How to Bake a Perfect Life (6 page)

Still. Those collarbones.

As if to nudge my darkening mood aside, a minuet twirls out of the radio. I stir the liquid ingredients together, set them aside for a few minutes to greet one another, and transfer the sourdough sponge into a clean jar that is carefully labeled. It goes back in the fridge, in a special small box I have outfitted with a lock to which only I have the key. My aunt Poppy tends a line of the sponge, as well, but each of ours has a different quality, as you might imagine. Poppy has been happier than I, so hers is sweeter.

All of our sourdough starters are born from the same carefully tended mother dough our ancestor carried from Ireland in 1845. How she kept it alive through the famine times is a mystery we don’t examine too closely.

What we do know is that Bridget Magill carried her sponge to a big house in Buffalo, where she was a cook in a banker’s house, and made the finest bread anyone had ever tasted. More than one matron in the fashionable district tried to steal Bridget away, but she steadfastly cooked for the Mitchell family until her thirty-fifth year. By all accounts the lively, plump old maid then charmed a westward-thinking miner by the name of William O’Hare, who married her and brought her to the gold rush in the Colorado mountains, where she cooked just as happily for miners until she died.

Bridget’s good nature made a bread that was sweet as heaven. She also kept her loaves cold for a long stretch, letting them ripen, resulting in a bread that melted on your tongue like sugar.

I am not as prone to good cheer as my ancestress, and tonight
my mood sends the yeasts bubbling riotously in the bowl, filling the air with that fecund and piercing scent. It carries with it a promise of rain, and I turn it out on the layer of fine white flour I’ve scattered across the surface of the counter.

Finally I can begin to knead, and everything slips away, as if I am meditating, as if I am praying.

Only names waft through my mind:
Sofia. Katie. Oscar
.

RAMONA’S BOOK OF BREADS

EASY SOURDOUGH STARTER

Technically, the best sourdough starters are made without commercial yeast, but it’s easier to understand the properties of a sponge if you make an easy one to begin with. This one is simple and reliable.

2 cups potato water (water in which potatoes have been boiled until soft), lukewarm

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

  K
atie 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 her favorite sweater, light brown with thin green stripes, and she pulls it on over her T-shirt, along with some jeans that are a little too short. Barefoot, she heads down the first flight of stairs, checking to see which stairs squeak. There’s nobody else around.

In the kitchen, there’s a bowl of apples and oranges, and Katie snatches an apple, biting into it eagerly. It’s so juicy, she has to wipe off her chin, and she puts it aside so the computer keys won’t get sticky. At school, they always have to wash their hands before they use the computers.

Katie opens her own special account that Ramona made for her and crosses her fingers.
Be there, be there, be there
.

Nothing. Nothing from Madison, though Katie had not really expected it. Madison might get to go on somebody else’s computer at their house or something but not until the weekend. Madison’s mother didn’t think they’d even get a little bitty netbook until her dad went back to Iraq. The girls would have to make snail mail work.

Also nothing from Katie’s mom. Though Katie knows not to expect it yet—her mom is probably still in detox, where everybody is too sick to be using computers—she’s disappointed.

The worst is that there is nothing from her dad. He writes her an email almost every week, but there hasn’t been one in a while. Not that she’s been able to get anywhere to read them.

But seeing that empty mailbox makes her heart hurt for a long, long minute, until she takes a bite of apple and promises
she will not think of him again for five hours. Just like everything is normal. She read a book that said whatever you think about comes true, and that scares her. What if she can worry him into being dead?

Instead, she wants to think about her dad being okay, only a little bit hurt, making jokes in his hospital bed.

Feeling nervous, Katie thinks about her mother. She is
not
allowed to talk to her. She gets up, looks out the back windows of the kitchen, and sees that Ramona is still there. The other lady is gone. The smell of bread baking is even stronger here, but it still seems as if nobody else is in the house except her, so she creeps back to the computer and opens a new email.

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

SUBJECT: safe and sound

Dear Mom,

I know you can’t probably even get to a computer yet, but when you do I wanted there to be an email from me so you didn’t have to worry. I’m staying with Sofia’s mom in Colorado and it’s totally boring but safe, so you don’t have to worry. I’m thinking about you every day. Hope you feel better super-fast and we can be together again.

Love you lots and lots, Katie

She hits the send button. No one will know. It would make her dad really mad. Standing up, she pushes the chair back exactly the same way it had been. Still nibbling her apple to make it last, she wanders through the rooms on this floor, peeking into the big living room and the bedroom that must be Ramona’s. An old-fashioned bed with curlicues made of iron sits in an alcove beneath three windows hung with fragile-looking lace. The bed isn’t made, and Katie likes Ramona better
for it, and for the pair of pants that are flung over a chair, and for a couple of pairs of shoes sitting by the closet door, as if they’d been kicked off.

She ambles through the long hallway, stopping to look at framed pictures of a little girl getting bigger and bigger until she turns into Sofia.

The bathroom is amazing. It’s gigantic with black-and-white tiles in diamonds across the floor and a big old tub that you could practically swim in, sitting on sturdy claw feet. One wall is made of glass cubes that make everything look wavy, so right now they are all green and white and blue, like a kaleidoscope. A huge green velvet curtain hangs on rings near the ceiling. Katie pulls it, and it flows on a bar across the glass wall for privacy. “Cool,” she says to no one.

The sink stands by itself beneath a mirror with double lines drawn on the edges. No counter, but behind the tub is a built-in dresser with drawers that have crystal handles. Bottles of bubble bath and shampoo and hair stuff are all lined up on top of it. A wicker basket is filled with pins and clips and elastic bands, and beside it is a brush with thick tan bristles that are way too soft to do anything for Katie’s crazy hair. She checks it out anyway because the brush is so pretty, looking in the mirror, which she really tries to avoid whenever possible. There is a white patch beside her mouth and a zit coming on her chin, and the stupid brush just skates right over the top of her dry, curly, uncut hair. Ugly! Especially when she thinks of Ramona’s hair, which is long, long, and a glittery red. Like Rapunzel, maybe.

She puts the brush away carefully and leaves the bathroom, looking for a trash can for her apple core. A hollowness goes with her. She’s bored now. There’s nothing to do. She’s already read her book six times and she doesn’t like computer games, and she can’t think about her dad until ten o’clock.

She might as well go outside with Ramona.

Ramona

  I
’m out in my garden by five a.m., the loaves baked and cooling on the counter. The air is quite sharp so early, and I wear jeans and a sweater, my hair woven into a tight braid, hands in gloves to keep the grit out from under my nails. Sometimes I still have to scrub them like a surgeon when I come inside.