Stones for Bread (9 page)

I know what he means. I am more
me
here than anywhere. So much so that when I’m outside the bakehouse I sometimes need to remind myself I’m something other than ether, that I can bump into passersby and be heard when I make comments aloud. Maybe I am
only
me here.

I poured out my soul when decorating Wild Rise. The aqua-green wainscoting, treated to look worn and topped with peg molding head-high. Then the plaster walls, Van Gogh gold rising high to the metal pipes and ducts, original tin ceiling, all a deep eggplant color. Wooden floors, absolutely. Mismatched chairs, painted the same purple as the ceiling. My father came to the grand opening and couldn’t suppress his astonishment at my choice in colors. “It’s so bright,” he said. “Not you at all.” I muttered something about vibrancy being good for the stomach and tried not to be too hurt because, really, what else would he think. We had always been that
quiet
family. We didn’t shout—usually. No one gesticulated while talking or hung our emotions on the clothesline for all the neighbors to see. We never seemed overly excitable or sought out rugged adventures, or even had much fanfare at the holidays beyond a wreath on the door and a few paper hats. We wore dull clothes in dull colors, moths not butterflies. Those looking in on the McNamara family must have thought us as wan as over-watered chicken broth, without meat or noodle.

So where did these colors come from? So deep I didn’t know I had them inside me until I left my beiges and yellows and twenty-seven shades of white sample chips in a pile at the Home Depot paint counter, carrying out my cans of color instead. But on my surface I still wear only brown and gray and denim and fatigue green.

I don’t want to be noticed.

Seamus gathers Cecelia, and they stand together at the counter to pick their loaf, a liturgy for them when he’s here before we pack away the extra. Most days they choose sandwich bread or a loaf of Italian if they plan on spaghetti for dinner. But today Wild Rise offers Cecelia’s favorite—chocolate sourdough. She won’t leave without it. Seamus
knows this very well, but rituals must be played out, despite knowing the endings. “I’m not sure, Ceese. It all looks good. Too many choices.” She giggles, and he points to the Sweet Chèvre. “How about something new?”

“What’s chev-ree?” she asks.

“Goat cheese.” He doesn’t correct her pronunciation.

“Yucky. No way.”

“Well, then maybe the one there, with garlic and sun-dried tomatoes.”

“The chocolate, Daddy. It’s right there. And there’s only one left.”

There’s always one left. I keep it aside, just for her, each time I make it.

Seamus
hmm
s loudly, pretends to deeply contemplate her words while stroking his beard. “I don’t know. I heard a little girl in Montpelier turned all sweet and melty because she ate too much chocolate bread.”

Cecelia giggles. “You did not.”

“True, true.”

“Please, please, please?”

“Aren’t you sick of it?”

She shakes her head, pigtails slapping her face.

“Alrighty then. I suppose we can all be a little sweeter. One chocolate bread. Thank you much, Miss Liesl.”

I bag the loaf and give it to Cecelia. “And you?”

“Oh no. We’re good,” Seamus says, taking a step back from the counter. “We can’t take any more from you.”

“I told you, it was a slow day. There’s too much left, and it will just be donated. So pick.”

He chooses a cinnamon raisin. I add a whole wheat sandwich loaf. He protests, hand fumbling to the back of his pants for his wallet, but I tell them to go. Seamus thanks me again, pinching both breads between his elbow and ribs. With his other hand, he cups the back of Cecelia’s neck, guiding her through the tables and
out the door. They stand on the curb, and I hear his blurry words reminding her to look both ways. He turns her head left, right, left, right, fast enough she begins to laugh. Then they stampede across the street to his truck, and he boosts her into the driver’s side before climbing in after her.

I want to call my father.

In the kitchen, Tee and Gretchen argue. Tee brandishes a ladle, stabbing it toward Gretchen with each angry word. “What on earth?” I ask.

“I have no clue,” Gretchen says.

Tee bites her lip. “She insult my food.”

“I didn’t. No one ordered her silly ankle soup today—”

“Solyanka.”

