“Is that quiet resignation I hear in your voice?”
“Maturity, I think,” I say. “Your Liesl’s done gone and grown up.”
He laughs. “Not too much, now. Sulking does a bit of good every here and again.”
“All right, if Patrice Olsen comes looking for me, tell her I’m being a good girl and I’ll get in touch with her sometime this afternoon.”
“She’ll find you, don’t you worry about that.”
I push open the kitchen door just as Jude swings through in the other direction, knocking me backward. “A little help out here? It’s psycho.”
“Zave, call Gretchen and ask her to come early. And that friend of hers who fills in sometimes. Erika?”
“Will do. And I’ll get some extra loaves in.”
The bakery has been open an hour and already the bread is half gone. Jude and I work the counter, the line of customers snaking toward the screen door. A few of the women pull compacts from their handbags and touch up their lips. Those who aren’t regulars ask about the other baked goods—muffins and scones and bagels—they can eat with their coffee while waiting for the cameras to catch sight of them. I tell them we don’t do those things here, my voice scuffed with irritation. Jude smiles and explains things much more personably than I, slicing and toasting thick pillows of cinnamon-coated raisin and offering that to people, topped with a pool of melted cultured butter, fresh from the farm down the way. The day tourists find this quaint; the green eaters, sustainable and local; and the rest happy to have something sweet now that the sticky buns are gone. Everyone is smiling, and I wonder if Jude can also turn water into some sort of fermented beverage.
Patrice Olsen weaves through the crowd with a cameraman, asking questions and filming the chaos. The local newspapers are back as well; Jude looks at me in a way that says, Be nice, and it’s his grandfather’s face fifty years and forty pounds ago, and I try my best to answer all the reporters’ questions without growling. One of the papers also photographs Jude in front of the sunflower-shaped art bread he’s made this morning. I haven’t seen it until now and am as amazed as those oohing and aahing around me. The bread is made in two parts: the center a simple boule covered in ground sunflower and sesame seeds, the outer a disk of curved petals. Jude tells the journalist he baked this outer part around a stoneware bowl so the seeded inner loaf could be cradled within it. He’s made three of them. I price them at twelve dollars, and could have easily sold two dozen more.
It’s ten before Gretchen arrives—her normal time—because, as she rushes to explain, her cell phone is dead and lost, and she spent the night away from home. And Erika can’t be tracked down. So I work until the lunch crowd fades and we’ve run out of bread to sell. Then I leave Jude and Gretchen on their own and run upstairs to find the photos, and to escape the tornado around me.
It changes hands, at some point. The labor of milling grain, of baking it. Before it’s woman’s work, low to the ground and accomplished only with stone and sweat. After it becomes trade, an occupation, a man’s livelihood and a way to feed his children. Still with stone. Still with sweat.
And lower still.
The miller is an evil man, the peasants whisper. What do they know of the soke forcing them to bring their wheat for grinding to the stranger who lives outside the gates of the city? Or that these laws compel the miller to spy into village homes to make sure no one is grinding their own grain at home? It’s one thing to use four-legged beasts to do his work, the townsfolk say. But now the miller dares control the gods of water and wind, harnessing their power to turn the millstones. And as the rocks move against one another, they speak with the voices of demons, low, loud rumblings echoing through the belly of the earth. What do the peasants know, but that their freshly milled flour is returned to them mixed with sand? They accuse the miller of adding it to make it weigh more, make them pay more. Sometimes he doesn’t, as the grinding process produces the grit, the medieval conditions. Sometimes he does; after paying the lord of the manor his share, the miller has barely enough flour for his own family.
