Stones for Bread (22 page)

Three days later I interview Rebekah, a still, milky girl nearly as tall as Seamus. Her mother waits outside for her in a fifteen-passenger van. She’s the second oldest of eleven, she tells me. This will be her first real job, outside of babysitting and helping work the family’s organic farm.

“I can run a register. We have one at the farm stand.”

I nod. “Where’s your farm?”

“On the other side of the creek. Windsor Creek, you know?”

“That’s a bit of a drive to get here.”

“Thirty-five minutes. But we’re in the middle of nowhere so it’s at least that to anything.” She uncrosses her legs beneath her almost ankle-length skirt, which she wears with a matching bandana around her hair, T-shirt, and plastic flip-flops. Her gangly feet are flat with calloused heels, her toes scrubbed clean, nails cut too short. “This is a nice place. I’ve never been here before. Most of our trips are in the opposite direction because, you know, Hanson has a Walmart with a grocery.”

“Why are you interested in working here?”

“Well, our church gets your bread. The leftover ones you give us to give away to people? When I read the help-wanted in the paper, I was kind of hoping I could somehow be involved with that.”

We sit in Wild Rise, at the table in front of the window, the bakery having closed an hour ago, the sun at the exact angle to dance on the dust particles in the air. I offer her coffee and water and Tee’s special summer punch and nearly anything in the bakery. She declines all of it with a graciousness not usually seen in teenagers. Her voice is animated, but the rest of her moves so little. She’s not at all the type I expected to have work here, but I have a feeling she’ll fit. “Well, right now I’m looking for a waitress and counter help. Hours are six forty-five a.m. to about three fifteen in the afternoon. You get a half hour for lunch in there. I’d like you to work either Tuesday through Saturday or Monday through Friday, but if there’s another day that works better for you to have off, I can accommodate, except Wednesday, because my other waitress has that off now. Otherwise, you can start tomorrow and learn as you go along.”

“You mean I got the job?”

“If you want it.”

“Oh my goodness, yes. Thank you, Miss McNamara. I can’t believe it.”

“It’s Liesl,” I tell her, giving her two forms to fill out and return in the morning. “As for the bread ministry, you’ll be the one packing the
extra loaves for pickup, but other than that, there isn’t much else to it. At least for now. I’m open to ideas, if you have any.”

“Really? Oh, I wasn’t thinking anything in particular, but I’ll pray about it.” She stops, rakes her teeth over her bottom lip. She does this often; the skin beneath her mouth is chapped, her lip puffed and bruised on one side. “Is that okay to say?”

“It’s fine.”

Rebekah stands. She’s lean and sturdy but her bones are large, the kind that too easily hold on to pregnancy weight and extra helpings of mashed potatoes and sleepless nights and worry. She won’t be thin much longer. “It’s the bags, you know.”

I don’t. “What bags?”

“The ones you put the bread in, the pretty ones that say
Bread of Life Ministries
on them. Our church gets food from different places and most of it is just thrown together in some boxes. Some of it’s not even edible, you know, like all covered in mold or bruised up, or really, really old. I knew when I saw your bags that you cared.”

I lock the door behind her, wave as she gets into the van and it pulls away from the curb.

It began in high school, when our Key Club collected food for a local pantry. We went out Halloween night, and instead of gathering candy we asked for canned goods and brought a van-load back to the school cafeteria. We stacked the food on a table, organizing it as best as our hormone-saturated brains could manage—pasta and sauces here, other noodles next, soups, canned meats, rice, vegetables, the pickles and strange items on the end. I took a jar of blue-cheese–stuffed Greek olives from one of the bags, the dust on the lid so thick it was sticky. I couldn’t blow it off, finding instead a box of Kleenex and scrubbing the top before adding it to the tower of beets and gherkins and mincemeat filling.

It bothered me for days, and I grappled with my feelings, the idea that someone would use a food donation to rid the pantry of disliked or
never-used food. I mentioned it to Jennie, who said, “Maybe they just thought someone else would want them. There are people out there who really like green olives. Or maybe that was all they had to give.”

