Butter and Eggs – Preview

The First Cold Morning

Thursday, October 1, 2015 1:08 a.m.

The first cold morning came without ceremony. There had been cooler mornings before it, of course, mornings in September when the river left a little dampness in the streets and people walked their dogs in sweaters they regretted by nine. This one was different. The cold had settled into the brick before dawn and stayed there. It found the iron handle of the bakery's back door, the sheet pans stacked on the lower rack, the stainless-steel edge of the worktable. It was the sort of cold that made butter useful. Laurel Bird unlocked the back door with her shoulder pressed against it because the old frame swelled whenever the air changed. The door gave all at once. She caught herself on the jamb, stepped into the dark kitchen, and stood for a moment without turning on the lights. The bakery had a presence at that hour that belonged to no one else.

At thirty-six, Laurel had a face that looked younger until she was tired, which at one in the morning was most days. Her brown hair reached a little past her shoulders when she bothered to wear it down, but bakery mornings meant it was twisted into a loose knot before she left the house, already working free around her ears by the time she unlocked the door. She had brown eyes, a straight nose, and the beginnings of fine lines at their corners that deepened when she smiled or narrowed when she was concentrating. She was medium height and solid through the shoulders and hips, not heavy so much as built like someone accustomed to carrying twenty-five-pound flour sacks without waiting for help. Her hands gave away the work more quickly than her face did: short nails, dry knuckles, a pale burn scar near the base of one thumb, and the faint roughness that came from years of flour, hot water, soap, and dough. Of the three sisters, Laurel looked the most like their mother, not enough that strangers always noticed, but enough that Jennifer and Destiny sometimes did when Laurel was turned sideways over a worktable and not paying attention.

The front room was beyond the swinging door, chairs upside down on tables, glass case empty, chalkboard menu half erased. In the kitchen, bowls sat nested beneath the counter. A flour sack leaned against another in the corner. The old mixer rose in the middle of the room with its enamel worn thin near the controls where three generations of hands had reached for the same switch. Nothing moved except the red dot of the thermostat. Laurel set her bag down and switched on the lights. They came up reluctantly, one row at a time. Before touching the starter she washed her hands at the little sink beside the pantry, working soap beneath her nails and around the old burn at the base of her thumb, then dried them on paper instead of the linen towel hanging from her apron. The towel was for hot pans; Mom had been militant about towels having jobs. Laurel checked the sanitizer pail beneath the prep table, dipped a test strip long enough to see the color settle where it should, left the wiping cloth submerged in the solution, and only then fed the starter first. Her mother had done that before coffee, before ovens, before conversation. The starter lived in a squat plastic tub that had once held something industrial and unromantic. A piece of masking tape on the lid said BREAD in Mom's handwriting, though nobody in the family could remember a time when anyone had needed the label. Laurel peeled the lid back. The smell was cool and sour, a little fruity, a little like wet flour and apples left in a cellar. The surface had risen overnight into soft ridges. She pushed two fingers against it and watched the indentation fill slowly. Alive enough.

Most people think a bakery opens when the door opens. By then, half the day’s work is already done.

She weighed flour into a bowl, added water, and stirred until the mixture thickened and resisted. The starter took the new flour without gratitude. It did not care that Mom was gone. It did not care that Laurel had fed it every morning since March. It accepted what it was given and went on. That steadiness had been irritating at first. Now Laurel depended on it. Jennifer arrived twelve minutes later through the front door and immediately came back carrying two paper cups of coffee. She had tied her dark hair at the nape of her neck, leaving the silver beginning at her temples uncovered. At forty-five, Jennifer was the sister strangers noticed first. She was five-foot-six, with dark brown hair she wore pulled low at the nape of her neck and silver beginning naturally at both temples, which she had decided years ago not to hide. Her face was oval, her nose narrow, her brown eyes slightly hooded, and there were fine lines at their corners that became more visible when she smiled. There was another line between her brows that deepened whenever she read small print, checked an invoice, or believed someone was doing something inefficiently. Mom had called it the measuring line. Jennifer still had the kind of mature beauty that made people look twice, though nothing about her suggested she spent much time maintaining it. She dressed neatly even at three in the morning, moved as though she already knew where everything belonged, and somehow managed to get flour on herself less often than either of her sisters. Destiny arrived last. She always arrived last and always looked surprised that this had happened again.

