half dozen, hiding them various places, even duct taping one beneath the worktable. He found the missing one several days later, submerged in the jar of raspberry jam.

Tee was back.

I, however, want to disappear.

No one talks to me about the show. They tried to ask a question now and then, but each time were met with a caustic, short answer or an “I’m not talking about it.” Patrice Olsen sends e-mails almost every day. I read half of them, maybe, and respond to less. Others remain unopened, glaring at me in their bold print. I forward them to Xavier. Some he takes care of on his own. The ones requiring my attention he boots back to me. I don’t look at them.

Finally, Xavier shows up at Wild Rise as I’m finishing for the evening.

“We need to talk,” he says. “That Olsen woman and her crew will be here in four days.”

“What? The show isn’t supposed to shoot until next Saturday.”

“If you had read your mail, you would have learned the crew comes early for preproduction work.”

“I can’t do this, Zave.”

“Too late for that, my friend.”

I press my fingertips against my closed eyes until it hurts and then blow a slow, flat stream of air from my nose, willing my body to deflate, to go limp and empty and slide off the wooden stool, slipping under the table where Xavier, if he’s kind, can roll me up and store me in some closet until the show passes. I avoid, like my father, plugging my ears and closing my eyes, singing, “Nana-nana-nana, I can’t hear you,” when facing something with which I don’t want to deal. Returning a confrontational phone call. Balancing the business checkbook when I haven’t looked at it in months. And lately, Seamus. Eventually, though, I force myself to face things, usually the day of the deadline or sometime within the grace period. Today is eventually for
Bake-Off
.

Another deep breath. A thumbprint of warmth blooms in the cavern beneath my breastbone, a penny on the sidewalk in the sun. The Comforter. The sensation fills my chest and dribbles down my limbs, and a perfect peace comes over me for a moment. The guilt comes seconds later. I think of how few times I’ve been to church this year, about the dusty spiritual disciplines book on top of the toilet tank, my sporadic bursts of two-second prayer only when I need something. I don’t deserve comfort. And yet he gives it to me anyway, warmer and deeper, clearing out my shame until I can raise my head and say, “Okay, what do I need to know?”

“You’ll bake for two challenges—”

“Two? What do you mean, two?”

“Yes, two. The first is a basic baguette—”

“Baguette?”

“—your choice of recipe. The second is a secret ingredient challenge—”

“Are you joking? What ingredient?”

“You won’t find out until the day of the competition. Hence,
secret. And if you don’t stop repeating what I say in questions, I’m going to let you read all your messages and handle this on your own.”

“Sorry.”

“The competition will last seven hours, beginning at nine in the morning. You’ll have to close that day, obviously. You can have the dough prepared ahead of time and allow for the final rises on Saturday.”

“We’re baking here?”

Xavier nodded. “But they’re doing the tasting and judging in Centennial Park, since they’re expecting a crowd.”

“And please shock me. Who’s judging? The mayor? Betty the crazy cat lady down the street?”

“Seriously, Liesl. At least try to enjoy this a little. And give them some credit. They’re getting one of the bakers from King Arthur’s to come. And that chef who lives not far from here. Marianna Dutton? She has a couple shows on Good Food.”

“And about a hundred cookbooks, lines of cookware, gadgets, and her own magazine.”

“So, you’re impressed?”

I bite my lip. “I suppose.”

“Good,” he says.

The Hebrews come into the bread eaters’ land with no bread of their own. It’s famine, and Jacob’s sons travel to Egypt in hopes of finding something to save their families. They find not only grain but forgiveness. Joseph is there, whom God takes from them so he can later deliver them. They find a new home. And they, too, find the miracle of yeast.

Surely the descendants of Abraham bake their grains, mixing flour and oil and kneading it to dough. But this is
uggah—
a flat cake baked on hot stones or in the ashes, the same given to the Lord by Abraham when he visits and pronounces Isaac’s birth. Nomads have no time for
fermentation, for waiting for dough to ripen. They have enough to carry from place to place. And they have no ovens, probably have never conceived of such a thing. Again, too heavy to move.

So what must it have been like for them to see these risen loaves come from strange Egyptian baking containers? It becomes part of them, the first thing they cry out for in the wilderness, not any bread but that of those who enslaved them. The Hebrews have freedom. Instead, they want food, their bellies filled with the earthly comfort they know. And God, the heavenly Comforter, sends bread of a different kind.

What is it?

They call it
manna
. And it’s given
to
the wandering children of Israel, but not only
for
them. For us. For all who brush away the veil and will one day lay eyes on the true manna, a child they do not yet know will be born in
Bethlehem
, the house of bread.

Seamus and Cecelia come for Saturday brunch, she in a yellow sundress with one strap stubbornly falling from her shoulder, he with his summer beard, not much more than stubble on his cheeks and a pom-pom of bristles hugging his chin. They’ve been regulars since May, since school ended. She orders the same thing each time, a cinnamon roll and hot cocoa, no matter how warm it is outside. He gets an off-menu sandwich; Tee gladly serves up anything he imagines, and I shake my head at his bizarre requests. This week it’s scrambled eggs, sautéed green bell peppers, and grape jelly on toasted rye.