RAE
The kitchen.
The flour.
The silence.
The silence was the house after nine. Dylan in his room with the door closed and Claire in her bed with the dog and the window unit cycling on and off, the rattle in the compressor getting worse, the getting-worse not something I could fix with what I had.
I had flour.
I had yeast and salt and the sourdough starter I’d been feeding since before Bobby died. I had the wooden board my grandmother left me, the one with the groove worn into the center from fifty years of hands pressing dough into shape. I had the kitchen and the night and the quiet that wasn’t peace but was at least absence.
Absence of the uniform. Absence of the weight of him in the doorway. Absence of the inventory his eyes ran—the dishes, the floor, the children, me—like a checklist he was looking for failures in.
My hands in tomorrow’s dough. The dough cool and resistant, not ready yet, needing another ten minutes of rest before it would accept the shaping. You couldn’t rush bread. You couldn’t tell the gluten what to do. You could only create the conditions and wait.
I knew about waiting.
The bread was wrong.
I knew before I opened the oven. The smell told me—the crust had gone past the line, past the deep amber into the char, the thin black edge that meant I had lost four minutes somewhere between the timer and the pulling-out. Four minutes. The bread did not forgive four minutes.
The bread did not forgive anything.
I set the three loaves on the cooling rack and pressed the heel of my hand against the top of the first one. The sound was wrong too. The hollow thump that a right loaf made—the resonance, the drum-skin tightness of a crust that had sealed at the correct second—was not there. The sound was flat. Dense.
The crumb would be tight, the jalapeño flecks dark instead of green, and Delilah would have taken the loaf because Delilah took every loaf, but Delilah would have known. Delilah would have cut the first slice at the café counter and seen the crumb and known that Rae’s hands had been somewhere else when the timer went off.
Rae’s hands had been on her wrist.
The bruise. Three days old. The green-yellow of it in the kitchen light, the shape of fingers—four of them, the thumb on the other side, the grip that had held when I tried to pull away.
I’d been washing dishes.
The water had been too hot. Dale had reached for me and I’d flinched because the flinch was automatic now, the body knowing before the brain, and the flinch made him angry and the angry made the hand tighten and the tightening made the bruise.
Three days of long sleeves in April. Long sleeves when the heat was rising, long sleeves when the garden needed weeding in tank tops, in the clothes that let the body breathe.
I couldn’t let the body breathe.