I knew it was true. Some old man on a fixed income who adores olives but couldn’t afford them would feast on them in his senior apartment, picking them straight out of the jar with his fingers and squeezing the cheese onto his tongue before squishing the olive in his mouth. He’d drink the packing oil and watch
The Amazing Race
, and go to bed full and happy.

Perhaps the person who donated the olives thought this, or for her, the donation was her widow’s mite. I imagined she thought nothing, though. Simply saw the jar hiding at the back of their pantry, some Secret Santa gift from the office holiday party two, oh wait, three years ago, and dropped the olives into the bag with the extra package of bread stuffing from Thanksgiving, the four-for-a-dollar can of creamed corn, and a box of Rice-A-Roni that has yet to be eaten because she accidentally grabbed the wrong flavor.

Do everything as if unto the Lord. Offer up everything as if for the Lord, including jars of olives to the food pantry. Or leftover loaves of bread. Years later, that’s finally how I make sense of it, where it settles out for me. If Jesus knocks on my door today, will I rummage through my home and give him the food I don’t like, the outgrown jacket with stains and a broken zipper, the dirty Crock-Pot in the basement, the one with the chipped lid and the mice nesting inside I’ve yet to find time to toss into the Salvation Army’s dumpster?

Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me
.

So I pack the bread in bags, like I will for any paying customer. I don’t send burnt loaves or stale loaves, or any kitchen experiment I don’t believe is quality enough to sell. I will not give to the least of these anything I will not offer to my Lord, should he walk into Wild Rise one afternoon and ask for a little something to eat.

Thirteen

I’m in bed and my father shakes me, his hand warm and gritty on my bare shoulder. I wear a lace-strapped camisole to bed, satiny and sheer and something I never would dare put on if I thought he’d come into my room to rouse me. Or for any reason at all. He hasn’t been in here in months.

I bought the camisole two weeks ago, when Jennie’s mother took her and Amanda Craft and me to the mall. She let us wander around freely while she shopped for new shoes, and we took advantage of the freedom by eating Taco Bell in the food court and squeezing into the photo machine and buying clearance lingerie at T.J. Maxx. Jennie and I bought it, at least. Amanda hid hers in the leg of a pair of jeans she took into the dressing room and then slipped the cami on beneath her shirt before returning the jeans and the little yellow plastic “1” tag to the attendant. She truth-or-dared us to do the same, but Jennie and I paid for ours. Mine had a red sticker on the tag, marked down to seven dollars. It’s midnight blue, or at least I’d call it that—I remember midnight blue being my favorite color in the Crayola box, the child of aqua
and navy, worn down well below the tips of all the others—with silver filaments woven through it. The lace at the bottom hem was torn away in two places, easily mended if I wanted to take the time or thread to do it. I didn’t, expecting no one to see me in it except me, in the bedroom mirror, turning this way and that, and lamenting how little my almost-an-A breasts filled out the gathered cups.

Before we met her mother to go home, Jennie and I folded the camisoles into bundles the size of an egg and zipped them into the innermost pockets of our winter coats.

Now, aware of my father’s clean-shaven scent hovering above, I tug the blanket to my neck and hold it tight around me.
What?

I’m going to mass. Come with me
.

I won’t roll over, fearing the blanket will somehow come loose.
Saint Andrew’s or Annunciation?
Lutheran or Catholic?

No. Ken invited me with him
.

Ken Burl. A coworker of my father’s whom he’s complained about more than once, because he doesn’t drink or cuss and is too nice to everyone.
He’s some sort of Baptist
.

I know
.

Forget it
.

He goes, shutting the door, trapping his Old Spice in the room with me. The smell, one I only ever associate with my father, and the sensation of the camisole’s silky polyester against my skin—childhood and adulthood, public and private, safety and budding sensuality—they collide so violently I’m almost ill. I reach down to the floor where my laundry is strewn—dirty, clean, doesn’t matter—and in one motion the cami is off and the T-shirt is on, and I’m burrowed under the blankets so far I’m breathing the hot, stale air of sheets that haven’t been changed in months.