“—whatever it is. No one wanted it because they have no clue what’s in it. Or they didn’t want to look like fools trying to pronounce it. I just told her to call it something different, like summer sausage stew or something.”

“It is Ukrainian solyanka.” Tee shouts this and flings her spoon into the pans on the counter. Her nose reddens, her glasses steaming with tears. “Only that. Only.”

And she goes, without cleaning the stove, without putting away the food. Gretchen looks at me and shrugs. “I didn’t mean anything by it, Liesl. I was trying to help.”

“It’s fine. She . . . she’s Tee.”

“I can call her tonight. Apologize.”

“Leave it alone. She’ll be back in the morning, her normal prickly self.”

We work for some time, falling into our rhythm, kneading and mixing and shaping and staying out of one another’s way. Gretchen offers to wash Tee’s pots before she leaves, but I send her home and do it myself, spending extra time making the stainless steel shine and storing the leftover soup in the cooler for tomorrow.

Then, upstairs, before changing my clothes or eating, I dial my father.

I don’t expect him to answer. Most of the time he doesn’t, ignoring the ringing and letting the machine handle it, sometimes listening to his messages, occasionally returning them. More than once I’ve had to contact old Mrs. Grimm, the neighbor, asking her to knock on my father’s door and tell him to call me. She doesn’t mind; she finds him charming and likes an excuse to make conversation. And I have to not mind, because when it comes to telephones, I do the exact same thing.

But tonight he picks up.

“Dad, it’s me.”

“Liesl, darling heart, how are you?”

He still has a bit of brogue left in him, passed on from immigrant parents, though he was born in Brooklyn. There have been times he’s worked to snip it out of his speech, and mostly he thickens it to sound like a Lucky Charms commercial. “It’s good for business,” he would tell me during the few times I made deliveries with him, “the accent.” The middle-aged women thought it delightful, the men felt as though they were talking with their buddy from the corner pub. My father came home exhausted from playing the game.

“I’m good. Busy with the bakery. What are you up to?”

“Oh, this and that.” He retired a few years ago from the deli meat truck but works part-time at the local Ace Hardware, instructing the lost on how to fix their perpetually running toilets and faulty light sockets. “They made me head usher at church. Speaking of which, remember Selah Bates, the one you used to play with in high school?”

“It was elementary school.”

“That long ago? Any which way, she got married last weekend. Real nice boy. A podiatrist, I think. Which gets me to wondering when you’ll—”

“Dad.”

We are close, he and I. Not as tightly knit as we were when I was
a child, but better than those teenaged years when I railed against his earnest and imperfect attempts at loving me, despite my hostility and the blame I placed on him for my mother’s death. We can get no closer, though, because she is always there, a placeholder for the past.

“I have some news,” I say. “I’m going to be on TV.” I tell him about
Bake-Off
and ask him to come to the taping, on July seventeenth.
Five weeks away
.

“I wouldn’t miss it for anything,” he says.

I want him there. But when he comes, she’ll be with him, her ghost inflated between us.

Cecelia’s Dark Chocolate Pain au Levain

Makes one loaf

L
IESL
’
S NOTES
:

If you haven’t been able to culture your own wild yeast starter yet, there are many places selling it commercially online, or you may want to check with a local bakery.

I
NGREDIENTS
:

400 grams (3 cups) unbleached white whole wheat flour, organic if possible

65 grams (½ cup cocoa) powder

200 grams (1 cup sourdough) starter commercial or homemade (see
page 45
)

100 grams (½ cup) sugar

250–300 grams (1¼ to ½ cups) water

6 grams (1 teaspoons) salt

50 grams (¼ cup) chocolate, 70% cocoa, chopped very fine

60 grams (⅓ cup) dried cherries (optional)

E
QUIPMENT
:

2 mixing bowls

wooden spoon

stand mixer with dough hook (optional)

olive oil or nonstick cooking spray

plastic wrap

parchment paper

broiler pan

pizza stone or baking tiles

serrated knife or razor

D
O
A
HEAD

Combine ingredients, except chopped chocolate, in a large mixing bowl. Use a large wooden spoon and stir for 1 minute, until well blended; the dough should form a coarse, shaggy ball.