They’re in my bedroom closet, on the topmost shelf, in a manila envelope. My father must have given them to me, though I never asked for confirmation, and he never brought them up. I found the envelope in a box of measuring spoons and pot holders and other odds and ends I packed up from our own kitchen when I went away to college. There is no reason to the collection; it appears he grabbed and stuffed random handfuls into the package. He probably did because, for all my mother’s talents, keeping memories wasn’t one of them. Film canisters lingered on the counter for weeks or months before someone dropped them off at CVS to be developed. We’d look through the pictures together, laughing and pointing and smudging them, and then they’d make their journey to the attic, first perched on the bottom of the stairs waiting for someone to grab them on the way up, then on my mother’s dresser, then to a box in the dusty crawl space above the house, forgotten unless I needed one for a school project or special occasion. I marveled at my friends’ homes where photos decorated every wall, school pictures and family sessions from Olan Mills, and collage frames displaying candid shots, the remaining snapshots arranged in albums at the bottom of the bookcases and pawed through every Christmas or birthday.
I stand on a chair and take the envelope down, spread the contents over my bed. The photos with stray fingers accidentally in the frame, the blurry ones, the ones of tree branches and feet and cars parked along the side of the road, those I pile aside. And then I find it, the one I knew was here, a Polaroid of my mother. She wears a yellow apron with gathered sleeves, half turned toward the camera, toward my father, giving him a look that might find them in bed later. Her hands are deep in the dough trough, the sunlight from the window above the sink painting her brown hair gold. A streak of flour mars her cheek, so perfectly positioned that if this were a magazine advertisement, the whiteness would have been patted on with a makeup puff.
She is alive.
I sort through a few more. There’s one of my mother and me baking Christmas cookies, both of us licking dark icing from the beaters. One of Oma, pulling a loaf of German rye from her oven, hair swirled in a loose knot like grandmothers in storybooks, bread held in her terry-cloth mitts. And then one of me the same day, sitting at her table, eating a slice of the warm rye with butter and jam. I think I’m about five, in short pigtails that curl and ribbons. I loved ribbons then, wanted them in my hair all the time. I wear navy corduroy overalls and a white turtleneck, sturdy liver-colored shoes on my feet. The soles were so hard I limped until they finally broke in. But I loved the laces and called them my candy cane shoes because the two-tone cords reminded me of my favorite candy.
There are three black-and-white photos. One is my mother as an infant, posed and professional. Another is my mother somewhat older, maybe three, holding the hand of a man only captured from the waist down. Opa. I’ve seen so few pictures of him I can’t recall what he looks like. And then this one, of my grandmother in her wool peacoat and panty hose drooping at her ankles, one arm around my young mother’s shoulders, the other holding a paper sack of groceries, three baguettes pointing from the top. I add this one to the others I have for Patrice Olsen. That’s five. That’s enough.
As I sweep the remaining pictures together, two more flip to the surface as if placed there intentionally by some invisible hand. My mother and me at the beach. Our Maine vacation. We’re laughing because the wind keeps blowing our hair across our eyes, into our open mouths, and my father is telling us we look better this way. Then taken moments later, another shot of all three of us, his arm over my mother’s shoulders, gently holding her hair in place. And mine too; he’s collected it in his fist, and I’m nestled against both of them, face upturned. My father whispers something into my mother’s ear and her eyes are scrunched in laughter. “Say cheese,” the stranger holding our camera instructs. “Der Käse,” we all say, and giggle as the man gives the camera back to my father and jogs down the sand w
ith his dog.
Why didn’t you stay? I squeeze the photo, smudging it. Why couldn’t you have stayed with us?
I sense then I’m not alone. I turn, and it’s Seamus in the doorway.
“I . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.” He peers down at me. “You’re crying.”
I sniffle, touch my face. Tears stick in my eyelashes, dangle at my jawbone. “I didn’t know.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, maybe. I guess.” I wipe my chin again. “What are you doing here?”
“They told me downstairs you were up here.”
“Is Cecelia with you?”
“No.” He tightens his thumb and forefinger around his clump of beard and tries to shrink his massive frame into something smaller and less present. “I haven’t picked her up yet. I was going to, but I thought, it’s early, and, well, I’ve been thinking about you, I mean about everything going on here, and I thought maybe I could help with something or . . . something.”