At thirty, Destiny was the smallest of the three sisters, barely five-foot-three, though she moved with enough speed that people tended to remember the movement before the size. She had thick chestnut-brown hair cut just above her shoulders, usually pulled into whatever knot or clip could survive a kitchen, and hazel eyes that seemed greener when she was irritated, which Jennifer claimed was most of the time. Her face was rounder than either of her sisters', with strong brows, a small slightly crooked nose, and a mouth that gave away amusement before she was ready to admit anything was funny. Years in restaurant pastry kitchens had kept her wiry through the arms and shoulders, and there were small pale marks along her forearms from sheet pans, oven racks, sugar burns, and all the other minor injuries professional cooks stopped bothering to explain. She was pretty in a quicker, less composed way than Jennifer and carried herself as though standing still were something she had agreed to only temporarily.

Laurel started the first bread dough while Destiny checked proofing trays and set butter where it could soften by degrees instead of being forced. There were things the body remembered even when the mind wandered. Water first. Starter. Flour. Salt later. Laurel's hands knew where the bench knife would be. They knew the weight of the bowl before she lifted it. They knew the difference between dough that wanted another minute and dough that wanted to be left alone.

Butter softened on the pastry bench while Jennifer rolled pie dough made the night before. It was firm enough to resist the pin and soft enough not to crack. Each pass lengthened the circle. She turned it, floured beneath it, turned it again. She did not waste movement. Her hands were cleaner than Laurel's, less permanently rough, but there was flour beneath one thumbnail before five. Destiny began cutting apples. Gravensteins were nearly finished for the year, and what they had now came from boxes somebody had brought in from west of town, each apple different from the next. Some were green with rose-colored stripes. Some were bruised at the shoulder. One had a worm hole that Destiny cut away without comment. She peeled quickly, sending long skins onto the board in loose red-green ribbons. By five-thirty the bakery had begun to smell like itself. Yeast. Coffee. Butter warming in the oven. Apples softening with cinnamon. The slightly bitter edge of the first batch of coffee Jennifer had made too strong.

Outside, Petaluma remained mostly dark. A delivery truck moved along the boulevard and stopped somewhere out of sight with the blunt sigh of air brakes. A few upstairs windows across the street carried yellow light. The clock above the old Masonic building was visible at the end of the block when Laurel stepped out front to switch on the case lights. She did not look at the building itself. She only checked the time. Five thirty-seven. Her mother had done the same thing every morning. Laurel returned to the kitchen. Mom's apron still hung on the last hook by the pantry door. Nobody used it. Nobody had discussed not using it. The apron was blue and washed nearly gray, with a dark spot near the pocket that had survived years of soap. Laurel had once thought it was chocolate. Jennifer insisted it was oil. Destiny said it could be both. They had been having these small arguments since childhood, and Mom had rarely settled them. The cookbook was in the bottom drawer beneath the register. It had been there for six months.

Jennifer had put it there after they cleaned out the house. She had wrapped it once in a tea towel, then removed the towel because Laurel said trapped moisture would ruin the pages. They had moved it from the office to the kitchen and from the kitchen to the office, finally settling on the drawer because it was close enough to use and protected from flour. None of them used it. Not really. They knew the important recipes already. Mom had taught them those with repetition rather than paper. Laurel shaped two dozen sourdough loaves. Jennifer lined pie tins. Destiny dropped apple pieces into a bowl and rubbed brown sugar between her fingers where it had clumped. At six-fifteen the first loaves went into the deck oven. Laurel poured water into the steam tray and closed the door. For a moment she watched through the glass as the pale surfaces tightened under heat. There were few things more reassuring than bread doing what bread was supposed to do. At six-thirty Jennifer turned the sign. OPEN. The first customer came in before she had returned to the counter.

It was Mr. Brennan, who had bought one plain glazed doughnut and a small coffee nearly every Thursday since the sisters reopened after Mom died. He removed his cap when he entered, not from manners exactly but because his scalp became warm inside the bakery.

Mr. Brennan was a slight older man with a fringe of white hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and the weathered face of someone who had spent much of his life outdoors. He usually wore the same faded canvas cap and a work jacket that had softened at the elbows with age. He placed it on the stool beside him and looked into the case. There were no glazed doughnuts yet. Destiny had started them late. Jennifer apologized. Mr. Brennan considered the empty tray as though it represented a change in municipal policy. Laurel heard Jennifer offer him an apple fritter. He took it because he was already there. Ten minutes later, from the kitchen, Laurel heard him laugh. It was a small sound. Nothing worth stopping over. Still, she stopped. Jennifer had stopped too. Destiny looked up from the fryer. None of them said anything. Mr. Brennan had not laughed in the bakery since his wife died in February. The fritter had been the first one out of the oil. On the cooling rack beside Destiny lay Mom's old slotted spoon. Destiny stared at it, then at the row of fritters shining with glaze. The moment passed. Laurel returned to the bread. There was work to do.