I finally get up hours later, spurred from bed by an over-full bladder and some clattering in the kitchen. I tie a bathrobe over my flannel pants and T-shirt and wander downstairs to find my father frying smelts in a pan on the stove.

He’s whistling.

What’s going on?

I’m making lunch
.

Why?

I thought it would be nice for us to eat together. We haven’t had smelts in forever. I know you like them
.

I like Mom’s
.

He continues to transfer the crispy fish onto a paper towel–lined plate, one after the other, heads still on, bodies curling like breaded fossils.
I followed the cookbook
. He turns off the burner, moves the iron skillet to the back of the stovetop, and, without looking at me, says,
Maybe it’s time we tried to let go of some things
.

She’s not a thing
.

Liesl—

This is because you went to that church?
I yank open the refrigerator, bottles rattling on the door shelves, reach into the crisper for an apple, and take a huge, noisy bite.
You can keep your Jesus freak crap. I’ll keep her
. I throw a loaf of bread and jar of peanut butter on the counter, make a show of digging around the flatware drawer for a knife. Unscrew the lid and plop a mound of Jif in the center of a slice of honey wheat.

My father turns away from me, dish of smelts in hand, shakes the fish into the trash pail, and then, as an afterthought, drops the plate in as well. Without speaking, he descends the basement stairs. I do the same with my food, gathering the peanut butter jar and hastily half-made sandwich and apple and all the bread into my arms, and push them down into the garbage, smothering the fish. Then I go in the opposite direction, upstairs, to lock myself in the bathroom with my hairbrush.

They want to learn wild yeast, these women, though I suspect of the nine of them, maybe one will still have a viable starter in her
refrigerator by year’s end. Caring for yeast is like nurturing a beloved family pet, a puppy needing to be fed, watered, housebroken, one that whimpers all night and is lonely even though its owner wraps a ticking clock in a blanket in its kennel, hoping it will be comforted by a sound reminiscent of its mother’s heart. It never works, and I tell them so. They laugh, not believing me, though several of them have tried to culture sourdough and failed. They think it’s bad flour, or chlorine in their tap water, or the fact they stirred the mixture with a metal spoon. They’re here to learn
the trick
. How much work can flour and water and a billion microorganisms truly be? Most of life is unforgiving, and there are no shortcuts when it comes to wild yeast.

“There are plenty of bread myths,” I say. “A metal spoon will not react with the culture. You can use all the metal spoons you want, even in the dough. I just happen to prefer wooden ones because my mother and grandmother used them.”

The women take notes. I compartmentalize them; after three years of teaching these classes, I can read their reasons for being here. Two are here because they believe commercial yeast destroys the gut and causes a multitude of health problems. Three are friends, housewives, mothers, looking for a life-enriching class while the kids are in school. Two are skilled home bakers who haven’t yet conquered sourdough; one will be self-satisfied with the success in her own kitchen, the other wants to sell her bread at medieval Renaissance fairs. Of the remaining students, one is addicted to learning, to trying new things, to the excitement of accomplishment. By next month her starter will be forgotten, the expensive bannetons and proofing box stored in the closet, waiting to be sold at her summer garage sale, and she’ll have moved on to cake decorating or stained glass. The last woman doesn’t know why she’s here, except she saw an advertisement in the newspaper and felt called. She’s never made a loaf of yeasted bread in her life. People like her are wild cards, the seeds in the parable of the sower. She may come to love baking and, even more so, excel at it, or her culture may die on
the counter as she forgets it, concerned more with her sick father and credit card debt and her son’s behavior problems at Boy Scouts. She may decide even a once-a-week feeding is too much effort, or at class end, she may think,
Why on earth did I figure I’d enjoy this?