“The producer asked for pictures,” I tell him, and hold one out to him. “My mother. She killed herself when I was twelve. She was bipolar.”
“I’m sorry.”
And I step into him then, because he’s there, because I need something solid and he’s nothing if not that. I lean my head against his chest and he hesitates only a flicker before tightening his arms around me, both firm and mindful. Even my father—who hugged me as much as I needed or wanted—couldn’t provide that. He wasn’t solid, not after my mother died. Her death ate away at his sturdy parts, his bony parts, his armor, leaving him spongy despite his best efforts to be strong for me.
I’m so comfortable here. Too comfortable. And I sway backward with the smallest hint of pressure against his arms. As soon as he feels it, he releases me and moves away.
“I have to meet with the producer now,” I say.
“Right, then.” He swings his arms, fist slapping his open palm. “I think I’ll go pick up Cecelia.”
“See you Saturday, I guess?”
“We’re on the list, I’ve been reminded by a very excited little girl. Many, many, many times.”
I walk him to the door and watch him as he descends the stairs in front of me, a sasquatch in this narrow corridor, hair at the nape of his neck matted with July’s heat. I wait for him to turn out of the doorway, then I run back through the apartment grabbing the Bake-Off binder and the photographs and go downstairs myself. Seamus is there at the bottom, sitting in the passenger seat of his truck with the door open. As soon as he sees me, he jumps out, slams the door. “I’m not stalking you, really,” he says. “I just forgot to tell you that your hair looks really beautiful.” And he walks around to the other side of the truck, dodging a few passing cars, and drives away.
Inside Wild Rise, Patrice Olsen sits at a table, waiting for me. Gretchen gives me an arched eyebrow look as I join the producer and then continues to sweep the floor. I slip the photos across to her. Silently she looks at them. Nods. “These will be fine.”
Her words sting me with their compassion, and I know Xavier has told her everything.
Nine
Sometime later my father arrives home. It’s dark. No lights have been switched on. I hear the crinkle of paper bags, his elbow fumbling against the wall, and then a burst of incandescence from the overhead bulb. bulb.
Liesl? he says.
I find enough voice to answer, The garage.
Only sounds now. My father’s parcels and keys crashing to the floor. His heavy footfalls behind me, to the kitchen. A moan. No, no, no. The door from kitchen to garage swinging open, banging into the wall. Claudia. No. Oh, God, Claudia. His voice on the phone, calling the emergency number, explaining, pleading. Another call, angry, to the doctor.
Red flashes outside the living room picture window, muted by sheer umber drapes. More pounding and scampering and heavy feet. Voices, so many of them. If my eyes are open they trace the mortar lines between the fireplace bricks. Mostly I keep them closed.
Finally, someone speaks to me. It’s not my father. I still cannot recall who, only that it is a man, his voice soft and low and indecipherable to my traumatized ears. He puts a hand on my arm, his pale blue shirtsleeve folded to his elbow, his watch white-faced with a fat black band. With gentle pressure he lifts me from the couch, the back of my pants damp from sitting so long, from my soul sweating out, and the coolness of the air against me is startling. I’m led upstairs, to my bedroom. The arm peels down the quilt and blanket from my bed but not the top sheet. I’m helped into it, covered. The hand touches my hair. Rest now.
In the days following I look at arms. I don’t find his again.
We wait for Jonathan Scott to make his entrance.
I see the cameras outside, following him down the sidewalk. He’s talking, and then suddenly laughs, along with the cameraman, and he makes his way back down the street to try the take again.
Yesterday Wild Rise was transformed for filming. All the tables were removed. Lights strategically placed. Two work spaces—one for the celebrity chef, one for me—were placed toward the back of the room. I’ve claimed my station already with my baguette dough; it proofs in my mother’s dough trough, my couches folded beside it.
Patrice Olsen motions to us and holds a mini megaphone to her lips. “Ready? Here he comes.”