Add chopped chocolate (and dried cherries, if using them). If using an electric stand mixer, switch to the dough hook and mix on medium-low speed for 2 minutes. The dough should stick to the bottom of the bowl but not to the sides. Or knead by hand for about 2 minutes, adjusting with flour or water as needed. The dough should be smooth and soft but not sticky.

Use olive oil to lightly coat the inside of a clean bowl. Transfer the dough to this bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let stand 8 to 10 hours at room temperature (overnight works best).

O
N
B
AKING
D
AY

Gently transfer the dough to a lightly floured work surface, taking care to degas it as little as possible. To form a boule, hold the dough in your hands and sprinkle with more flour so it doesn’t stick to your hands. Stretch the surface of the dough around to the bottom on all four sides, rotating it as you go. When it’s correctly shaped, the ball will be smooth and cohesive. This should
take less than a minute to accomplish. Rest dough on a sheet of parchment paper and proof at room temperature for about 3 hours, until double its original size.

About 45 minutes before baking, preheat the oven to 550 degrees Fahrenheit or as high as it will go. On the lower shelf, put the empty broiler pan. Position the pizza stone on the shelf above.

Just prior to baking, score the dough ½ inch deep with a serrated knife or razor. Transfer the dough to the oven, pour 1 cup of hot water into the steam pan, then lower the oven temperature to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bake for 25 to 35 minutes, until the loaf sounds hollow when thumped and the internal temperature is about 200 degrees Fahrenheit in the center. For a crisper crust, turn off the oven and leave the bread in for another 5 minutes before removing.

Tee doesn’t show up for work the next day. I call the number on her employment forms and a woman answers. Her landlord. She tells me Tee is out of town for a family emergency, something about her sister’s unexpected death yesterday morning.

I reheat the solyanka, and in yellow chalk Gretchen writes
Hearty Sausage Dill
under
Soups
on the menu board. It sells out before the lunch crowd finishes.

Six

Madness is a sugar cube dissolving in warm water. The sharp edges melt away first, then the white brick shrinks until nothing is left but a few crystals and fog. Eventually the water clears too, and looking at two glasses—one sweetened, one not—no difference is detectable. But the sugar is there, invisible, permeating everything, even though the sturdy, solid cube is long gone.

I never see a sugar cube dissolve like this, not then. Not yet. All mine disappear into murky cups of tea, doubly hidden by a blanket of cream. I think if I had, I would recognize it better—my mother rounding off, melting away, clouding over.

By the clearing, it’s too late.

It takes a year for her to disintegrate. The sticky sadness only tightens around her, even with the pills, when she takes them. More than once, late at night when he thinks I’m asleep, I watch through the old-fashioned keyhole my father trying to wrestle the lithium into her mouth, one wiry arm restraining her, the other curling around her head to push the capsule through her lips. She doesn’t want it, insists
she’s fine without it, says it makes her too tired and too slow and too fat. But she’s tired and slow without it. I come home from school and she’s asleep on the couch, all the shades pulled low. Or she’s in the bathroom, in the dark. Or the bedroom closet.

My father stops reassuring me.

There’s no one left to hold us together. My father, too worried and absentminded. He forgets to pay the bills—her job—and more than once I pick up the phone only to find it disconnected. He buys odd food at the grocery, jars of beets and frozen corn dogs and peanut butter. He doesn’t remember things like Q-tips or conditioner, and my hair snarls so badly I cut it off with my craft scissors, to my chin first, then my ears because I can’t get it even. I try to cook us supper using the ingredients in the pantry and fridge, cutting up chunks of salami and mixing it with the beets, serving it over still-crunchy elbow macaroni. Sandwiches are easier, but anytime my father buys a loaf of packaged bread, we find it in the garbage can the next morning, unwrapped, each slice mauled to crumbs. Even when he hides it in the Crock-Pot at the top of the linen closet.