After Mr. Brennan left, Jennifer found half the fritter glaze on the table where he had sat. She wiped it away with a damp cloth and looked through the front glass at his back moving down the sidewalk. “Do you think we should have said something?” she asked. Laurel was lifting bread from the oven. “About what?”

“That he laughed.”

“People are allowed to laugh without it becoming the talk of the town.”

Destiny snorted from the fryer. Jennifer returned the cloth to the sink. The answer irritated her mostly because it was right. Mom had been good at not frightening people away from comfort by naming it too quickly. The daughters were only beginning to learn the same restraint.

Theo Alvarez came in while Jennifer was still wiping Mr. Brennan's table. He was forty-two, broad through the shoulders, with close-cropped black hair already graying above his ears and the permanent shadow of a beard he apparently saw no reason to shave before sunrise. His work jacket was usually dusty enough to suggest he did something physical for a living, though nobody at the bakery had ever successfully determined what, and he arrived early enough to buy a small coffee and the end of a baguette whenever there was a loaf cool enough to cut. If there was not, he bought the whole loaf and tore the end off himself before reaching the door. Jennifer had once offered him a bread knife. Theo had looked almost offended. This morning he nodded toward Mr. Brennan's empty stool, asked whether everything was all right, and accepted Jennifer's answer when she said it was. He took his coffee, his torn piece of bread, and the same place near the window he occupied three mornings a week. Nobody explained what had happened. He was already part of the room.

At seven-twenty Celia Moreno arrived carrying a handbag large enough to contain another handbag. Celia was in her early fifties, compact and carefully put together, with dark hair cut neatly at her jaw and reading glasses that spent more time pushed onto the top of her head than over her eyes. She worked at a real-estate office two streets over and had been telling the sisters for six years that she did not eat sweets. Jennifer poured coffee, added more cream than coffee deserved, and put half an apple fritter on the saucer. Celia looked at it, looked at Jennifer, and ate it without comment. By eight, the bakery had acquired the ordinary population of a weekday morning: Mr. Brennan gone, Theo reading the sports page someone else had abandoned, Celia making a phone call near the window, Laurel moving bread from peel to rack, Destiny cursing softly at the fryer, Jennifer refilling coffee. The extraordinary thing about the fritter had already been absorbed by routine. That seemed to Laurel like the safest place for it.

By seven-thirty, the light outside had changed from gray to the pale gold peculiar to clear autumn mornings in town. It reached only partway between the buildings and left the bakery front in shade. Jennifer liked those mornings because the case glass stayed cool. Across the street, businesses opened one by one. Metal gates rose. A delivery van idled too long. Someone swept leaves toward a gutter where they would return with the next breeze. The bakery did not need a panoramic view of Petaluma. It had a front window and regular evidence that the town was awake.

The business itself was newer than almost everything inside it. Mom had signed the lease the previous winter and opened the doors in January, putting a fresh name over a room built from secondhand equipment and family pieces hauled out of storage. The old mixer had come down from the Sebastopol years. Two sheet-pan racks had belonged to an uncle. The rolling pins were a mixture of commercial maple and things that had once lived in Mom's home kitchen. Three Sisters Bakery had been Mom's late-life gamble, not an institution the daughters had inherited fully formed. She had worked in it barely long enough to teach the room her habits before dying in her sleep in March.

The daughters could have closed it. Jennifer had said so the first week, not because she wanted to but because she was the one willing to say aloud that a lease remained a lease after a funeral. Laurel had heard surrender in the sentence. Destiny had heard Jennifer trying to control the only decision that still belonged to them. They had fought in a kitchen with no customers and too much unopened flour, then agreed on the only compromise none of them liked: keep the bakery through Thanksgiving and see whether it could pay its own way. Six months later, the agreement still sat between them even when nobody mentioned it.

Laurel resented that Jennifer had arrived after three. Jennifer resented that Laurel treated a one-o'clock start as proof of moral seriousness. Destiny resented both of them whenever they spoke around her as if thirty were a probationary age. None of those grievances was large enough to break a family. Together they had been enough to make the sisters drift before Mom died. Now they spent more waking hours within ten feet of one another than they had in the previous five years.

On the shelf above the mixer, Mom's cookbook remained closed.