The crowd follows her earlier instructions. When Jonathan Scott opens the door, they cheer.
He smiles and waves and shakes hands. “Are we ready for a bake-off?”
“Yes!” everyone shouts.
Clapping, he says, “Awesome,” and rubs his palms together as if plotting my demise. His two assistants move to his prep table and unpack his prepared dough. He joins them, giving the audience the standard, brief introduction to the show and its rules. He then says, “We’re baking two types of bread today. The first is the traditional French baguette. No other shape or type of bread is more recognized in the world. Everyone who sees these long, slim loaves knows what they are, or at least where they’re from. Baguette can be translated into English as ‘stick’ or ‘wand’ and has only four ingredients, usually—water, flour, yeast, and salt.”
I form my baguettes and bunch the couches around them. Jonathan does the same, facing the camera, giving instruction to the future home audience. The second camera records my hands. Patrice Olsen instructs me to say something, and I fumble around for a smudge of something interesting or significant. My mother always told me something new as we baked together, or whenever I asked, “Tell me something about bread.” I said those words that day in the bed with her, when she’d come down from her mania into the miry clay of despair. My fingers pick the edge of the linen cloth cradling my loaves.
“You should never wash your couche,” I say finally. I think of my mother, holding hers over the sink and gently fluttering away the excess flour dust. “The yeast and dough residue is what helps give baguettes their signature crust. You want your linen to be seasoned with it. Just brush them off.”
“Great advice, Liesl,” Jonathan says, and then removes a wicker picnic basket from beneath his table. “Now it’s time to reveal the secret ingredient to be included in our second type of bread. This can be made of any type of dough, but must prominently feature whatever is in this basket.”
The crowd hushes and he opens the lid, removes two containers, and holds them in the air so all can see. “Chèvre,” he declares. “Goat cheese.”
Jude looks at me. “What a joke. I thought you would get something good, like sour gummy worms or turkey feet or something.”
Jonathan speaks to the camera as he works a new lump of dough, explaining how he’s using the same base formula as his baguettes, but adding the sweet twist of maple syrup and apples.
“Ciabatta,” I tell Jude.
“Seriously?”
“I need you to caramelize some onions for me.”
He snorts. “I can’t cook.”
“Where’s Tee?” I scan the room. “Or Zave.”
<
br /> “Pops is checking on the oven. Tee’s so short, she’s probably stuck behind someone out there.”
“Tee can’t be here until this afternoon,” Xavier says, coming from the kitchen. He dries his hands on a towel, carefully slipping his wedding band to his knuckle so he can wipe beneath it. Annie has been dead five years. “I’m still married to her,” he told me once when he caught me looking at the ring. “Don’t matter that she’s not here. I know.”
“I need someone to caramelize some onions.” I motion to Jude. “Apparently boy wonder here only works in bread.”
“He can use a can opener, but heating the contents is a challenge. And forget frozen pizza. I’ve had to scrape more than one blackened crust from the oven rack.”
“Electric oven?” I ask.
“Unfortunately,” Xavier says.
“I suppose we can forgive him, then.”
“Whoa,” Jude says. “Not cool, people.”
I ask him to pull the buttermilk sourdough; I’d taken several of my wet starters, fed them vigorously yesterday, and created three different dough variations early this morning, giving them time to rise. “The green bowl.”
“Yeah, okay,” he grumbles.
“And I’ll take care of the onions,” Xavier says. “Why do you need them?”
“Ciabatta,” Jude says.
“Dough.” I point to the door. He goes and I show Xavier the container of goat cheese. “I need something splashy. I thought a caramelized onion and Chèvre ciabatta.”
“Using the buttermilk starter as a base?”
“I consistently get the biggest rooms with it.”
“You need a third ingredient, I think. Apricots?”
I nod toward the other table. “Scott’s going sweet already. I’ll stay savory for contrast. Sun-dried tomato?”
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